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Friday, March 29, 2024

How the Mainstream Media Operates – A Case Study – Part 3 

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(Continued from last week)

Does Swed provide an example of my militant polarizing? Yes, just one: my “calling liberalism a cancer.”

Like The New York Times article, Swed did not place the words he attributed to me in quotation marks, and for good reason. I have never in my life written or said that “liberalism is a cancer.” What I did write recently is that “leftism is a terminal cancer in the American bloodstream.”

But I always distinguish between leftism and liberalism because the two have almost nothing in common. Leftism is as anti-liberal as it is anti-conservative. But Swed knows that writing “liberalism is a cancer” renders me far more extreme-sounding than writing “leftism is a cancer.”

However, what is most disturbing about Swed is not that he wrote a column against the Santa Monica Symphony inviting me to conduct. Hiltzik wrote a similar piece, after all. But as irresponsible as Hiltizk’s piece was, Hiltzik is a political columnist. Swed is not. He is a classical music critic. What he did was one of the reasons I wrote that leftism is a cancer in the American bloodstream: The left damages virtually everything it touches — the arts, education, religion, the economy, the news media and the military, among other areas of life.

When I was a young man living in New York City, I read every column the legendary New York Times classical music critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote. I do not recall him ever writing a political column. To this day, I have no idea whether Schonberg was a liberal, a leftist, a conservative or a Buddhist. He knew his role was to write about music. Swed, a man of the left, does not.

Finally, we come to NPR. It published a piece on Aug. 13 titled “Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra Confronts Controversy Over Right-Wing Guest Conductor.”

Putting the title aside — again, it communicates a negative story when a positive take would have been just as valid — the piece was considerably more balanced than those of the Los Angeles Times or that of The New York Times.

But it had the usual media defect: It gave away its political bent. The second paragraph read: “Dennis Prager’s day job, however, has members of the orchestra up in arms — and laying down their instruments. He is a conservative talk show host who often targets multiculturalism, Muslims and LGBTQ people.”

The writer gave an example in each case. For multiculturalism, she cited a column I wrote titled “1,400 Girls Raped by Multiculturalism.” In it I described the kidnapping and sexual enslavement of over 1,400 English girls by young Muslim men over the course of more than a decade — while the police and the media conspired never to divulge that the rapists were Muslim. The reason, as British authorities later admitted, was their commitment to multiculturalism.

But for a writer at NPR — even one who did not go out of her way to portray me as a mean-spirited bigot, as The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times did — the mere fact that I wrote a column against multiculturalism explains why members of the orchestra were “up in arms.”

As for “targeting” Muslims, she cited my column titled “Yes, Muslims Should Be Asked to Condemn Islamic Terror.” In NPR’s moral universe, asking Muslims to condemn Islamic terror is equivalent to “targeting” Muslims. When the left demands that our white president condemn white-supremacist violence, is it targeting whites?

And the example the she supplied for my “targeting” LGBTQ people is my 2014 critique of judges who, I argued, overreached their authority when they overturned popular votes to keep marriage defined as the union of a man and a woman. The whole article was a critique of judges, not LGBTQ people. But on the left, merely disagreeing with judges about an LGBTQ issue is “targeting” LGBTQ people.

In summary, all mainstream media coverage of this one story was tainted, biased, often false and predicated solely on left-wing presumptions. Magnify what they did to me a thousand fold and you will begin to understand media behavior over the last two generations, and especially behavior today, when hysteria and advocacy have completely replaced news reporting.

The media pay little or no price among those who still believe them.

But I will pay a price. The New York Times lied when it wrote that I “suggested that same-sex marriage would lead to polygamy and incest.” Yet that will be cited forever as if it were true.

It’s already begun. On the night of the concert, the Fox TV station in Los Angeles reported: “A left wing attempt to boycott a performance of the Santa Monica Symphony due to a guest appearance by conservative radio host Dennis Prager backfired on Wednesday night; the event was a sellout. … Prager has made controversial comments in the past, saying that he believes gay marriage would lead to incest.”

By: Dennis Prager

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