 |
| Click above for the video |
You might have seen this amazing exchange between CBS Late Night host Stephen Colbert and CNN’s Kaitlyn Collins on Monday night.
Colbert: I know you guys are objective over there, that you just report the news as it is.
[loud audience laughter]
Collins: Was that supposed to be a laugh line?
Colbert: It wasn't supposed to be but I guess it is.
What was so amazing about it wasn’t that everybody laughed. After all, just 32% of the public trusts the media to be objective. What was amazing was that Colbert really appears to believe that CNN is objective.
On the one hand, we shouldn’t be surprised by this. Both Colbert and CNN are anti-Trump and liberal. It’s natural that Colbert would agree with CNN’s point of view.
But does Colbert really believe that the public views CNN as “objective”? After all, just 7 percent of the public told Gallup last year that they have a “great deal of trust in the media,” while 38% say they have no trust at all.
You might not think this matters. Colbert is a late-night host, not a reporter. And everybody already knows that media elites, who constitute the most influential part of the ruling class of every Western society, live in a bubble. But Colbert is far more influential than most reporters, and the reporter that he was interviewing, CNN’s Kaitlyn Collins, was just as surprised as he was.
And while everyone may know that the elites live in a bubble, it’s not just surprising for them discover this fact on national television, it also is genuinely surprising that elites are so out of touch. That’s because in order to remain the ruling class you need an accurate understanding of the public. When elites like Colbert are so out of touch with the public, their legitimacy and ability to rule the country are at risk.
So why are the media undermining their own credibility by demonstrating how biased and out of touch they are? The media spent years insisting that Joe Biden was just fine and then, literally overnight, decided he wasn’t. For the last three weeks, the media have not only been producing overt propaganda for Kamala Harris, they have been defending her decision not to hold a press conference or sit down for a serious interview.
And in reaction to Elon Musk talking with Donald Trump on Monday night, reporters joined the European Union in demanding that their conversation be censored. “Misinformation on Twitter is not just a campaign issue; it's an America issue,” the Washington Post’s Cleve Wootson asked the White House press secretary. “What role does the White House or the president have in stopping that? Or stopping the spread of that? Or intervening in that?”
So why is that? Why are our media elites so out of touch with the public? Why do they believe they are objective when they are producing blatant propaganda for Harris, demanding she not be interviewed, and urging the censorship of their political enemies? Why can’t they see that they are undermining their own credibility and legitimacy, as well as the foundation of Western civilization, which is a commitment to discovering the truth?
Over the last several years, we have been exploring the propensity of the elites to undermine civilization’s pillars, including free speech and law and order. But the blindness of media elites to their own propaganda shows that their disregard for the truth is self-defeating. The Internet and social media in general and X in particular allow the public to expose media falsehoods. So why do media elites keep behaving in this irrational way?
A French geographer named Christopher Guilluy (/gil-we/) argued in a recent interview that “purely political explanations are no longer sufficient” to explain the increasingly destructive and self-destructive behaviour of the ruling classes. We have to look at the psychology of the elites. In this sense, Guilluy’s work is not easily classifiable as either Left-wing or Right-wing.
“We must take into account what Christopher Lash saw a long time ago, the culture of narcissism,” explains Guilluy. “This culture has permeated the ruling classes and the Parisian bourgeoisie or the Barcelona or London bourgeoisie, it doesn’t matter. The driving force behind the destruction of society is not just the existence of Bill Gates and a few super millionaires, but this 20-25% of the population that has turned its back on the reality of society.”
Elite selfishness and snobbery make them want to distance themselves from the rest of society, says Guilluy. “The deep motivation of these [elite] individuals is their ego… this elite believes that the individual is king. That the sovereignty of the people doesn’t exist because the only objective is the ‘I’.” The way elites live, travel, and experience culture are more segregated and apart from the masses than ever before.
The problem is the structure of the economy has changed. “The working classes no longer live where the wealth and employment are created.” In the industrial economy, the bourgeoisie had to care about the working class because they needed the working class to make its products. With the shrinking of the working class and the globalization of production, the “ruling classes… no longer care about the working classes. It’s no longer a class conflict because they don’t acknowledge this conflict; it’s indifference.”
Urban elites thus embrace migration, which brings cheap labor and allows them to live anywhere. “There is no one, in any country in the world, who wants to become a minority where they were born,” says Guilluy, “except the elites who can [move] at any time, leave where they live, enroll their children in suitable schools, etc. They are free to move, but the working classes are fundamentally sedentary.”
Guilluy notes that 70% of the public in France is concerned with too much migration, while 30% benefit from it in the form of cheap labor. While most of the working class is outside of the major cities, the elites have come to believe that their migrant servant class constitutes a majority. “The perception that the ruling class, journalists in the lead, have of the working class is reduced to their immediate field of vision.”
The same elites use environmental policies to increase costs and inconveniences for the working class, while providing themselves with meaning and purpose. “And here we come back to this issue of indifference towards the common good, which is related to existential emptiness, the absence of transcendence; the elites are like dead souls,” says Guilluy, “who think they are alive because they maintain an ecological discourse… ‘I will save the planet’: this phrase is completely megalomaniacal.”
The result of elite selfishness is the destruction of liberal democracy. “I don’t think the collapse of the West is solely related to the emergency of China or India,” he says. “It’s internal to Western society. What attacks the West is not China, not even Islam. The causes are internal: especially what this new bourgeoisie has become… if you have an economic and cultural model that no longer serves the majority of people, then it’s not a democracy, it’s something else. It creates a rift between what I call the interior, which is peripheral France or peripheral Catalonia, and the metropolis. And when you cut off from the interior, you cut off a fundamental source of life that allows a society to constantly regenerate itself.”
So why, in the end, are elites so blind to reality, including to their own motivations and the consequences of their actions? “It’s impossible for these elites to see themselves as they really are because it’s too violent for them,” says Guilluy. “There’s cognitive dissonance. It’s understandable. You can’t, on the one hand, maintain a progressive discourse and, on the other hand, generate so much social violence.”
Media propaganda is getting worse, not better. The media spends no time anymore reflecting on obvious mistakes such as its coverage of Biden. The New York Times got rid of its ombudsman. CNN misrepresented remarks made by Musk and Trump to make it sound like they were dismissing concerns about nuclear war when in fact they did the opposite of that. And journalists from the Washington Post, Financial Times, and newspapers around the world are openly calling for governments to censor X.
Yesterday, the news publication Axios published a story about how the Kamala Harris campaign had run deeply misleading ads through Google search. But the Axios reporter turned around and played down her scoop, noted journalist Glenn Greenwald, “saying it was no big deal and Kamala did nothing wrong.”
The media not only hold the totalitarian idea that their idea of the truth is objective and the only right one, but they also reject truths that they themselves discovered when those truths threaten their biased worldview.
Elite overconfidence creates its own problems. Yesterday, people close to the EU's top censor publicly criticized his decision to send a letter to Elon Musk warning that his conversation with Donald Trump could result in the spread of hate speech and misinformation and even cause riots in Europe. Even the EU felt that a line had been crossed and that the letter could, rightly, have been interpreted as interfering in American elections.
The public is not only waking up to the media’s bias; they think any mention of the media being objective is, literally, a joke.
After the audience laughed at the idea of CNN being objective, Colbert asked questions that weren’t very important or even relevant: “Did you think that Biden was going to step down?” “What’s your favorite part about anchoring?” and “Did you hang out with Kid Rock or Hulk Hogan at all?”
After Collins expressed surprise at how Biden announced he wouldn’t run again, Colbert asked her what she was doing that day.
Collins: I was surprised when he tweeted it out because that is not very Biden-esque. Like normally he would call people to the Oval Office or have a press conference but he was home sick dealing with COVID still, and truly he just tweeted it out and and all of our reporting had been basically for not because —Colbert: — on a Sunday afternoon were you, like, taking it easy
A CNN reporter tells you something was off about how the president decided not to run again, and Colbert wants to know what she was doing that day?
As for the rest of the media, there are some voices starting to raise questions about Harris’ refusal to subject herself to questioning by even sympathetic reporters.
But as the polling shows, most Americans no longer trust the media to tell them what’s true and not true, important and not important. And they even find laughable the idea that CNN is any more objective than Stephen Colbert.
