Quite a few days ago now, Roseanne Barr tweeted this:
The liberal media is an absolute joke – they no longer provide real news or information. They have made it their ultimate goal to undermine our dually elected president everyday. I encourage real Americans to find other reliable sources for their news and share their information.
It seems that Roseanne is copying the technique pioneered by her “dually” elected President of the USA, by including grammatical and spelling mistakes in her tweets, thereby getting these tweets noticed and written about by pedants like me, who would probably have had nothing to say about them had they been more properly phrased.
Even better would be if she had misspelt duly as “duelly”. Imagine POTUS being chosen by literal single combat. Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have won that either. (By the way, how do you not misspell “misspell”? Misspell doesn’t seem right. But miss-spell doesn’t seem right either.)
See also: The liberal media “is” an absolute joke. Should be “are”, surely.
On a more serious verbal point, I personally don’t like the way Roseanne Barr calls them the “liberal” media. I don’t like either “liberal” or “progressive” to describe people who seem to have no sane idea of what liberty or progress actually are.
But at least Roseanne Barr refrains from calling these media the “mainstream” media. This is a usage I am starting seriously to dislike. It attributes to these very particular media a cultural dominance that they did once possess, but no longer do. “Mainstream” says to me that any other media only have significance if they are tributaries of this main stream. But now, other streams can find their own way directly to the great sea that is public opinion, with no help from that still supposedly “main” stream at all.
I will now elaborate on what I mean.
Commenter “Y Knott”, at David Thompson blog, on this posting about Robert de Niro and his recent Fuck Trump! moment, says this:
So, this is how I see it. What with the PC culture, the mandarins running our government, and the leftists infesting our academic and media institutions, we have a cancer running through our society. Early on, when it was just infesting our higher academic world, it would have been much easier to cut this ugly tumor out but no one did. Then it metastasized into our news and entertainment media. Nothing seriously was done to stop it. Now it has become so wide spread that we needed Trumpian chemotherapy. Like chemo, you’re not gonna like it. It will make you sick. Might even make you very, very sick. But it’s just about the last hope of arresting the mitosis of leftism.
In the days when there really were “mainstream” media, Robert de Niro’s silly outburst would quickly have been judged counter-productive to the preferred mainstream media narrative and quickly forgotten. Soon, even those who hated de Niro’s uncouth behaviour and who hated even more all the uncouth cheering from all those tipsy Hollywood fools in the audience on the night, would have forgotten about it all (in the event that they had even heard about it in the first place), because day after day, night after night, nothing more would have been said about it, in the one single echo-chamber (to switch metaphors from geographical features to artificial constructs) by means of which people everywhere acquainted themselves with the world and its important happenings.
Not any more. Now, a narrative-threatening moment like de Niro’s goes “viral”. It does not get forgotten, by those who instead choose to remember it. Other things which the ex-mainstream media considers very important indeed get totally ignored, by less Trump-hostile medias, but not de Niro and his “Fuck Trump” outburst. I am re-remembering this moment, for all you good people, again, right now.
Actually, it goes far deeper than that. Had there still been this great gush of dominant “mainstream media” triumphantly flooding the thoughts and conversations of absolutely everyone, there could have been no President Trump to hurl insults at in the first place.
As I believe President Trump has himself said, Twitter is now like owning your own mega-newspaper. That Twitter may well be owned by – and is surely staffed in large numbers by – the kind of people who were cheering de Niro’s Fuck Trump moment does not alter this fact. If anything, if you are Trump, it just makes it that much more amusing.
Just yesterday morning, I read of another, not nearly so uncouth but equally revealing foot-in-mouth moment, in this Instapundit posting. Again, there is a very shrewd comment included in the posting, from some nobody-in-particular guy who writes for a non-mainstream media outlet (but whom I am now following on Twitter), which in the days of the actual mainstream media would never have even been noticed, let alone noticed as much as it actually is being.
So if the mainstream media are no longer “mainstream”, what are they? I now think that the word I have been looking for, for these ghastly, bossy people and their ghastly, bossy opinions, is: “regressive”. Progress means ignoring these current bosses, and these regressives are now clinging on to power and trying to impede progress, screaming obscenities at the writing on the wall, rather than contributing anything positive to the world.
Others have been using this adjective for some time, to describe left wing or even “liberal” (those quotes being very sneer) support for reactionary Islamist views on women, gays, genital mutilation, etc. But I think that this word extends very nicely to include stupid left wing opinions about how to make economic progress, and about how wonderful various despots, who have actually be trashing economic progress, are at achieving it. I will probably now climb aboard this rapidly moving verbal bandwagon, unless commenters here can persuade me otherwise, perhaps with an even better adjective that “regressive”.
(By the way, I distinctly recall a commenter, on one of my earlier postings here about “liberals” and “progressives” being neither, suggesting the word “regressive”. I only clocked this when I reread some of these comments a few weeks ago, but I don’t recall exactly which posting this comment was attached to. My apologies to whoever this was.)
Maybe someone can persuade Roseanne Barr to start tweeting about the “regressive” instead of “liberal” media, when she complains about the regressive media being obsessed with unseating a duly elected President.
More about Roseanne Barr’s recent travails here. (Thank you, again, Instapundit.)
Depends on what the definition of “is” is, as a certain American president once said. 😛
Actually, it’s probably one of those Americanisms, “government is” vs “government are”, for example, as I suspect those of you on the other side of the pond might say.
I detest the very word “liberal”, largely because those who use it tend to be left wing authoritarians. I do wish for a genuinely Liberal administration but the Conservative party have forgotten the word and its meaning. The most dastardly set of words is “Liberal Democrat”, a strange party who are neither liberal nor democratic….and tell lies!
Darrell, unlike government, media is actually a plural form of medium 🙂
Perhaps we need to apply the same rule as is given to the word “Conservative”, such that people have to talk about being a “small-c conservative” to define themselves in the traditional sense, not to be confused with those non-conservatives who claim the moniker.
I’d like to call this Capitalism, as opposed the small-c capitalism.
Eh, I still think the name “mainstream” applies. In the US, they built up plenty of capital while the government protected their places on the broadcast spectrum, and they haven’t run out of it yet; they’re still the preferred option in airports & other public spaces. I don’t know the details of their counterparts in the UK, but I gather the BBC is even more entrenched.
Really, I think the best test for their mainstream-ness is the sheer volume of people who take their assertions as nonpartisan.
Sadly there is indeed still a MSM… that said, it is far less influential than it was 20 years ago, but it still reflect the views of the political mainstream.
Have to agree with CaleyGraph: the left continues to maintain a deathgrip on culture, whether we absorb our culture from the academic industry, the entertainment industry, the social-communication industry, or the information industry. They may not be the mainstream consumers of culture, but they are still very much the mainstream producers of it.
And, “progressive” and “regressive” are relative terms. “Progressing” towards . . . what? “Regressing” from . . . what? Some seek progress towards socialism, others seek progress towards libertarianism. I’ve always considered myself to be progressive – but few on the left would think of my goals as “progress.” Each side simply tries to take for itself the most meritorious label. The left has been most successful at this, as they have the firmest grip on culture.
It’s a good measure of the left’s cultural dominance that we speak of these terms – even here – in the context of the left’s aims and goals and desires. Calling the left “regressive” just acknowledges that we have our goals, too. I think I prefer to call them, simply, the statists.
Shouldn’t this be “there are indeed MSM . . .”? 😉
Mr. Micklethwait, you are a grammar snob. I say this without meaning offense, as I tend to be one, too. But our thoughts are now transcribed through the filters of spellcheck and Voice-to-Text. When I talk into my phone and watch as the words appear, I’m horrified to see how it comes out. If eye for get to Ed it the results, it can bee ember assing. “Dually” pales besides some of my memorable mistakes, and I’m fairly O/C.
When my kids’ generation first started using phones for text communication, I saw that they were becoming more familiar with the written word – both in reading and writing – and I thought it a good thing. What can be better than a more literate society? But I’ve been dismayed at how much of our communication’s rules and structure we’ve given up as the price, and I’m no longer sure it is a good thing. Roseanne’s texts look clean compared to three-quarters of Twitter and the blogosphere. We’ve traded quality for quantity.
Perhaps Roseanne might best our Brian in a pedantry contest? Maybe Ms. Barr’s comment about “dually elected” was indeed correct, and alluded to the Constitutional procedure where the citizens in the several States elect groups of Electors, who then go to the heart of the Swamp and elect the President and Vice President in a second election?
As we look at politics today, it is quite possible that that original process (now honored in the breach) was a better way than the current perversion where rich Statists flood the media channels with chaff to mislead citizens (and voting non-citizens) directly.
Yeah, but you have to admit that he’s certainly not the dully elected president.
So wrote Queen Victoria when news reached the UK of the death of General Gordon in Khartoum at the hands of the Mahdi. She wrote this in a public telegram, thus ensuring it would be swiftly leaked to every newspaper in Britain and become an enormous news story, much to the irritation of Prime Minister Gladstone, who had recently stated that General Gordon was only “hemmed in” at Khartoum, and had delayed for as long as he could sending to the general’s aid one of those imperialist military expeditions that Gladstonian liberals so disliked. It also annoyed him that the telegram got even more notice because when people were not discussing General Gordon’s death, they were discussing the Queen’s grammar (even in 1885, almost nobody else treated the word ‘news’ as a plural). The result was a period of some three weeks in which crowds would gather in the streets to jeer and hiss the PM. as he went to the theatre or wherever, and it doubtless contributed to his losing the election that occurred not long after.
A royal telegram a century-and-a-half ago is a far cry from a Trump tweet today, but perhaps not quite as far as you’d think.
On a (yet) lighter note, could “dually elected” refer to Trump’s being elected according to the constitution but not according to the deep state. 🙂
Marxist media is a much better description. You just has to see what qualitative, descriptive words they employ to whom. Who they discriminate about.
who the journalists legitimate in these phrases often seen in media ?:
Fidel Castro, the Cuban Leader
Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean Dictator
A Leader is someone there isn’t a discussion about its legitimacy, their power is natural like water, instead a Dictator is someone that is only in power due to violence…
That is the not so subliminal message that a journalist employs on propose to indoctrinate.
(I suspect “whether it’s good news or not” means “whether you common people like it or not”.)
I agree with bobby b that ‘regressive’ is unlikely to take off or do us much good as an adjective for the MSM. He suggests the ‘statist’ media but to me that’s not quite the nail-on-the-head either. They are the ‘Believe what we tell you – or else!’ media; the ‘We talk, you listen – respectfully!’ media; the ‘We know everything worth knowing, you know nothing worth our knowing’ media.
I agree with Perry that the MSM, though much weakened from my youth, is still a thing – and has used the power it had in my youth to march its allies through many an institution that now helps it mask its waning power.
Back in the Sixties, I used a similar technique myself. I had a typewriter. I had an education. But when I wrote a letter to the editor, I wrote it in pencil on lined paper. Seemed to work – they figured it was one of the People writing.
It probably wouldn’t work as well today, now that “deplorables” has become a synonym for “the people”.
Niall, “…[C]ould “dually elected” refer to Trump’s being elected according to the constitution but not according to the deep state.”
No. That would be un-dually elected.
Also, I believe it deserves to be called “the from-God’s-Mouth-to-Your-Ear” media. It’s the touch of sarcasm wot does it. Or what about “the Achy Breaky” media, not to swipe a (doubtless Deplorable) song title?
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Brian, “…no sane idea of what liberty or progress actually are.” But “liberty” is singular, “progress” is singular, and the conjunction “or” indicates that each is to be taken singularly. (Thus, Singularity is Preserved. Heh.) Therefore “are,” the plural of the verb, is incorrect: s/b “or.” However, I think your meaning would be better preserved by changing “or” to “and.”
Also I notice you have ended a sentence a preposition with. Fie!
Heh … just teasing. 😀
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bobby, I trust you do not intend to rob me of my position as Chief Grammar Snob. I did issue an incorrect correction once, of course. I think it was back in 1964. 😆
bobby again, on a definitely serious note: I absolutely agree that this “texting” business has done our use of and usage in English no good … traded quality for vast quantities of gobbledygook.
Grammar critics note-
Ms. Barr’s native language is American, and not English.
Indeed, Capt. As Prof. ‘Iggins noted, “In America they haven’t spoken it in years.” :>(
Actually the Americans speak a truer English after their independence they were somewhat isolated and Britain kept adopting European idioms.
The Pravda Press?
“Fidel Castro, the Cuban Leader
Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean Dictator”
As I once said to Mrs. Wayze: Republicans have regimes, Democrats have administrations.
The Progressive (ever-bigger-government) agenda of the media is not some recent thing – it has been the case since the rise of “Schools of Journalism” in the late 19th century. A basic reason, openly discussed at the time, for creating the “Schools of Journalism” was to promote “Social Reform” – i.e. ever-bigger-government.
It is not the job of the “mainstream media” to treat non Progressives fairly – it is the job of the mainstream media to promote the Progressive agenda of ever-more-“compassionate”-government (ever more regulations and government spending on benefits and services) by destroying, by any means necessary, anyone in public life who is not on board with this agenda.
This is basic to understanding the media (at least the electronic media – there is more dissent in print media in some countries) – not just in America, but just about everywhere.
In the United Kingdom dissent, at least in television stations, from the Progressive Agenda is actually unlawful – no conservative (i.e. anti Progressive, anti ever-bigger-government) television station is allowed here – a total monopoly of television stations by the Progressives is called being “unbiased” (an Orwellian misuse of language by the officials). A real conservative may be allowed on a television station – but only for the purpose of being undermined. For example, one of the specific charges made against Fox News in this country is that some programmes on Fox News (certainly not the news controlled by Mr S. Smith and other Progressives) did not “challenge” (undermine) conservative guests. No real “challenging” of Progressive guests is demanded – they are allowed to demand more Welfare State spending and more regulations without real “challenge”, because the “broadcasting authorities” are themselves (being the products of the universities) committed to the Progressive Agenda.