Bruce Walker: American TV Has Become Sovietized
Balanced news isn’t easy to come by these days, little beyond puff pieces and liberal advocacy. Print journalism in America is moribund. Though independent, Web-based news services are fragmented, while the likes of Facebook and Twitter offer little more than a yard sign or graffiti.
Television is still the choice for working parents to get a bit of news in the evening, but the familiar national news networks have all but abandoned hard news in favor of human interest stories with decided liberal salesmanship. The political right has no venue or presence at all, other than as misrepresentation and denigration.
Local affiliates have all they can do to keep up fundraising support for welfare-type programs, including free food. Beyond news, these stations present programming and commercials that are barely concealed advocacy for the liberal agendas. Even cartoon shows have proliferated to help parents who really don’t want to be parents–that is, cheap babysitting.
Many viewers today turn to the socialist-leaning BBC for “hard” news, or to Dish-prominent Russian (RTV)) on Communist Chinese (CCTV). Bruce Walker’s just-in essay “The Sovietized American Media” argues that American media is now a Soviet look-alike:
In the old Soviet Union, the oppressed subjects of regime had a phrase used to describe the news media: “There’s no pravda in Izvestia and there’s no izvestia in Pravda.” In Russian, “Pravda,” the leading Communist Party periodical, means “Truth,” and “Izvestia,” the principal state periodical, means “News.”
The bosses of the Kremlin had no interest in their subjects knowing anything about the world or having any honest opinions expressed. Instead, the news media (also all cultural life, all educational institutions, all common means of ordinary people sharing anything together) was placed in the hands of bureaucratic flacks, well-trained in determining what constituted news and who had the legal monopoly on truth.
What happened in the Soviet media was the systematic suppression of all real news and a purging of all serious intellectual inquiry. All news made the party leaders look good, or it simply wasn’t news. All facts supported the theme that the latest Five Year Plan was working marvelously, whatever the clear facts of ordinary Soviet life might say to the contrary.
Isn’t that the way things are in America today? The leftist establishment media, which includes entertainment, education, and all the other conveyor belts of information and ideas, ignore the vast ocean of muck which could affect the political bosses in Washington (more and more our Moscow) and instead either present absurdly fluffy pieces intended to make sock puppets like Obama look good or portray the notional enemies of the people as vicious and corrupt.
Not only is there no news, as such, in much of American media today, but much the news presented is never presented as anything but another argument: that we need more gun control…that traditional religious values make people dangerous maniacs…that government needs to spend more money on health and education…that racism remains a problem in America…that hurricanes, ice storms, droughts, and every other bad change in weather is evidence of man-made global warming.
