Capitol Ideas / The Morality Charade

...A Washington Post series on the very extensive government funding of leftist organizations in recent years, complete with outraged quotations from Howard Phillips...

...But they don't...

...The government side or the insurgent side...

...I also wish the Washington Post hadn't cut this paragraph from its version of Anderson's column...

...Carter showed that he was eager to please the Powers That Be the minute he arrived, rolling over like a puppy and declaring that he liked classical music, read Reinhold Niebuhr, and all in all was a good liberal with a kiss on the cheek for Brezhnev...

...This the NYT/CBS poll did by asking people for specific information: whose side are we on in Nicaragua and El Salvador...

...He had gone to his ranch for the July 4 holiday, as I recall...

...But just because the press is approximately nonpartisan in its antagonism to the White House, it does not follow that it is aimless, or that it impartially presents us every day with a random mass of data...

...In this light, then, let us look briefly at the mountainous molehill of Jimmy Carter's debate papers, which somehow leaked to Reagan's staff...

...This came out in a most unusual poll which actually violated the First Unwritten Rule of Polling: never disclose the ignorance of the people whose "opinion" you are manufacturing in the guise of "sampling...

...And who, in mid-July, was caught in the beam, unexpectedly skipping in dishabille across the stage...

...Elections may be fun to write about, but their drawback is that they so unpredictably introduce outsiders into the machinery of government--and at very high levels...

...Try to imagine, if you doubt me, a "CBS Evening News" segment pointing out that welfare workers lobby to expand the programs they administrate...

...When you consider such incongruities you begin to realize that the press is in league with some institutions-in opposition to others...

...The columnist Mary McGrory, who rises to the most tremendous heights of moral outrage whenever she scents an opportunity to advance her perennial cause, socialism, could only say of the pair's ignominious censure: "Humbling they may need, but humiliation is not popular...

...Notice how well these selective displays of outrage comport with the "media elite attitudes on social issues" shown in the 1981 Lichter/ Rothman poll: 97 percent agreed with the statement that "government should not regulate sex...

...Nevertheless, Weisman still had the effrontery to say "the public" was rejecting our "military policies," hence the Commission...

...Such treachery now routinely comes under cover of principle: a high-minded insistence that American institutions must be judged only by the highest standards...

...It would be beyond the scope of this article to describe the pattern itself, but as Joe Sobran has pointed out an entity behaving purposefully in ways not consciously recognized by the individuals that constitute it is best described by analogy with collective "organisms" found in nature...

...Public...

...And, by the way, if by some misfortune Teddy Kennedy were President, he too would soon come under intense media fire: the press corps would want the world (and Teddy) to know who was boss...

...they need and who in fact constitute a communication system between the various parts of the Coalition...

...But at a deeper level there is in Washington a profound resentment of the fact that we do have to hold these damnable elections every few years...

...Elections, then, considerably complicate the task of ruling...

...Broadly speaking the press is purposeful, and this purpose can be deduced from the underlying philosophy (ideology) which determines What is to be regarded as news and what is not...

...There is a pattern of attack, even though the journalists themselves may not be aware of the pattern they create...

...Someone switched off the searchlight at that . point...

...None other than James Baker, the White House press corps' all-time favorite chief of staff, click...

...Debategate" is only the latest such morality charade, bringing on stage such hypocritical if minor players as the Los Angeles Times's Jack Nelson, backstage adviser to the Carter Camp in the late 1970s, calling George Will "outrageous" for playing backstage adviser to the Reagan Camp in the early 1980s...

...Judiciary and retinue, and their media allies who give them all the free p.r...

...Kristol himself some years ago called this same entity, or something very much like it, the New Class...

...One would have no cause fpr complaint about the stringency of such guidelines if they were applied uniformly...

...It regards its job as the destruction of all authorities and all institutions, and to the degree that it can destroy an institution, it thinks it is doing good...

...If journalists showed themselves to be completely indiscriminate in their attacks on American institutions, I would agree with this...

...The presidency does not...

...By "Washington" I mean a loose association of civil servants, senior legislators, elder statesmen, public interest lawyers, congressional aides...

...For the most part, the Galahad Gang instinctively wished to propel him back to the sticks whence he had so implausibly emerged, just as they instinctively would like to be rid of Reagan today...

...Policy from Public Rejection...

...But it didn't do him any good...

...They are applied selectively...

...Jimmy Breslin is another who rather incongruously looked down a moral lorgnette at Will...

...In this enterprise media and bureaucracy are allies, regarding each other as old friends with permanent-resident status, united in their distaste for all hacks and political neophytes, whether they be from "the sticks," like Carter, or from the social stratum labeled "nouveau riche," like Ron and Nancy...

...It would be more accurate to say that the media collectively operate a searchlight, and where one spotlight falls, others will slavishly follow...

...The Moderate Coalition's response has been to make life as difficult as possible for the White House incumbent, whomever he may be...

...The modus operandi of the media is every bit as interesting as their motive...

...Meanwhile fully 49 percent of the media-elite agreed with the Marxist proposition that "the structure of society causes alienation...

...This explains the Moderate Coalition's constant resort to verbal camouflage, and its infatuation with polling-the up-to-date method of persuading the public that policy is merely a response to the popular will...

...Moreover, media behavior follows an unmistakable pattern-a pattern, which cannot be denied simply because most journalists are not aware that they contribute to it...

...Three weeks earlier the New York Times itself had convincingly shown that the public has not the slightest idea what is going on in Central America...

...The columnist Jack Anderson answered this question in a lucid paragraph that deserves to be carved in stone: "The uncovering of a political scandal requires a great cooperative act of perception...

...Everything depends on whether the institution in question enjoys Media approval...

...Such politically astute ideologues will logically tend to support John Glenn in 1984...

...Of course I agree...

...The media's great conceit is that their activities are comparable to a floodlight, bathing the political arena in an all-encompassing, salubrious glow, leaving no dark corners in which lawbreakers can toil undetected...

...New Team on Central America Was Needed to Save U.S...

...But they are not...

...Another point to notice about the Moderate Coalition is that it is a small minority, perennially touting such unpopular policies as tax increases and bank bailouts...

...I mean, what a shameless lie...

...The headline read: "Panel to the Rescue...

...One way to understand this is to bear in mind that the Bipartisan Consensus, or the Moderate Coalition (as Joe Kraft calls the Ruling Class), can't abide elections...

...I wonder how long it will take for our media hypocrites to realize that they have been overdoing their displays of selective indignation of late, and soon may completely exhaust their already depleted fund of good will...

...In a recent meeting of the Committee for the Free World, Irving Kristol said that contemporary journalism "reflects a state of mind that is egalitarian and antinomian...

...How did the story evolve from the point where Laurence Barrett could not get his own scoop into Time (1981), to the point where Leslie Stahl could lead CBS News with the non-item that President Reagan was "perceived as being increasingly isolated...

...Oh, I know media folk love to write about horse races, because they are easy to grasp...

...The democratic election of policymakers poses an obvious threat to such policies...

...Perhaps it wasn't a story after all...

...CAPITOL IDEAS THE MORALITY CHARADE The disproportionate attentiont given to the Reagan Administration's acquisition of Jimmy Carter's 1980 debate papers has shown us once again American institutions under attack, with Sir Galahad of Media wielding a pen more righteous than the sword, and wielding it (as future historians will note with puzzlement) against his own side...

...Twenty-five percent knew our position on El Salvador, 13 percent on Nicaragua, while only 8 percent got both alignments right...

...The contrast between the hot condemnation of Will (a kind of transposed envy on the part of some of his critics, I suspect) and the cool political appraisal of Representatives Studds and Crane, publicly chastised for consorting sexually with teenage pages in their charge, could not have been more striking...

...The other day I came across a beautiful example of this...

...By 1980 Anthony Lewis of the New York Times and one or two other alert leftists demurred, knowing that they had in Carter an ideally pliant incumbent...

...Steven Weisman wrote in the New York Timesthat the new "bipartisan commission" on Central America that Reagan had so lamely appointed (rolling over, just-like Jimmy) "was needed to rescue his military policies in the region from rejection by the Congress and the public...

...Translation: "Let's not get carried away or do anything to roll back the sexual revolution...

...Elsewhere, I gather, Fred Barnes says that the press would have seized the same opportunity, whoever was President...

...If the press at large ignores the fledgling expose, if the editors fail to grasp its importance, if reporters do not widen the beachhead, if press conferences do not confront public officials over it, if columnists do not elaborate its ramifications, then it will not survive to reach those levels where public advocates take it up, where investigative agencies begin to grind, where mass opinion demands redress...

...Moreover these newcomers usually have "simplistic" ideas about reducing government, even though they lack real experience in governing...

...I only wish Anderson had added that the same "cooperative act" can, for a time at least, turn a non-scandal into an illusory one...

...That's why they were so vexed with George Will-rushing off so shamelessly to the old, demoted Court...

...Or visualize a three-part series in the New York Times examining the accommodationist culture of the State Department, Are you ready for this one...

...Senior media figures in Washington now undoubtedly think of themselves as constituting a Court, rather a dour Court perhaps, not a glittery one like Jack Kennedy's, but still a Moral Court, and, if the truth be told, a Classy Court...