THE SELF-IMPOSED CENSORSHIP OF THE LEFT

POWERLINE'S John Hinderaker wrote a typically BRILLIANT post which exposes the MSM's left-wing bias. He posted an excerpt from an email he received from the managing editor of the CJR, in which the editor called THE NYPOST a "truly right-wing" paper which was nothing more than "a [right-wing] rich man's toy." Hinderaker comments:

... the Times and the Post are "truly far-right newspapers"? Only if your perspective is somewhere on the most leftward 5% of the political spectrum. Do you suppose that Lovelady would describe such liberal papers as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times as "truly far-left"? No, neither do I. And where does Lovelady get off calling those papers "rich men's toys"? Who does he think controls the New York Times? Has the Sulzburger family become poor? Has "Pinch" not treated his paper like a toy, encouraging its forays into left-wing arcana even as profits declined and veteran employees were laid off? And has the Graham family stopped running the Washington Post Company? These papers would be "toys," too, but for one fact: they're liberal. It's an interesting window into the mind of an influential liberal journalist.

I often experience the same exact thing: My parents (God Bless my Father's memory and God Bless my Mother) were leftists, and her leftist friends think the NYTIMES is RIGHT-WING (or at best "centrist")! AND TO THEM ... IT IS! I tell them that this ONLY proves that they are so far left that even when they are looking right... they're still looking left!

I believe that the key to getting leftists change is to get them to open their eyes and get them off their left-wing media addiction (which leads them to EXCLUDE reading or watching anything that is right-of-center; in other words: their self-censorship - THEIR INNER EXILE). I believe that once reasonable people start to look at events from both sides, they will begin to "see the light."

The leftists in the USA and Europe - (and in the academy and in the MSM) - live in a self-imposed totalitarian regime of their own minds; whereas tyrannies like the USSR actively censored all media and prevented their trapped citizenry from reading any real news, and from reading any real history (of Communism or anything else), or from reading Hayek - or anything that opposed their rigid ideology, contemporary post-modern leftists voluntarily censor themselves and restrict their reading and viewing of news and commentary to the left-of-center media (which is still MOST of the media, so they don't FEEL like their censoring themselves).

This self-imposed censorship is so bad, that some leftist NYTIMES readers I know WON'T EVEN READ BROOKS OR TIERNEY!

Sheesh.

My current refrain to them is this: "How can you claim to have a better informed opinion of events than I do if you don't read news and commentary from both sides of the poltical spectrum as I do!?" This seems to stop them in their tracks, and makes a little crack in their wall of denial. One that needs to be continually hammered if these otherwise bright people are ever to become freed from their attachment to an utterly discredited ideology.

ALAS: it is a form of deprogramming, and is as difficult a road as any which tires to disengage a person from the armature which they belive holds them together and is the skelton of their personal identity, so-to-speak.

But I - and my brothers - (and Hinderaker and Davod Horowitz, and Norman Podhoretz and so SO many other former leftists who have moved right) are proof that it is possible.

And that it's liberating.