Last night’s impending impeachment compounds other recent lessons affirming my contention that America is dwindling, slipping into a culture of faith, not reason. I think it’s an insidious decline because America coasts on the Industrial Revolution’s aftereffects and its progressive byproduct, today’s technology with advancement in medicine, aeronautics, science, robotics and artificial intelligence.
Yet regression is real.
Two recent cases in point come from CBS News, press that I’ve praised (read my post here). The first instance involves two anchors for the CBS News streaming app, Vladimir Duthiers and Anne-Marie Green, both of whom thoroughly and feverishly endorsed the concept, if it can be called that, of divine intervention after reporting on a child’s brave attempt to survive her father’s suicide and attempted murder.
After the man jumped with his daughter in his arms in front of a New York City subway train, the girl survived, apparently by lying down between tracks. After the deadly leap, someone jumped down and assisted in rescuing the child by guiding her out of danger, instructing her not to look at the dead father and, instead, to “crawl like a puppy”, treating the child as a child, encouraging her to come out from underneath the train. Green and Duthiers raved instead about what Green calls “divine intervention”, trivializing the girl’s intelligence and the heroism. It’s an instance of irrelevant, inappropriate and improper editorializing, really proselytizing for faith, during what should have been a somber report on suicide and an act of heroism.
Also on CBS News, billionaire media titan Oprah and bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared with Gayle King, Tony Dokoupil and Anthony Mason on CBS This Morning to discuss a new novel being promoted by Oprah in partnership with Apple Books via Oprah’s book club. The hosts were interested in knowing whether Oprah’s running for president. There was one line during the entire segment about the novel. The author was reduced to fragments.
Here, faith lies in the cult of a woman’s personality, in this case Oprah. As I’ve written before, the cult of Oprah Winfrey is entirely based on Oprah Winfrey. She is the ultimate narcissist. Everything she does is centered upon herself in crass, vulgar and undignified ways and means. That most of her musings appear in superficial bursts on self-improvement makes her narcissism more insidious.
Consider her appearance on CBS This Morning. Rather than invite the author of a potential new bestseller to appear on the program to answer informed and intelligent questions about the plot, characters and theme, the trio, declining to disclose that one of the hosts maintains an intimate personal relationship with Oprah Winfrey, proceeded to defer to Oprah — strictly on the grounds that she’d bestowed attention upon a new novel, whose author sat silently and obediently by her side. Coates was asked to speak once or twice. Though this is presumably done for the sake of “diversity and inclusion”, note that the intellectual was sidelined and excluded.
The religion for this particular application of faith is multiculturalism. The audience learned next to nothing about the book; not the price, not the publisher, not the publication date, certainly not the characters, plot or meaning — really, nothing was learned in any substantial sense. However, the audience did learn that Oprah read the book twice and that her friend Gayle is in the middle of reading it, too, and that Gayle called Oprah to find out what’s going to happen next.
This is the culture of belief in the superficial; facts and analysis matter less than faith in personalities, small talk, impressions, what others think because others think it and trends.
Greta Thunberg is another example. I call this braided girl the anti-child. The teenaged environmentalist and activist is clearly disturbed. Her faith that the world will end in 12 years based on apocalyptic preachings is apparently encouraged by her environmentalist-activist parents. I can think of few transgressions worse than exploiting a child for religious purposes. The new religionists tout environmentalism, feminism, multiculturalism, statism and total government control or totalitarianism and they are wildly irrational and overzealous. Propagandizing this delusional, hostile, wayward child became a media sensation.
That a child on an internationally sponsored press tour preaching alarmist rhetoric gets more press at the expense of examining the fact that millions of Americans suffer and struggle to pay for unaffordable health care after nearly 10 years of the monstrosity known as ObamaCare, enacted as the preposterously named Affordable Care Act, or that rebels launched a historic protest against Communism in Hong Kong or that the Islamic dictatorship of Iran escalates acts of war against the West is an unmistakable sign of regression.
I’ve encountered everyday signs, too. During a recent airport ride with a Lyft driver, I observed the danger of religious zealotry.
Upon activating the ride, I had pre-designated the destination airline. But the driver asked which airline when she arrived to give me a ride to the airport. I told her the airline. The driver would ask again — and again — which airline. The most disturbing part of the trip involved her explicit proclamations of belief that God is in control of life on earth. As the driver of the vehicle, she was in control of mine. Accordingly, I remained silent. Upon each mention of God, I diverted the conversation from her belief in a supernatural being. At one point, she explained that she believes God controls her every action. In that moment, she struck me as mentally unstable. As we came closer to the airport, and she asked again which airline, she slowed to five miles an hour — a rate of speed she maintained for the trip’s duration — as I sat in silence. She rambled about speed, God and what she called theneed to believe in obedience.
This calls to mind Starbucks’ new Sirens blend, another example of belief without evidence — in feminism.
Starbucks introduced the blend this week in an email professing the company’s commitment to women. I have never heard of a coffee blend being produced on the basis of discriminating on behalf of one’s sex. Starbucks, which claims it’ll donate some of the blend’s revenue to women’s groups, broke the mold by singling out a single sex, excluding the opposite sex, with charity toward women because they’re women. This act sanctions feminism’s premise that identity is based on sex. Early advocates of what was once called women’s liberation promoted feminism as a means of achieving equality with men. Today’s feminists have dropped this pretense. Big business takes this offshoot of egalitarianism, which at once segregates and blurs the two sexes, on faith.
Last night’s announcement that America’s Speaker of the House supports an inquiry into impeaching the American president over a telephone call with a foreign leader is the ultimate profession, however, of faith. She literally declared an inquiry into impeaching the president without evidence.
I was an early Trump critic long before it was considered acceptable, let alone hip or “trending”. I argued against Trump on my blog. I did so repeatedly and on principle. I did so after Trump was elected president. But Trump’s supporters, whatever their faults and errors, are right to dub the Democrats’ delusional opposition as Trump Derangement Syndrome. The opposition to this president is worse in its irrationalism than the opposition to the previous president (which includes mine).
Today, President Trump released a transcript of his conversation with the president of the Ukraine — the supposed flashpoint for the Democrats’ grounds for impeachment. If and when the Democrats pursue impeachment on these flimsy grounds, the contrast between a president who takes America and its interests seriously — and, whatever his vulgarity, stupidity and errors, Trump does — and the party that wants the government to control every aspect of every individual’s life will be inescapable to the most disinterested, apathetic and asinine American voter.
“The House must impeach,” 2020’s Democratic Party presidential frontrunner Sen. Elizabeth Warren posted yesterday on Twitter. “It must start today.”
In fact, in accordance with frontrunner Warren’s wishes, impeachment did. Senator Warren is the matriarch of a new Inquisition. With her radical environmentalism and feminism, vehement opposition to capitalism in favor of statism, attempts to rationalize explicitly fraudulent multiculturalism, redounding to her authoritarianism, Sen. Warren is the ideal preacher for today’s faith in the statist — and regressive — status quo. America’s been dwindling from decades of welfare statism. The United States is dimmer after 50 years of Earth Day and poorer after 10 years of ObamaCare. As Americans strive to live better, facing the scowl of an anti-child, the congregation of brash believers gathers, chants and peddles influence, preparing to strike in a grab for power.
For an excellent source of news through streaming, try CBSN, an application for CBS News for television streaming which is one of my favorite regular means of getting news. It’s free on Apple TV.
CBSN also features live streaming of CBS News. Other programming is also available, from CBS Evening News, Face the Nation and CBS Sunday Morning to 60 Minutes and Mobituaries.
Functionally, CBSN is both satisfying and accessible. For example, unlike other apps for major broadcasting news competition, such as ABC News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News, its content is both substantive and fast to use without excessive advertising, promotions and noise, graphics and fast cuts. I’ve been informed, amazed and moved by multiple reports, stories and segments, including an excellent report on an American Prisoner of War’s widow and some sense of closure during last week’s failed summit in Hanoi, Vietnam between Communist Korea’s dictator and the American president.
Leftist bias creeps in, though in smaller measure than in other quality press sources, such as National Public Radio (NPR). Wide access to CBS News archives, with archival reports, footage and material from the late Walter Cronkite and other CBS News journalists, adds value to the source. Major Garrett’s reports and podcasting (The Takeout) from Washington, DC, are especially good. That’s where I learned that Face the Nation hostess Margaret Brennan’s favorite movie is the awful hamfest The Departed starring Jack Nicholson and for no good reason, really, and that her favorite book is The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, which she says made her never want to eat beef. This answer by Brennan says so much about her and helps me better judge her inquiry on Face the Nation.
But one of the best reasons I like CBSN is that it’s an intelligent news tool. Unlike the worst of these apps, such as the ABC News app, which moves too fast in bright color with lots of sound effects and seems designed for unthinking audiences, the CBS News app deals primarily in stories, in facts and, occasionally, because it is an app, in tidbits. The ads are not too distracting. The longer form features, such as 60 Minutes segments, are very well done. Generally, there’s a kind of respect for the viewer as a thinker; a benefit of the doubt that you’re a person who’s capable of exercising independence when consuming the news. Strikingly, this means CBS News is more balanced and less biased in its approach than other sources.
I watch, read and listen to other news sources. But I find that, increasingly, bias and an agenda to push me toward a certain viewpoint creeps in, whether I’m watching Fox News, listening to NPR or reading the Los Angeles Times. Or, worse, there’s a general aversion to any coherence or reporting at all in the name of neutrality, which results in a sort of burp of sensory-level material that makes no sense, like a meme or a looping video clip. CBSN isn’t perfect, but it helps me accomplish the crucial task of keeping myself informed.
Journalism suffered a few blows this week and not for the reasons you might think.
First, NBC Nightly News anchorman Brian Williams was suspended and had his pay slashed in half after he apologized for conflating a story in which his war correspondence was at issue. I’ve written that I’m giving Williams (if not NBC News) the benefit of the doubt, which he’s given me no prior reason not to grant, though I think it’s clear that he is an example of journalism driven by having fans, not gathering, having and reporting facts. Still, I think NBC News is more responsible for whatever wrong has been done, given what is currently known. That the nation’s top anchorman was caught conflating (there is no evidence of lying) the truth, which he acknowledged and for which he apologized, who was, in turn, vilified by the press and the public without a proper and thorough inquiry and then suspended without half his pay before either exoneration or proof of wrongdoing strikes me as a disincentive for others to step up when they make a mistake. That NBC News, which is totally infected with subjectivism, is not at all transparent about what is known by its investigators compounds the problem. No one should expect NBC, which is controlled by a crony cable utility, to be objective about Brian Williams, his replacement or the news. What happened to Williams is, as I wrote when the story broke, a black mark on today’s journalism and not only because of Brian Williams. The blame also lies with those who watch.
This was my point a few years ago when I wrote about comedian Jon Stewart, who announced this week that he’s quitting his Comedy Central program. It’s the audience that ultimately propels today’s media and the vicious cycle of mistaking satirical, cynical, absurdist humor mixed with facts for news is that it leads to more reasons to feel like sneering at the world and its corollary that the whole world deserves it. So what’s left is a landscape of shockmeisters such as Howard Stern, Greg Gutfeld, Bill Maher, and other crude, sniveling types where once the public tuned in newsmen such as Harry Reasoner, Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace. In between, even hosts and publishers such as Johnny Carson, Hugh Hefner and Tom Snyder were serious and intellectual compared with today’s often vacuous and self-centered TV personalities such as Oprah, Barbara Walters and Bill O’Reilly.
American media has been in a steep decline for decades, since Woodward and Bernstein made headlines out of relatively trivial matters and, perhaps through no intention of theirs, became bigger than the stories they covered. This made personality-oriented print and broadcast journalism all but a necessity in the age of new journalism. The fabricating began in earnest and it never let up, from Janet Cooke at the Washington Post to Jayson Blair at the New York Times. But the padding and airheaded advancement of stories not based on facts and truth emanated from the highest levels and the most vaunted institutions, not working class blokes like yours truly and other less anointed bloggers, freelancers and scrappy, self-made journalists. The list of those caught lying or concealing is not only long; it includes today’s biggest names: Mike Barnicle, Fareed Zakaria, Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Joe Klein, to say nothing of the newspaper scandals in auditing circulation and the Los Angeles Times‘ Staples Center fiasco.
If you’re reading fake news, why not watch fake news that admits it’s fake?
Enter Jon Stewart and his cohort the ascendant Stephen Colbert, owing to the godfather of fake news, the Weekend Update segment on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Could Borat, stunts by Breitbart and Michael Moore’s Sicko among other fabricated stories be far behind? Now, Stewart, coddled by and nuzzling up to his intellectual cousin O’Reilly, formerly of the torrid A Current Affair, moves up into a presumably higher status. The circus goes on while the public knows less and seeks only to laugh through the sneer. So, the cycle continues: subjectivism spreads. Laughing with, or even at, the irrational as an evasion of being rational becomes a heavy burden that gets heavier with each major development. The Simpsons, once a segment on a Fox variety show,has been on the air for decades. Stewart has been on The Daily Show (note its antithesis to the nightly news) for 15 years. Deterioration of cultural discourse parallels the rise of the absurd and the asinine.
Last night, news came that punctuates the point. CBS News correspondent Bob Simon, who traveled the world, took risks and was captured by an Arab dictatorship and held for 40 days, died in a car accident at the age of 73. Police said Simon was not wearing a seat belt and there may be more to the story.
But the fawning, personality-driven, subjectivist media wanted very little or nothing to do with facts. Fox News hostess Megyn Kelly mentioned Simon’s death briefly and then moved on. The Los Angeles Times did not find it necessary to bother addressing, let alone reporting, the circumstances of the car accident. CNN invited its leading newsman Anderson Cooper, who had his own syndicated daily talk show, as a guest to talk about working with Bob Simon. But, rather than discuss the facts of Simon’s death, Cooper kept saying that Simon’s death is “incomprehensible”. The fact is that dying in a car accident is not incomprehensible, especially if one is not wearing a seat belt.
The media’s herd mentality on Bob Simon’s death is that it is ironic because Simon lived in such a risk-oriented manner but died in a presumably random car accident. As the LA Times reported: “60 Minutes boss, executive producer Jeff Fager, noted the irony: Simon “had escaped more difficult situations than almost any journalist in modern times” but lost his life as a passenger in a hired car that smashed into a Mercedes Benz at a stoplight.” As usual, the Times reported only partial truth and they reported it as the definitive and final account. Strictly speaking, the Times report is false. Simon’s life was not lost in the manner the newspaper describes; Newsday reported that Bob Simon wasn’t wearing his seat belt and “died from blunt force head trauma as well as other injuries in a Manhattan car wreck” and that “a law enforcement source said his driver had nine past license suspensions and two outstanding traffic summonses.” Simon’s death is not ironic. On the contrary, if Newsday‘s report is true, Simon died as he’d lived: knowingly risking his life.
This aversion to reporting facts in favor of framing the story, in this case the Times‘ compulsion to impose an irony theme on the story regardless or in absence of the facts, is subjectivism. It starts with the public accepting, following and buying fake news and demanding more of it to consume and laugh at, lulling them into the plausible denial that the world is collapsing. Subjectivism ends, and objectivism in news begins, with thinking for oneself and demanding facts even if it means making an effort to gather, grasp and analyze facts. This means tuning out fake news and tuning in (or learning how to look for) real news. To use a noble phrase which is more likely to be satirized, being objective means seeking the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about reality.
Author’s Note
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Two recent cases in point come from CBS News, press that I’ve praised (read my post here). The first instance involves two anchors for the CBS News streaming app, Vladimir Duthiers and Anne-Marie Green, both of whom thoroughly and feverishly endorsed the concept, if it can be called that, of divine intervention after reporting on a child’s brave attempt to survive her father’s suicide and attempted murder. 
Starbucks introduced the blend this week in an email professing the company’s commitment to women. I have never heard of a coffee blend being produced on the basis of discriminating on behalf of one’s sex. Starbucks, which claims it’ll donate some of the blend’s revenue to women’s groups, broke the mold by singling out a single sex, excluding the opposite sex, with charity toward women because they’re women. This act sanctions feminism’s premise that identity is based on sex. Early advocates of what was once called women’s liberation promoted feminism as a means of achieving equality with men. Today’s feminists have dropped this pretense. Big business takes this offshoot of egalitarianism, which at once segregates and blurs the two sexes, on faith.
CBSN also features live streaming of CBS News. Other programming is also available, from CBS Evening News, Face the Nation and CBS Sunday Morning to 60 Minutes and 
Journalism suffered a few blows this week and not for the reasons you might think.