With so many pronouncements and so much finger-pointing in the media about the crisis and decline of American culture, it is easy to miss the central role of the media itself in this ongoing distress in our nation’s daily life.
It is now well-known that the American education system, from kindergarten to graduate school, has been overtaken by radical teachers, professors and administrators who promote negative narratives of American history and society. In their place, schools now put forward and advocate a radical agenda that employs woke standards, cancel culture, and ridicule of American capitalist representative democracy to advance neo-Marxist values of wealth redistribution, hyper-egalitarianism, and totalitarian restriction of free speech and dissent.
The result has been that significant numbers of the youngest adult generation hold very different views than older generations — views often formed not only from a lack of experience, but also from a lack of knowledge about American and international history as well as national cultural values — directly attributable to programming and indoctrination in their formative years.
Of course, there are still many good teachers who seek to provide their students with an honest, unbiased education, and there are notable examples of private schools and colleges which offer a more balanced and traditional curriculum, but overall, the public education offering is radical and doctrinaire.
While this is occurring at the various levels of our public education establishment, its success in indoctrinating younger generations of Americans has spilled over to older generations through the efforts of the U.S. media establishment which uncritically and deliberately promotes the radical agenda in the dissemination of news.
Fortunately, the radical media establishment in the U.S. is offset by a substantial number of moderate, conservative, and libertarian commentators, editorialists, broadcasters, and internet journalists who reach large audiences with alternative views, analyses, and data. As a result, the country remains as a whole divided in politics and cultural perspectives.
But the distortions and bias of the establishment media have produced exaggerated divergences between urban, suburban, and rural Americans, opinion gaps that increasingly discourage civility, compromise, and socially healthy communities.
This is what happens when the establishment media gives radical voices and events inflated attention, employing positive language to describe extremists on the left while employing negative language describing anything moderate or conservative.
Classic examples of this are descriptions of any and all conservatives as “far right” or “extremist” while describing those on the far left as “progressives.” The terms “radical” or “extreme left” are avoided.
The establishment media is also notorious for minimizing or totally ignoring news which runs counter to the radical agenda. Major television networks, most urban daily newspapers, and major social media sites do this routinely.
This has caused once popular broadcast networks and once respected major newspapers to lose audiences and readership. The New York Times and The Washington Post, for example, were once highly regarded, but now are seen by many as basically propaganda sheets. CNN and other cable networks have also seen drastic declines in their audiences and ratings.
Where this all goes is uncertain, but a recent controversy in higher education may have provoked general public opinion to a tipping point.
That controversy involved the presidents of three of the most prestigious universities in America: Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.).
These officials appeared before a congressional committee to testify about recent incidents of antisemitism on their campuses. When asked directly whether calls for genocide against Jews violated their schools’ codes of conduct, they refused to answer yes or no, but instead said it depended “on the context.”
All three also raised concerns about “free speech” when it comes to disciplining explicit calls for violence against Israel and Jews. But the recent incidents on college campuses were not about free speech since most of them involved harassment and intimidation, and educational institutions have a responsibility to protect their students from harm.
The presidents’ retreat into abstract technicalities provoked an enormous backlash not only among elected officials of both parties, but also among their alumni, major donors, and the general public as well. The result was that one of the presidents had to resign and a second one might resign soon.
Much more importantly, a national discussion has begun about what is being taught and tolerated on the nation’s college campuses. The events at Harvard, Penn, and M.I.T. have been occurring at a great many other campuses across the nation —- during which “free speech” and “academic freedom” is denied to anyone who disagrees with the left.
Nor were the establishment media uninvolved in these events. The media provided incentives for the left’s protestors by giving them uncritical publicity and access to the news — publicity and access which moderates and conservatives contend were not merited, but which promoted the media venues themselves through sensationalism.
Yet the backlash to the university presidents was so great that the establishment media could not ignore it, and it was widely reported.
The same deficiencies are occurring in the national election cycle now underway, especially in the media which is routinely slanted to one party, its candidates, and its political agenda.
Curiously, the frontrunning candidate of that party, President Joe Biden, seeking a second term, is trailing or underperforming against his three major potential Republican opponents. Taking their cue from several nervous Democrat strategists, several establishment media venues are now publishing or broadcasting critical stories about the 81-year-old president, implying that they, like the strategists, want Mr. Biden to retire, so that a younger, more popular Democrat could run in 2024. But this only reinforces the contention that the establishment media does the bidding of the Democrats.
Unanswered is the question of whether the education backlash and the national election campaign will bring needed lasting reform and change in the year ahead. There is much more at stake in 2024 than only which candidates win their elections.
