George & Winston

By G Murphy Donovan 

“Political chaos is connected with the decay of language… one can probably bring about
some improvement by starting at the verbal end.” George Orwell

Internet journalism “could” be the ideal public forum. Anyone with internet access can read, write, or comment on what is offered. Commentary, authors, and content links all make for a spicy, proletarian, if not vulgar, mix. Feedback loops on the internet make broadcast and print journalism, in contrast, look like one-way mirrors.

Legacy print journalists write, you read. Most feedback loops, ‘Letters to the Editor,’ as an example, are consigned to the rubbish bin.

For the most part, American media doesn’t really care much about what consumers think. The written political word in America, as in Europe, is largely creature and province of the Orwellian political left.

Indeed, most legacy media of any sort has an agenda. Neither audience sentiment nor dissent is that relevant. It’s the narrative, not the facts or the argument, that matters. And we like to bleat about free press here in America, yet in practice, Americans confuse “free” with private, commercial, or political.

American journalism, print or broadcasting, is about selling; products or politics. Indeed, most US media platforms are government financed – and shot through with partisan ideology.

CPB, PBS, and NPR are monolithic offenders. Between CPB and BBC, English speaking American, British, and Commonwealth networks comprise the largest multi-state influence/propaganda brokers on the planet.

NPR in America alone has 1000 radio stations and 60 million listeners; literal coverage in all 50 states. PBS has 350 TV broadcast stations, somewhere between 16-53 million viewers daily, reaching 58 percent of American households; again coverage in all 50 states with redundant programming and platforms servicing urban, largely single party political domains.

The nexus of public broadcasting in America is the so called DMV (District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia) where no fewer than 16 PBS/NPR stations blanket greater Washington, DC and suburbs. DC alone even has two university affiliated CPB broadcasters (WAMU, WHUT) and a national mother ship (WETA) covering just the captive audience inside the Beltway before sharing with national affiliates.

Nine in ten voters in Washington, even in the two Trump eras, consistently vote for the Democrat Party in any given election. The nation’s capital, suburbs, and resident Civil Service/contractor regimes are, for the most part, a one media and one party monoculture.

Whilst, CPB will claim NPR and PBS stations are locally operated and “independent,” somehow all seem to carry the same political news; documentaries, round tables, and commentary. Social engineering and globalism, if not Socialism, is a mainstay on NPR and PBS – as it is for their role model, BBC. Nationalism, patriotism or any conservative meme, as Yoram Hazony reminds us, are demonized as if they were social diseases.

The likes of Christiane Amanpour, Amy Goodman, or Jeff Goldbloom curate or groom for the left daily, with enough replays to cover all time slots. The politics of the Atlantic, the NY Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle et al are also the politics of American public radio and TV.

News and commentary in the English speaking world these days is either Left – or left out.

The presumption seems to be that if it isn’t woke, progressive, socialist, globalist, or Islamist; it’s not news. The cheap shots of journalism are easier to make and market when sold as virtue signals like tolerance, inclusion, and diversity.

American, Commonwealth, and EU state broadcasters have created what amounts to a global ideological circle jerk with shared news/entertainment content and mutually beneficial revenues. Call CPB in America a fiscal trifecta; state funds, foreign revenues, charitable donations, all laundered as “public services” under secret, “non-profit” or “charity” fiscal immunities and protections.

No doubt public broadcasting produces some cultural or artistic product that might not be found elsewhere, but even there, programming is never far from the message.

Before the last election cycle, the host of Rick Steve’s Europe, putative “travel show,” was fronting a retrospective on fascism. Yes, a travel agent on PBS doing riffs on Hitler and Mussolini. Alas, when such public TV hosts cover places like Iran, the Levant, or North Africa, they seldom notice Islamofascism; Muslim women treated like live stock for millennia in cultures where religious fascism is the norm.

Christopher Hitchens, the Left’s last honest liberal, provided a defense of the term “Islamofascism,” two decades ago, an assessment that recent events in the Levant, South Asia, and elsewhere continues to validate.

Even after the recent American election, PBS twisted the Trump hate knife with historical innuendo. The very same WETA that produced Rick Steve’s fascism series ran a separate anthology on Julius Caesar, the iconic totalitarian who brought down 500 years of heliographic Roman republicanism. Such bookend programming bracketing a presidential election is consistent with CPB’s political agenda.

Projection, underwritten by propaganda, are the perennial implements in a political shill’s tool kit on any day of the year.

The great fail of contemporary English language broadcast news and analysis is the failure to acknowledge that religious fascism and political fascism are distinctions without a difference.

Alas, Islam is now the sacred cow of media in the so-called civilized or “free world.” Moslem excess and abuse is rationalized, indeed celebrated in American universities, as culture. Moslem politics are epidemic now, accorded the same immunities allowed to other evolved, religious institutions. Islam, with few redeeming social virtues, has been granted global moral equivalence.

Public broadcasting in the EU, the Commonwealth, and the Americas now facilitates Islamofascism too under blankets of fear, apologetics, and virtue signals.

Winston Churchill, another erstwhile journalist, recognized the problem nearly a century ago with unambiguous clarity. “No stronger retrograde religion exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.”

Churchill and Orwell had two things in common, the written word and public broadcasting. Today, neither man would recognize either profession. Surely, the BBC, once a role model for broadcast integrity and responsible reporting, now features transvestite news readers whilst largely ignoring the abuse of British girls by Islamic men.

Jonathan Willoughby takes a bow here. Sexual dysphoria and Islamophilia now trump the safety of English girls and women. Withal, there is at least one small consolation. We now know that George Orwell and Winston Churchill were social optimists.

 

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1. Murphy Donovanwrites about the politics of Intelligence and National security. Follow him on X.