The Sovietization of the American Press

The transformation from phony “objectivity” to open one-party orthodoxy hasn’t been an improvement

Matt Taibbi:

“…Soviet newspapers were wrought with such anvil shamelessness that it’s difficult to imagine anyone ever read them without laughing. A good Soviet could write almost any Pravda headline in advance. What else but “A Mighty Demonstration of the Union of the Party and the People” fit the day after Supreme Soviet elections? What news could come from the Spanish civil war but “Success of the Republican Fleet?” Who could earn an obit headline but a “Faithful Son of the Party”?

Reality in Soviet news was 100% binary, with all people either heroes or villains, and the villains all in league with one another (an SR was no better than a fascist or a “Right-Trotskyite Bandit,” a kind of proto-horseshoe theory). Other ideas were not represented, except to be attacked and deconstructed. Also, since anything good was all good, politicians were not described as people at all but paragons of limitless virtue — 95% of most issues of Pravda or Izvestia were just names of party leaders surrounded by lists of applause-words, like “glittering,” “full-hearted,” “wise,” “mighty,” “courageous,” “in complete moral-political union with the people,” etc.

Some of the headlines in the U.S. press lately sound suspiciously like this kind of work:

— Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty

— Champion of the middle class comes to the aid of the poor

— Biden’s historic victory for America

The most Soviet of the recent efforts didn’t have a classically Soviet headline. “Comedians are struggling to parody Biden. Let’s hope this doesn’t last,” read the Washington Post opinion piece by Richard Zoglin, arguing that Biden is the first president in generations who might be “impervious to impressionists.” Zoglin contended Biden is “impregnable” to parody, his voice being too “devoid of obvious quirks,” his manner too “muted and self-effacing” to offer comedians much to work with. He was talking about this person:

Forget that the “impregnable to parody” pol spent the last campaign year jamming fingers in the sternums of voters, challenging them to pushup contests, calling them “lying dog-faced pony soldiers,” and forgetting what state he was in. Biden, on the day Zoglin ran his piece, couldn’t remember the name of his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and referred to the Department of Defense as “that outfit over there”…

…More than 70 years ago, George Orwell explored the intention behind the dystopian determination to deprive the individual of his true self. Emptied of all his former ideals, meanings, and priorities, he would become an empty vessel for totalitarian dogmas: “You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

Intellectual subversives have left American youth with no ideal that cannot be dismantled. And the young are angry—at their parents, who failed to empower them with deeply rooted values; at their semiliterate and confused school teachers, who beg for respect and try to win it by teaching children to respect nothing; at their college professors who, having forsaken their commitment to education, assist political efforts “for a peaceful and just society.” Professors fail to provide knowledge or to teach critical thinking; instead, they urge students to scorn outmoded beliefs and send them off to adult life with a farewell message that life is meaningless. Losers—in a morphological sense of the word, for they are as lost as have been their “dislocated” peers in the past—the young are famished for new principles to fill the yawning hollowness. They are perfect material for political demagogues.

“A sacred place cannot be empty,” affirms a Russian proverb. To the new “progressive” creed the rebels must hold on for dear life: Aside for allowing them to redirect their accumulated anger toward newly defined enemies, it offers a brand-new core identity, an illusion of values, and a sense of belonging. Revolutionary activity is highly addictive, and unlike other narcotics, the perpetual pursuit of visionary ideals provides a never-ending sense of exhilaration, backed by the promise of an impending grand triumph…”