The complicit media
We stand today on the edge of a unique precipice in human history. Never before have the influences of the mainstream media, social media and misinformation conspired to create a more perilous situation. The circumstances we find ourselves in today are unique by definition because the technology to create them didn’t exist until now. It’s little wonder that we are baffled, little wonder that the paradoxes we see every day are so unexpected, so strange, so startling. Nothing like this has ever happened before.
It’s as if one day in the normal course of our ordinary lives we awoke to find ourselves on the other side of Alice’s looking glass. In this strange new world Republicans love Russia and hate Democracy, treachery and deception are the order of the day and a complete fool is in charge of it all.
The mainstream media has responded with studied cowardice, frustrating our expectations with a disquieting absence of adequate outrage. We look around at the choppy waters of opposition and wonder why there isn’t a thousand foot tall tidal wave of horror and antagonism. We are right to wonder. This isn’t natural, this isn’t the way it should be.
Why is the media’s response to this newly minted Nazism so tepid? Are we, finally, to blame? Are they just giving us what we want? I don’t think so. This isn’t a proverbial chicken and egg problem. The wrongness of the situation that we feel deep in our bones is no illusion. We are being merrily led to the edge of this cliff by greed and gutless complicity. We have been sold out by a media that is bizarrely smug.
We can comfort ourselves with promises that the November election will go our way. But what about future elections? And how is it possible that this peril is met with so much craven stupidity when the stakes are so chillingly high?
The idea that we could hand over America’s nuclear codes to a doddering monster with a hair-trigger temper ought to fill every single human being on earth with existential dread and disgust. The idea that a stupid, climate-denying cretin could possibly again hold in his tiny, inadequate hands the levers of the ultimate power on earth ought to be so unthinkable as to galvanise every sane commentator to immediate and unceasing action. Instead we see polls predicting defeat, complaints about our candidate’s age, equivocation about policy on Israel and lethargic acceptance of this indicted rapist and criminal as a legitimate alternative.
And we used to scratch our heads and wonder at the forces that led Germany to embrace Hitler. We used to heap superior shame on the Neville Chamberlains of the world. How young we were.
As the election approaches the mainstream media is hedging its bets. There is no doubt in my mind. In the unlikely event that Trump should win they don’t want the Fourth Reich to shut them down. In the words of Mel Brooks, they have to protect their phoney baloney jobs. They are gambling with our lives and the future of our planet in the name of greed and cowardice.
Shame on them. Shame on their smug self-righteousness, shame on their meticulously shaped hairdos, shame on their swivel chairs, shame on their arrogance. Shame and endless infamy on every single goddamn one of them who utters a single syllable of cowardice or accommodation. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
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Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.