Friday, June 16, 2017

Peggy Noonan opines on the current incivility of the media



“Tuesday I talked with an old friend, a figure in journalism who’s a pretty cool character, about the political anger all around us. He spoke of “horrible polarization.” He said there’s “too much hate in D.C.” He mentioned “the beheading, the play in the park” and described them as “dog whistles to any nut who wants to take action.”

“Someone is going to get killed,” he said.

That was 20 hours before the shootings in Alexandria, Va.” . . .

 “A comic posed with a gruesome bloody facsimile of President Trump’s head. New York’s rightly revered Shakespeare in the Park put on a “Julius Caesar” in which the assassinated leader is made to look like the president. A CNN host—amazingly, of a show on religion—sent out a tweet calling the president a “piece of s—” who is “a stain on the presidency.” An MSNBC anchor wondered, on the air, whether the president wishes to “provoke” a terrorist attack for political gain. Earlier Stephen Colbert, well known as a good man, a gentleman, said of the president, in a rant: “The only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c— holster.” Those are but five dots in a larger, darker pointillist painting. You can think of more.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/rage-is-all-the-rage-and-its-dangerous-1497571401

And I thought.  But the incivility is not spread equally—even though the media has warned us incessantly about dangers from the right wing extremists. The conservatives are not the news anchors and reporters; they are not the entertainers; they can't get tenure at the universities to melt little snowflakes into submission. The left owns the culture and they own this mess. Conservatives haven’t burned buildings or prevented speakers at graduation or political forums on college campuses and they haven’t threatened sponsors of talk radio or conservative shows. It's not the right who insist that boys will be girls, and if you know better we'll destroy you.  The right wasn’t in control of the federal government PR campaign the last 8 years. All they are guilty of is voting. And it has created a call for a violent revolution.
 

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