From the first Jim-written Morning Jolt in a week:

Keep your head on a swivel this week. It’s the anniversary week of the Boston Marathon bombing (April 15), the Virginia Tech shooting (April 16), the Oklahoma City bombing (April 19), which was itself selected to occur on the anniversary of the Waco siege, and the Columbine shootings (April 20).

America’s West and America’s Rest

One of the most intriguing comments I read over the Easter break came from sportswriter Jason Whitlock:

Yes, sportswriting has moved far left. The entire media has moved far left. The media used to cater to New York, the hub for traditional liberal values. Journalists used to be obsessed with working at a New York magazine or newspaper or TV network. Now the entire industry is obsessed with going viral and how words will be received via social media. Who determines this? San Francisco/Silicon Valley, the hub for revolutionary, far-left extremism, the home base for Twitter and Facebook. Twitter and Facebook’s employee base is from the area. New York and San Francisco are distinctly different. San Francisco is driving the American media, not New York. You have young, microwaved millionaires and billionaires reshaping the American media in a way that reflects San Francisco values. This is a major story the mainstream media ignore. San Francisco hacked the media. Frisco-inspired clickbait is the real fake news.

There’s a lot of truth to that, and Whitlock puts his finger on why today’s conservative complaint about a liberal media is different from that of ten years ago or twenty years ago. The old New York establishment Left, shaped heavily by Watergate — Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Anthony Lewis, Woodward & Bernstein – could drive the right batty but it was largely driven by a sense of noblesse oblige – a self-awareness of the power of their positions and a duty to correct the world’s injustices through exposure. The old journalism saying, “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” implied punching up; the more powerful you were, the more you needed scrutiny. For Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, My Lai, all that the press needed to do was expose the wrongdoing and the public would instinctively recoil and dole out appropriate consequences.

Today’s social-media outrage-mob-driven click-bait journalism is much more about punching down, finding someone who has deviated from the range of acceptable thought and ostracizing them and enforcing the tenets of a shame culture. It’s less about exposing the sins of the powerful than exposing the sins of the near-powerless, whether it’s those gorillas-in-the-mist reports from Red State America or gleeful exposes about the hypocrisies of religious conservatives. (The hypocrisy of a self-proclaimed environmentalist who enjoys a private jet with a massive carbon footprint never quite stirs the hearts of the media as much as a preacher’s affair.) Reading some media sources, you would conclude the biggest threat to America isn’t found in terrorists, hostile threats, runaway government power or violent mobs at Berkeley or Waterbury, but in the menace of haircuts at CPAC or an Indiana pizzeria unsure if it would cater a gay wedding, an obscure Tucson school board member, an Idaho pastor claiming evangelical Christians are bullied by the culture at large, or Washington Redskins fans who wanted to keep their team’s name. No wonder their dominant attitude towards immigration, legal and illegal, is so welcoming, if they feel such contempt for the Americans who are already here.