The Left's Indoctrination Conundrum
-- David Swink, FCTA board member / 2025-03-27
The Press:
Pity the poor Washington Post. After years of infecting its news
and opinion articles with a left-wing bias, it seems to have reached a
crossroads with its diminishing reader base. The election of Donald Trump
herolds a drastic change in direction for the country, and the mainstream
media (MSM) are suddenly caught in a bind of their own making.
The American public generally seems to finally had enough of left-wing governance at the national level, and the legacy media have to make a choice: Do they continue with their leftist slant, or do they impart a more conservative tone to their news and opinion articles.
When Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, wrote an Op-Ed expressing a desire for a more conservative direction, it caused a commotion in the WaPo newsroom, and hundreds of readers dropped their subscriptions. The Post's readers had been indoctrinated for so long with false reporting and leftist opinion, they "couldn't handle the truth" (to borrow a famous movie line).
So the Post has to decide: (1) Stay with their leftist narratives to appease their current reader base and continue to lose national credibility; or (2) Take a more conservative tack, and service short-term reader ire for long-term crediblity and eventual readership gain. The same conundrum is faced by other left-wing newspaper outlets.
Cable News:
Cable news channels MSNBC and CNN face a similar problem. Fox New viewers
consistently outnumber the total viewership of those two channels combined.
Fox News and NewsMax will increase their gains. Ultra-woke MSNBC will
likely do quite well by staying with their nut-bar narrative, consumed by
their dedicated nut-bar viewer base.
But poor CNN is caught in the middle. Should it try to compete with Fox News by leaning more conservative, or remain in its semi-nut-bar position to compete with MSNBC?
The Democrat Party:
Democrats are also stuck in the same indoctrination conundrum. President
Obama successfully weaponized the government, converting the unelected
bureaucracy from a mere "administrative state" to a full-fledged "deep
state", combining Big Government and Big Tech to form what amounted to
Obama-style Fascism.
Now, after 16 years of this, Americans have rejected the Obama doctrine, and flipped 180 degrees to cheer for President Trump and his efforts to streamline the federal government and put the country on a sound fiscal course. In pre-Obama years, the Democrat Party would simply move farther toward the right, remain competitive with Republicans, and work to regain power in the next election.
But the post-Obama Party seems to have lost the ability to adjust in the ratioal manner of yore. It suffers from a dearth of national leadership, and like the Post, must make a similar decision: Will it remain hard-left and in the good graces of George Soros and other dark-money magadoners and a diminishing voter base; or will it eventually "bite the bullet" and do what needs to be done to regain national credibility?
Education, the Source of the Problem:
For several decades now, American secondary schools have been neglecting
to teach the basic 3R's and critcal thinking skills. Instead of teaching
students how to think, they have been pushing what to think.
The results have been devastating. Many high school graduates require
remedial instruction when entering college. And American colleges and
universities -- one the most respected in the world -- have gradually
devolved to the point that a degree from Columbia or Harvard is highly
suspect by prospective private employers.
The Result:
Lacking the critical thinking skills enjoyed by the masses in previous
generations, Americam voters en masse have been less able than their
forefathers to discern reality from leftist narrative. It finally all came
to a head last November.
Big Media, the Democrat Party, and the Education Blob have work to do. They've dug themselves into a massive hole. Will they get out now or continue digging?