A few thoughts on immorality

When I get up in the morning I never have to worry about having nothing to post about. To the contrary, between the New Jersey and local news, American politics, the Latin Americans, the French and Europeans, the hundreds of books and CDs in the house, and the movies playing in theaters and at TCM - and, of course, shoes - my habitual morning dilemma is not not having something to post about but rather having too much to post about.

And then sometimes the subject for a post just falls on my lap.

Yesterday Siggy commented, Immorality is a powerful drug.
His comment referred to the MSM's coddling of Chavez, Castro, Arafat, Che, et al

To now anticipate any kind of appropriate response from the MSM is an absurd thought.

The press has tried mightily for decades to turn night into day. Despites decades of failure, they will forge ahead.

Immorality is a powerful drug.

Siggy is a very dear friend whose blog I visit daily and on whose support I rely on for my podcasts. I owe him much.

As it is customary for him, he's come up with a most insightful comment.

Because in all decisions, big and small, the question is, what is the right thing to do: Not the convenient thing. Not the fashionable thing. Not the thing that will get you the most attention or the most readership or the most celebrity and acclaim from the cool kids, whoever they may be.

Doing the right thing boils down to morality, to doing the moral thing. Doing the right thing implies that the person has a moral compass that will lead them to moral actions.

By consistently avoiding doing the right thing, a person ends up sinking into immorality. An immoral person's moral compass is broken. This breakdown means that, like the picture of Dorian Gray, a gradual process corrodes the soul and blinds the spirit.

Journalists tossed away what moral compass, broken as it was, they had to begin with.

For over a century the press has willfully ignored morality and has consistently brought out stories with ever-greater depravity and evil. Mind you, not stories of depravity and evil, not because they were writing about evil things, but because by avoiding the reality of evil they have facilitated the evil doings of others.

By doing so, they have descended into immorality.

While Walter Duranty wasn't the first, and is certainly not the last, he is the classic example of the immoral journalist. He attained seldom-reached heights of immorality:

What we do know is that, in March 1933, while telling his readers that there had indeed been "serious food shortages" in the Ukraine, he was quick to reassure them that "there [was] no actual starvation." There had been no "deaths from starvation," he soothed, merely "widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." So that was all right then.

But, unlike Khrushchev, Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less, was keeping count - in the autumn of 1933 he is recorded as having told the British Embassy that ten million had died.

Lest you think that statement is exaggerated, check the footnote in the article, and also read The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression a book I highly recommend, but suggest that you don't read it before going to bed at night. The writers estimate that communists killed between 85 million and 100 million people in the 20th century. I specifically say that communists killed, not that Communism killed, because the ideology needed the executioners.

Duranty in the 1930s was the precursor of hundreds of present-day collaborators who under the guise of journalism continue to promote and publicize dictators, big and small, everywhere in the world. As regular readers to my blog know, Matt Lauer, Barbara Walters, Charles Enderlin, and dozens other journalists go and report without mentioning dissidents, concentration camps, censorship, Hezbollah's Israeli casualties, and whatever else doesn't fit their glowing image of the dictator du jour. By doing so, they show they are not good men, they show how immoral they are. As John Milton once wrote,

None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license.

They don't love freedom. If they did, they would be on the streets of Caracas talking to the people protesting the closing of TV stations as their colleague Adam Housely does. They would be asking about the hundreds of Cuban dissidents in concentration camps. They would name the hundreds of people that Che executed. They would be showing the real story about Hezbollah. They would shed some light on the manifestations of 21st century communism.

Instead, they propagandize for all the above so they can self-congratulate each other, and earn the acclaim of the Left and the license (in every sense) of the regimes they continue to support.

They do it in part because, as Bob Godwin was saying the other day.

the more unpleasant reality impinges, the more denial is necessary.

Bob's commenter Cryptic Life pointed out,

The media is often guided by principles which de-emphasize the truth in service of sales or politics, often to the point where it becomes quite difficult to make valid comparisons

I'll leave to Siggy, Bob, and the Sanity Squad to examine the causes for this denial, but as I see it, it is due to a blindness to the humanity in others.

A blindness that leads to immorality.

And, as Siggy said, Immorality is a powerful drug.



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