In an earlier article, I looked at the rise of “Woke Capitalism” and the challenges that this development presents for a free society (or, to be accurate, a somewhat free society). For the time being we probably do not need to worry about the establishment of the People’s Republic of Google, but a much greater problem than left-wing business corporations has invaded our body politic: The Woke Mainstream Media.
Private sector Wokeness is not limited to profit-making businesses, however, as the giants of American media now are subscribing to the same hard-left political and social theories, and this development has become a much greater problem to American society and American liberty because of the symbiotic relationship between media and government.
However, a media campaign against someone, even someone who is innocent of a crime, can result in imprisonment or worse. As one who for more than a decade has written about prosecutorial misconduct and unjustified pursuit of innocent people, I have yet to find a case in which the worst kind of prosecutorial behavior was not aided by irresponsible and dishonest journalists.
Furthermore, the rise of Woke Media presents a problem in this country, one in which the progressive news media becomes a partner with government to strip people of their rights and to impose authoritarian rule.
While that is not the picture of the media that the media itself tries to present or is the dominant theme in journalism school, it is much closer to the truth than anyone tied to the media will admit. On top of that, almost all of the national media (with the exception of Fox News) is closely linked to the Democratic Party, and most journalists now being on the left. In the years of the Donald Trump presidency, that has meant that much of the media now acts in concert with the Democrats to weaken and even end his term in office.
When the New York Times calls for curtailing free speech or when its reporters actively work to promote a corrupt prosecutor in order to frame innocent people for rape, as the NYT did in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case, when the press wrongly accused the high school boys from Covington Catholic School of harassing a Native American, which led to active death threats against the students, or when media outlets recklessly repeat false statements by government officials, as was done in the Jewell case, such transgressions are open attacks on a free society.
When these things happen, a media outlet then becomes an advocate for oppressive government, which seems to openly conflict with the media’s self-declared label of “government watchdog.” As I wrote a decade ago:
Despite that fact that every student in J-school is taught that the press is a "watchdog" of government, the truth is that journalists are the lapdogs of the state. From the local police beat reporter to the top journalist at the New York Times, journalists pretty much repeat what government officials tell them. When journalists actually do pressure government, it is either for the authorities to pass laws that are stricter than what they are at the present or to demand that governments regulate businesses in a draconian fashion.
In the Jewell case, the FBI leaked material to friendly reporters to implicate Richard Jewell in the Olympic bombing, and there was the usual feeding frenzy early in the case. The frenzy wore itself out, however, when it became clear via pure logistics that Jewell could not have done what the FBI had claimed. In their defense, media figures said that they were just following the FBI’s lead, which was true.
However, perhaps it should logically have followed that maybe, just maybe, the FBI is full of untrustworthy and incompetent, dishonest, and vindictive employees that have not earned the trust that journalists had given them. Perhaps, just perhaps, government is not full of brilliant and deducting G-Men that are worthy of the heroic treatment the media often gives them. (One excellent exception is James Bovard, who has been an independent warrior exposing government malfeasance — and has been the bane of politicians from both parties.)
A decade later in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case, most of the U.S. media was craven from the start. By then, the infamous “narratives” that now drive political thinking were in full force.
The media latched onto the dual themes of racism and sexual assault and even when the earliest evidence cast serious doubt on the truth of the story, American journalists continued to run in one direction until they fell over the cliff and earned a well-deserved rebuke from American Journalism Review.
(In noting the deterioration in thinking with the elite factions of the media, the Columbia Journalism Review never did an assessment of the Duke case, despite the obvious media failures and breakdowns. And while CJR did provide an assessment for Rolling Stone in the wake its disastrous story, “A Rape on Campus,” which turned out to be wholly fiction, the publication stuck to the original sexual assault narratives which drove the whole thing in the first place.)
The Covington Boys story, which dominated the media for several days in January 2019, is an account of how “Wokeness” has so infected the major media that even when the truth was right in front of them, American journalists ran with the left-wing narratives instead. Besides making life a living hell for the Covington students and their families, the elite U.S. media from the New York Times to the Washington Post to CNN proved themselves nearly incapable of being able to separate facts from narratives and created their own fiction of white racist teenage boys in MAGA caps terrorizing and disrespecting minorities. While even a cursory glance at the original video of the so-called incident was enough to make an honest person question the popular story, elite American journalists were unwilling to do even that small task.
What makes things even worse is that the NYT’s editorial page now is being used as a conduit to promote questionable historical narratives, promote huge confiscatory taxation schemes, and a very dark history of American capitalism that claims that capitalism here entirely owes its existence to the worst aspects of black chattel slavery. Yes, these are opinion pieces that ostensibly represent independent thought from intellectuals, political figures, and academic leaders, but when these writers are dishonest or terribly misleading, a newspaper as influential as the NYT should not be promoting them.
Because so many American journalists today are squarely joined to the radical left, one wonders what is going to happen to journalism here in the next decade. The so-called watchdogs of state power today are advocating for government to grab authority that would end many aspects of historical American liberty. The next step seems to be the media becoming the TASS of a future Democratic Party administration, and if we reach that stage, it is doubtful we ever can roll back those levels of state power, and we will see Woke journalism not being a barrier to state-sponsored oppression, but rather its enabler.
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