As IF Times

Source: Jailed Instagram model wants to trade secrets for freedom

Hardly a day goes by without some breathless headline about the tribulations of some ‘model’ or ‘rapper’. A detached observer will note that the ‘talent’ which these individuals purport to possess are rather marginal at best and likely delusional at worst. If every youngish woman who has ever posed with duck lips and a bikini are models then the USA must be overgrown with models.  If every black person who has ever managed to rhyme two words in verse is considered a rapper, then also, the US is filled to the brim with music talent.

That the media continues to characterize and glamorize the misadventures of very ordinary people as being somehow interesting is a reflection of the ‘look at me’ culture that has taken hold in the last decade of social  culture.  We can lay the blame partly at the feet of the explosion of media conduits that need to fill their pipelines with sensational stories, but really, the root is the proliferation of social media.  Thanks to certain infamous people with no useful skills other than to point a camera at themselves in various stages of undress, an entire generation of impressionable youth, mainly women, have been emulating that kind of narcissistic exhibitionism.

Young women are seemingly obsessed with posting images of themselves, usually in coy or provocative poses. Some are attempting to emulate the template of the Kardashians by pushing the boundaries of tastefulness in order to gain ‘followers’.  Yes, this is a real thing. As we know, much of this is clearly fake news.  A recent article exposed the resulting sad reality behind the fake world that this kind of delusion can cause.  The majority of people would never be able to emulate the kind of lifestyles portrayed by social media stars…including the social media stars.  In the linked story above, would anyone care if the headline read ‘jailed person wants to trade secrets’?  Probably not, but put the word ‘model’ in there and it captures a prurient audience.  If we want a more truthful headline, it may be, ” reasonably attractive woman wants to get out of jail by telling a story”.

Similarly with the liberal use of the label ‘rapper’. When a story emerges about the most recent criminal activity by someone who happens to be black, they are invariably characterized as rappers.  As if that would make their criminal activity less heinous.  Violence in the Black community is so rampant that reporting on it loses its impact day after day after day.  However, if the headlines somehow include ‘rapper’, it may cause some to actually click on the story.  Sensationalism and hyperbole sells and this truth has never been more evident than in today’s zeitgeist.  These days it seems as if people don’t as much make the headlines as headlines make the people.

Source: The Post (2017) – Rotten Tomatoes

Observing the massive conflagration of liberal properties has been entirely amusing of late.  We refer not to the California fires of course, but to the majority of news outlets that purport to offer straight up reportage.

When I first began to make comments on the subtleties of bias that permeated most of the popular media’s offerings of news, those threads of bias were not always obvious.  As the years have passed and with the widening political divide in America, any pretext of objectivity has yielded to full blown whoppers and knee slappers on the part of many heretofore unimpeachable sources.  Like him or not, the election of Donald Trump has poked through the thin veneer of credibility of such outlets as CNN, NBC and ABC, not to mention the more foamy at the mouth MSNBC and the Washington Post.  He has exposed these outlets for their nakedly partisan skews.

It’s not that all of this now properly labeled “fake news” originates from these outlets.  Sometimes, it’s just a matter of reporting on the crackpot utterances of someone famous.  However, the fact that they give voice to the rants of the more logically challenged people of society, mainly ‘celebrities’, makes them complicit in their dissemination of fake news.  Just the other day, Chelsea Handler (who?) expressed that the massive fires in Southern California were somehow orchestrated by Donald Trump.  Of course, that’s preposterous.  We know that only Kim Jong Un can control the weather.

Recent revelations of galling hypocrisy and malfeasance within their own ranks is the most rapturous bit of schadenfreude that could be offered to the rational public, now hopefully awakened to the dangerous tilt that these outlets have all subscribed.  This tilt was recently best depicted by David Frum who recently opined in an interview that:

“…The mistakes are precisely the reason people should trust the media. Astronomers make mistakes all the time because science is a process of discovery of truth. Astrologers never make mistakes or at least they never own up to them because what they are offering is a closed system of ideology and propaganda…”

It hardly gets more Orwellian than that.  By the way, replace the word Astrology with Global Alarmists next time someone brings up that bit of fantasy.

It is therefore all the more galling that an upcoming film depicting the noble activities of the Washington Post will soon be offering their version of moral courage to the unwitting public. More amusingly, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, those two pillars of liberal  sanctimony are cast as the sympathetic protagonists.  That would be like a film on how Pravda provides the truth and exposes corruption to the Russian people.  It’s assured that the film will be reasonably successful, if only because of the fan base of the title stars. It will however, compete with that other blockbuster film, also in the fantasy space, only slightly less believable,  the next installment of Star Wars.