WHEN WILL WE GET MEDIA WE DESERVE?

My point is not to promote Trump; it is the colossal failure of the press, and the widespread extent of this phenomenon. The British national press generally supported remaining in the European Union. They failed and the opposition Labour Party has revealed itself, in its leader Jeremy Corbyn’s support of the Russians in the matter of the poisoned former agent and his daughter and in his opposition to the British collaboration with the United States and France in recently attacking Assad’s chlorine gas facility. The British media have taken commendable issue with Corbyn, but they have misjudged British opinion on Europe, scandalously misrepresented Trump as a violent and bigoted moron (exceeding even our local shrieking media parrots in that regard), and their credibility has plummeted.

The public in the West has been backing away from globalist ideas that in practice enable unfriendly and less developed countries to pick our pockets, and in the name of progress to world brotherhood and government, wish to empower unaccountable forces as long as they march under a politically correct banner. The problem with the European Union is that those who run it, though nominated by their governments, are compromise choices from the little countries of little natural authority who are not answerable either to the dysfunctional European parliament or to the principal sovereign constituent states. The French and Italians and Spanish, who don’t normally expect much from governments and don’t necessarily pay much attention to their edicts, are not much affected. The Germans, who are accustomed to authority, don’t mind, especially as they are the most powerful country in Europe. The British like to be lawabiding, but do not like and would not ultimately accept an endless deluge of authoritarian micro-regulations from an anonymous claque of Belgian and Dutch Euro-commissioners. The media largely missed the whole issue and scoffed at Brexit and similar sentiments throughout Europe.

The same problem has arisen in the central European elections. The international media have panned the Polish, Austrian, Czech and Hungarian governments as authoritarian and retrograde. The Hungarian elections two weeks ago, which incumbent Viktor Orban was expected to try to steal by fraud at the polls and intimidation and by muzzling the media, were won by him easily, with ample voice for his opponents. Orban has been the most articulate and courageous European leader in making the point that a wave of migrants that swept into Europe after the IraqiSyrian disintegrations wasn’t orderly immigration of the kind celebrated by the Statue of Liberty — it was an oceanic movement of desperate people. Arriving literally by the millions, the migrants — many of whom were genuinely fleeing carnage, of course — overwhelmed the resources and goodwill of many of the European states, a situation that was not helped by outrageous crimes committed by some of the new arrivals. Orban objected to the omniscienti in Brussels purporting to control Hungary’s borders and to redistribute refugees throughout the EU’s 27 countries. He ran a clean election with a completely free media and won a landslide. The media in the West bought the line that he was a corrupt neo-fascist. He isn’t and never was.

Our problem is not so much our leaders in the West, who at least have the rod on their backs of free electorates; it is our purblind and now severely compromised media. Influence on public opinion is now profoundly fragmented across the internet; the traditional media have no real influence and don’t deserve any. But the typecasting and stigmatizing by leftish journalists continues, like the singing of doomed people on sinking ships. Locally, Doug Ford, who will be premier of Ontario in less than two months unless the province has really been forsaken by God and man, is being demonized as a local Trump. (He performed a public service in not allowing the octogenarian “moonbeam” governor of California, Jerry Brown, to address the provincial legislature last week on the bunk about global warming, as we shivered without electricity in an April winter storm). We could do worse than Doug Ford, and recently have.

But we will get the politicians we deserve. When will we get media we deserve? This is a burning question for the whole West. Until it is answered, a free press is undervalued and accordingly vulnerable. The recently exposed abuses of Facebook and other tech giants and the U.S. president’s successful use of Twitter are symptoms of the problem.