I have laid low with this blog for the past couple of years, but I feel constrained to comment on our deteriorating media, how their Trump-hating has descended into a full-blown emotional disorder. There are two examples of this:
Throughout January and well into February, the establishment media was freely using the term Wuhan coronavirus. But then, after Trump used the term Wuhan coronavirus, I believe it may be on Monday, now one of their talking points has become that this is racist and xenophobic. The thought process seems to be that they have thoroughly programmed into their brains that Trump is evil. Therefore, whatever he does must be evil, even if they have done the same things. They are not able to ascribe a good motive or even an innocent motive to anything he does.
But the outstanding example of this emotional disorder is the recent exchange between CNN anchor Don Lemon and former Ohio governor John Kasich. The occasion was a post-speech analysis of Trump’s address to the nation on Wednesday. Kasich, a Republican who hates Trump and came out in favor of impeaching him and removing him from office, nevertheless had to admit that the speech was good and called for unity. But Lemon was so upset at Kasich for saying that that he wouldn’t even let him speak. Here is the video of Lemon tearing into Kasich:
Kasich hates Trump, otherwise he wouldn’t have been invited onto CNN. But it appears that his hate has not descended into the full-blown derangement that it has with Lemon, who can’t even suffer to hear someone say anything nice about Trump.
Unfortunately, this derangement is pervasive at CNN and many national media outlets, which is why we can’t get accurate news from them. During a time of national emergency, people who are in control of their emotions would find it in themselves to be able to put aside their feelings and unite with others for the good of the country. While John Kasich was able to do this, in the process he enraged Don Lemon.
And this explains why most national media outlets spiked the story that on Friday, Trump posted on Twitter his declaring today as a national day of prayer to address the pandemic. Go ahead and search as I did. While I found coverage of this declaration on conservative media outlets and on Fox News, the story was spiked by CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc.
Sad.
Do you agree? Disagree? I welcome your comments.
Click here to visit the Liberty Musings conservative politics home page.
Interesting post. I agree that it’s been fascinating to see how quickly people see non-political issues (a virus pandemic) through their own political lenses.
Ezra Klein recently argued that the American people are actually less idealogical now and more identity-driven in our views than ever before. “I will decide what I believe based on what ‘my team’ or ‘my politicians’ say I should believe.”
Don Lemon is a good example of the polarization that you call an emotional disorder. He often uses emotional arguments instead of facts and isn’t willing to give Trump any credit. I think he is seen as more of a pundit than a journalist. That may be because of his identity as a black queer media figure who sees Trump as a threat to his own identity (we don’t know his reasons). But he is certainly an outlier among the media voices today.
What is even more fascinating is how his outlier behavior provokes an even stronger emotional backlash from the Trump-supporting populous. They see Don Lemon poking fun at rural voters or criticizing minor slip-ups in the Trump Administration and say: “See? CNN hates Trump” or worse: “the entire media apparatus can’t be trusted because they want to destroy our President.” This is a dangerous path.
One important step we can all take is to check our own emotions before assigning them to other people. If you say “the only reason John Kasich believes Trump should be impeached is because he hates Trump”. Or claim that the “only reason John Kasich is being invited on CNN is because he hates Trump”, you might be enacting the same emotional fallacy by fabricating the worst motives in others. Unfortunately, this thinking closes down judgment and rationality and can make the problem worse by prompting even more backlash and polarization from the other side!
It would be more objective and evidence-based to look at John Kasich defending the President on some issues and criticizing the President on others and come to the conclusion that “John Kasich sometimes disagrees with the President for idealogical reasons,” rather than assign pure hatred as his motive. The fact that Kasich seems to be using his own judgment rather than reflexively jumping to one side or the other is evidence that he is not, in fact, “emotionally deranged”. He seems to be acting like most of the professional journalists who report and comment on the facts instead of their identity-driven and emotionally-biased perceptions. We could all benefit from this careful and responsible approach.