Lügenpresse
The German pejorative, lügenpresse (“lying press”), has dark associations, as it was deployed by the German National Socialist Party before and during the Third Reich to discredit news media. For such organs of social power could become rallying points of opposition if these ever recovered some moral authority and credibility. Because of this association with Nazism, the term “disappeared from public discourse for almost half a century in democratic West Germany.
“Lügenpresse” was branded a taboo word in Germany in 2015 by an academic panel after anti-Islam movements, such as Pegida, started using it more frequently in the presence of journalists. As in the United States, trust in mainstream media is on the decline in Germany.
The term reappeared in American alt-right circles during the 2016 election, later replaced with “fake news” (Donald Trump), “gaslighting,” and “cheap fakes” (Democrat politicos, mainstream media). This most recent phrase intimates that the plentitude of videos, showing a doddering President, had been doctored, without necessity of providing proof that this is so.
“Lügenpresse” has an anti-Semitic connotation. For just like America now, Jews were vastly overrepresented in the news media during the Weimar Republic relative to their respective population. Thus, if the news media engaged in lies and deceptions, either Jews were especially instrumental in the promotion of these prevarications, or they became besmirched with that reputation by virtue of their overrepresention.
I cannot read German. I do not know directly whether Lügenpresse had legitimate basis or whether the Weimar news media simply refused to cater to the narratives held by those making such aspersions. Yet, there is good indirect reason to believe that they engaged in lies and deceptions. Such aspersions would have had little electoral effect had it lacked resonance among the populace.
The American Lügenpresse
Anyone with eyes, not blinded with partisan prejudice and rage, should be able to perceive the mendacity of American mainstream media (MSM) and a substantive portion of social media. While the progressive left are almost uniformly perpetrators of lies and deceptions at this time, a majority of conservative outlets also make my stomach churn on this account.
I began a blog series in 2016 on all the subtle ways that the news media were misrepresenting cosmological and socioeconomic realities. Francis Schaeffer had laid out a similar exposition, almost 40 years earlier. But I soon terminated the endeavor, it having become a moot exercise. For the MSM had even thrown subtlety out the window, mostly due to TDS (Trump Deranged Syndrome). I wonder why this disorder does not deserve an entry in the DSM, perhaps under a more generic classification.
I had been disturbed by the corruption of science as attested by Climategate in 2009: the selectivity of studies in meta-studies to fit the prescribed narrative, the massaging of the raw data, the capricious interpolation in computer code, the alarmism and catastrophism, the inside political pressure placed on researchers and peer-review magazines by Michael Mann et al, the hubris in claiming that contemporary projections of temperature in a given locale at a given time were more accurate than actual measurements made at the time. These are the more obvious and easy to explain artifacts.
(The core climatologist claim could still be true, despite the rank dishonesty that permeates these disciplines, just as Richard Nixon would have likely won the 1972 presidential election in a landslide without need of the White House’s dirty tricks campaign.)
The lies and deceptions during the COVID-19 pandemic deployed many of the same tactics. They were enjoined by MSM and social media corporatists. This time, however, it hit closer to home. For those, who dissented from these lies and deceptions, suffered reputational and socioeconomic loss. Governments were in the initial stages of depriving people, mostly from the working class, of their livelihoods if they did not conform to policies which were based upon these lies.
Why has the guillotine not been rolled out for such agents of mendacity and tyranny!!
American Media, the Outlier
My continuing complaint about Canadian news outlets has been that of provinciality and myopia of concern and superficial analysis. I could nary find a single outlet prior to the 2016 election who were aware of the incipient polarization and schism in America. Yet, Canadian MSM have mostly kept their intellectual integrity, although there were threats of collapse during the Truck Convoy protest of 2022.
This was brought home to me during the trial of Jian Ghomeshi (2014), in which a popular radio host was accused of several sexual assaults. Ghomeshi was rightly acquitted of those charges on account of the lying, the conspiratorial collusion, and the incongruent actions of some of the complainants, subsequent to the date of the alleged assaults. It was also evident that Ghomeshi abused his position for sexual favors, rightly receiving a lesser social condemnation and punishment.
The salacity of the trial interested me less than in how the Canadian MSM were covering it. Even feminists at the Toronto Star, who were undoubtedly champing at the bit, remained responsible in their reportage and op-eds. It was in NYC rags wherein specious and outlandish hyperbole was promulgated.
If I wanted to acquire an honest take on the American scene in this last decade, I had to peruse the South China Morning Post (SCMP), RT (Russia), DW (Germany), France24, Al Jazeera, the Jerusalem Post, various British papers, and other foreign publications. Each of these publications have an agenda and spawn a dishonesty, unique to their own. Foreigners no more understand Americans than Americans understand foreigners. But, at least, foreigners are observers of the American scene, not would-be participants and aspiring Goebbels.
The Come-to-Jesus Moment
Biden’s debacle during the debate was so schadenfreude delicious to anyone who has become contemptuous of and livid towards the American MSM. Either the MSM have been stupendously oblivious and ignorant regarding the doddering imbecility of this Potemkin President, or these sycophants had become so enmeshed within the Party Organ, that they became enthusiastic or cowardly participants of the deception. Either way, any journalist, who claimed an acuity that was evidently not there, the lack of which was evident to any foreigner, including America’s geopolitical adversaries, should be purged.
It will not happen. It never happens.
Yet, in the exposure of the emperor’s nakedness, there was such swift destruction of all moral authority and cred of the MSM, it was biblical. The rimmers have suddenly become brayers against the ass that they just recently rimmed, this in order to stand upon a shard of the crumbled mantelpiece of intellectual integrity and objectivity that they long ago destroyed.
What Could MSM Do Now?
MSM cred is now openly shattered, the operative word being openly, even to those on the Liberal/Progressive aisle of the political continuum. Some from that faction have even found a testicular nerve to call out colleagues, who claimed Biden won the debate, as idiots. They are experiencing an ephemeral epiphany of intellectual integrity. But can the leopard change its spots? Is this clarity not for effect, rather than a result of genuine mea culpa and repentance? Once things settle down, will the dogs not return to their own vomit?
If I owned such a news agency, in order to save it, I would go full Japanese, openly confessing the mendacity that I had hitherto sponsored and spawned and the harm, mostly of indirect nature, that ensued. Thereafter, I would conduct a sweeping, yet intelligent, decimation of all pundits who had been the enthusiastic cheerleaders of prevarication. Thereafter, persons from both sides of the ideological and socioeconomic divide would be hired, not necessarily in equal fashion, yet sufficient to keep publications from that news agency in touch with objective realities through internal and welcomed dissent. After the Pearl Harbor debacle, FDR sponsored such a decimation of the military ranks.
Alas, it will not happen. It never (or no longer) happens. Consequently, MSM will follow the same path to obscurity and irrelevance as the Mainline churches.