Intellectual honesty mostly dead — but few partisans even care

By David McElroy · April 2, 2018

For a political partisan, there are only two positions. His own position — parroting the party line of his group — is absolutely correct. Everybody else is lumped together. Anybody who dares to point out something which is outside of his group’s talking points must be shouted down.

Public discourse is a disgrace in this country, mostly because few people care about anything other than their side winning. Almost nobody is interested in another point of view, much less learning something which hadn’t occurred to him before — and which falls outside the bounds of his group’s talking points.

The faux controversy over an editorial delivered by close to 200 local TV stations owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group is a case in point. For instance, New York magazine had this headline: “News Anchors Reciting Sinclair Propaganda Is Even More Terrifying in Unison.” All the other news networks have had similar stories, mostly with headlines darkly reporting that TV anchors at those stations were “forced” to “recite Sinclair propaganda.”

What actually happened?

Sinclair owns or operates close to 200 local television stations around the country. (For the sake of full disclosure, my ex-wife worked as a news producer for a Sinclair station years ago, but I have no opinion about the company.) The ownership of the company holds views that lean in the conservative direction. Every now and then, the company sends scripts to its local stations which they are required to run as editorials.

Here’s one example of local anchors delivering the editorial. It’s pretty tame by modern political standards, but because it points out — correctly — that some media outlets are too quick to report things that aren’t true in order to push an agenda, the political left has jumped all over this. Because the editorial complains about media pushing agendas with “facts” that turn out to be false, the progressive left went ballistic and complained that this is simply propaganda for Donald Trump.

So what exactly is “propaganda”? By the definition being used here, it seems to mean “something which the left doesn’t agree with.”

Why are headlines consistently saying that anchors were “forced” to deliver this message? Do these people understand that news anchors at every station are reading scripts? Do they understand that the news readers rarely write their own copy? Do they understand that these are highly paid television performers to compete for these jobs — for the right to read other people’s words?

When I owned newspapers in the distant past, my newspapers’ editorials were my opinion. Our news stories were shaped by my idea of fairness. When I edited newspapers for other people, there were times when a publisher dictated what our opinion or position would be about a particular subject.

This is exactly as it should be.

If you own a media outlet, you have every right to dictate the messages promoted by your stations or newspapers or magazines. In the same way, I have the right to write whatever I want here. Because I own my own site, you know my words represent my own beliefs, not someone else’s.

Television networks and stations all over this country express politically biased beliefs every day. CNN and some other networks have become the PR arm of the Democratic Party and the anti-gun lobby. Why is one media owner’s conservative opinion “propaganda” and another media owner’s progressive left-leaning opinions are simply brave journalism?

When I’ve pointed out this double standard a few times on sites where the Sinclair editorial was being vilified, I have been shouted down by people pretending this “propaganda” is unprecedented. They don’t know what they’re talking about, but they have no interest in facts. They care only about repeating the talking points of the left.

Nobody could accuse me of being sympathetic to Donald Trump, but I have great sympathy for truth and fairness. For intellectual honesty. And for the right of media owners to deliver whatever message they want to deliver — whether I agree with it or not.

This selective blindness isn’t just a problem of the left. It’s a problem across the board. It’s a very human problem. In a world where people are more interested in lobbing “memes” at each other than in doing serious thinking, public discourse is pretty much dead.

Note: If you have any interest in why public discourse is so shallow and insipid today, I strongly suggest you start with a 1985 book by Neil Postman called “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.” Postman was writing about how television had changed everything by the early ’80s, but what he has to say is even more true in the age of social media.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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