The Washington Post, New York Times, and NY Daily News just won’t give up. Bernie keeps winning while they keep whining, ignoring him in coverage and bashing him on the back page, even after he hammered Hillary in eight out of the nine last contests. These jaded pieces are so strident they border on the boorish, painting the first populist since John Edwards and Howard Dean as a delusional, lying lunatic bent on sending the U.S. straight to Stalinist Russia. Did these papers rip that other Democratic Socialist (and top-tier POTUS Hall of Famer) FDR like this when he ran for Prez? Doubt it. Yet it’s quite clear this Clintonite crew is experiencing a visceral, knee-jerk reaction to Bernie’s New-New Deal, but why?
Tom Wolfe coined these types “Masters of the Universe” in Bonfire of the Vanities, his classic fictional case study of elite hubris. This current cast of vain-glorious characters recoils at the notion of Bernie’s revolution, which challenges business-as-usual in the corporate media establishment. Heck, if Bernie’s elected they might have to cover future elections on substance rather than gossip, gotcha-questions, and horse-race politics. Or cover corporate corruption the way their predecessor Walter Cronkite did instead of soft-pedaling it from their pedestals.
In their quest for harvesting eyeballs and cheap profits, mass media has contracted mass amnesia. Mainstream news has completely forgotten its sacred mission and public duty to constantly QUESTION the status quo rather than shamelessly and vigorously defend it as they do with Clinton. For the Washington Post, the case is hopeless so long as Amazon magnate Billionaire Bezos owns that dying paper. Honestly folks, would the current Post have pulled out all the stops to expose Watergate under its current regime? Pleeeease . . .
And we don’t need to read tea leaves to see that citizens on the left AND the right are fed up with a system that’s been ripping them off for two generations. The People are demanding change NOW, not next year, or next month, or next week, but NOW, so it’s high time the tone-deaf media started challenging the status quo instead of coddling it. Not only that, they should thank their lucky stars they live in a country where they still can. These guys should know journalists around the world get murdered every day for pushing back against power, yet they insist on denigrating Bernie’s revolution against a system that, ironically, gets less democratic by the day.
Granted, some Clintonites genuinely fear big change might disrupt the overall economy, but Bernie’s answer is: What economy? The current system may be working for them, but not for 99% of their fellow citizens. The bottom line is, despite all the elite media’s kicking and screaming, we really do need an FDR redux to fix forty years of disastrous, neo-liberal economic policy, and Bernie brilliantly fits the bill.
So when Hillary’s henchmen like Chris Matthews bitch that Bernie “makes promises he can’t keep”, it’s not just a lie but an insult to any American, liberal or conservative, demanding real change. Statements like these assume the American people aren’t capable of freeing their government from corporate tyranny, even via a grassroots groundswell of political pressure not seen since the Sixties. Apparently, Master-of-the-Universe-Matthews and other media honchos just don’t believe the American people have the juice to get the job done. Well, I don’t know about you, but I take that as a challenge, especially when it comes in the form of a patronizing dictum hurled at me (a mere mortal) from the lofty heights of Mt. Olympus. In fact, it makes me damn mad.
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