Oh, How Wonderful The Media

JMSmith on the media:

The Longest, Strongest Hurricane of Lies

“It is a rather serious thing that an ordinary intelligent human being should have to rely on everything else except the public press for his information about public affairs.”

G.K. Chesterton, “A Parenthesis on Minorities” (1926)*

We must at the best of times make do with a diet of very dubious information, what with the fatuous wheedling and whining of our neighbors and relations, the insouciant dishonesty of hired mouthpieces of rapacious commercial interests, the slick mendacity of politicians who propose, with well justified confidence, to remain in office by bamboozling their voters. And to this unwholesome stew we must add the spurious meat that is manufactured for a price by the Ministry of Truth that we call our media. It appears to be the creed of this perfidious rabble that he who blows,

“The longest, strongest hurricane of lies,
May have the highest seat in Paradise.”**

And this, as I said, is the character of the chefs who furnish our food for thought in the best of times. These rascals really get down to business in times of war. This is because they are, for the most part. meretricious salesmen who work on commission. As the great historian Harry Elmer Barnes long ago explained, to no effect whatever:

“If we can but understand how totally and terribly we were ‘taken in’ between 1914 and 1918 by the salesmen of this most holy and idealistic world conflict, we shall be the better prepared to be on our guard against the seductive lies and deceptions which will be put forward by similar groups when urging the necessity of another world catastrophe in order to ‘protect the weak nations,’ ‘crush militarism,’ ‘make the world safe for democracy,’ ‘put an end to all further wars,’ etc.”***

But very few ever understood how totally and terribly they were taken in and many of these inquiring minds soon forgot it. So, when it became desirable to market the next “most holy and idealistic world conflict,” the salesmen were not taxed with fabrication of new “seductive lies and deceptions.” They just once again stirred up the yokels with the old story that a damsel (a “weak nation”) was being distressed by a dragon (“militarism”), and that, upon the death of this one last dragon, the damsel and all yokels would live happily ever after.

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