Our Brazenly Seditious Media

by David P. Gontar

It is hardly an exaggeration to observe that the exclusive focus of the American media these days is the new President and his alleged foibles. Substantive matters like law, national policy, war, trade, immigration and economic development are taken up, if at all, only to the extent that they can be bundled as brickbats to hurl at the President. In and of themselves these issues are ignored. For example, Mr. Trump recently directed our attention to the spike in the US murder rate, which he characterized as the highest in 47 years. Instead of reflecting on the problem of violence in our homes and on our streets, and considering ways to control such misbehavior, reporters leaped to fuss obsessively over Mr. Trump’s statistics. Evidently what is important to those who fashion public opinion is not the serious challenges we face as a people, but whether in his remarks on public safety our leader may have been arithmetically imprecise, as though a presidential speech were a classroom lecture.

It doesn’t concern CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC, et al., that today Chicago is as much a slaughterhouse of human beings as it is of hogs and cattle. What gets their attention is that the President’s numbers are a tad askew. But in The Economist of 2/7/17 we read that “Over the past two years America has become more murderous. After steadily falling for a quarter-century, the national homicide rate jumped by 11 percent.” The obsession of the media with the new President blinds them to dangerous social realities.  

The daily torrent of quibbles and accusations against Mr. Trump amounts to nothing less than a full scale campaign designed to discredit and undermine the present administration, and it has the effect of encouraging those in high and low places to commit treasonous deeds. In fact, it is fairly admitted by the press that this is what it’s all about, and well does it deserve the title “enemy of the people.” There is unfolding before our very eyes the grossest instance of de facto sedition in modern history. Make no mistake about it: our media are engaged in a vast criminal enterprise directly proscribed by 18 USC 2384, 2385. The whole lot of those so employed should be arrested, tried and delivered to prison. Let us commend these acts and enactments to the Attorney General for his immediate review.