The Persistence of the Media Meta-Narrative

 By now you’ve seen the headlines about how “a car” drove through a Christmas market in Germany at high speed, killing and injuring numerous people. I had no idea that Skynet’s self-driving car technology had progressed to the Terminator stage already:

'At least 2 dead and 60 hurt as car drives into German Christmas market in a suspected attack.'

The sequel deception is the “reporting” about this “suspected” attack that the driver of the car—yes, it actually had a human driver—was a Saudi “migrant” (Taleb Al Abdulmohsen) who had been granted political asylum to escape rape charges back in Saudi Arabia, and who supposedly had disavowed radical Islam and supports the AfD party that may well win the snap election in February, and by such a margin that the German establishment won’t be able to deny AfD a place in the government.  If you thought the Dem/Media “Trump is Hitler” slogan was overdone here, just watch Germany the next two months.

Only someone in a newsroom (or college faculty lounge) could believe such nonsense.

Meanwhile, up in Canada last week, there appeared a headline reading “Flames Target Place of Worship on Montreal’s West Island.” Flames! Was it yet another Spinal Tap drummer spontaneously combusting? And did the flames “target” just any old “place of worship”? No—as anyone with an IQ above room temperature will guess, it was a synagogue. And the police said it was arson. (The headline and news story have been taken down.)

But the important thing, as always, is to validate the progressive narrative.

Which brings me to the media coverage of last week’s protracted fight over the “continuing resolution”—has there ever been a better euphemism for “business-as-usual in Washington” than “continuing resolution” (CRTM)?—to avoid a “government shutdown”? The media narrative, which too many Vichy/Stockholm Syndrome Republicans in Washington seem to have swallowed, is that the inability of Speaker Mike Johnson to get the CR through the House shows that “Republicans can’t govern,” etc. It became the occasion for the media and their Democrat overlords to inveigh against Trump and especially Elon Musk, whom the left can’t forgive for taking away their monopoly over Twitter. See—the narrative holds—congressional Republicans are terrified of their MAGA grassroots.

But isn’t the real story here just opposite—that the CR saga is a story of Democratic incompetence and fear of their radical progressive grassroots?

As was reported in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere after the CR failed the first time,  the CR had been negotiated by party leaders—that would include Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries—over several months, in which “lawmakers from both parties loaded the bill with dozens of extra provisions.” Speaker Johnson knew that a certain number of Republicans wouldn’t vote for a CR, so he had to make concessions to Democrats to get enough votes for this CR to pass. So Democrats were able to stuff the bill with a lot of their policy wish-list, including immunizing the J6 Committee, funding the State Department’s social media censorship office, and—my favorite—altering official criminal justice language from “offender” to “justice-involved individual.” But House Democrats voted almost unanimously against the first CR, dooming its passage, and guaranteeing that the successors would draw back from their planks in the first CR.

The final “skinny” CR that did pass stripped all of these policy riders, which is a defeat for Democrats and minor victory for the GOP grassroots. Which raises the question: why didn’t Democrats, whose leaders negotiated the contents of the first CR, vote for it? They would have been the big winners. The final bill that passed is a defeat for their wish-list. They likely voted against it for a combination of reasons, including not wanting to help the GOP and Trump achieve a “win,” and fear of the radical progressive grassroots who wouldn’t have liked the result.

The media won’t report it this way. Instead we have the egregious Molly Ball “reporting” at the Wall Street Journal that “Democrats, for their part, watched from the sidelines, alternately rolling their eyes and licking their chops at the spectacle of Musk, the world’s richest man, triggering a shutdown with dire consequences for the very working classes that Republicans boasted had delivered their electoral victory. . . The near-shutdown experience was nonetheless a rude shock and reality check for the GOP—a reminder of the inherent difficulty of governing that can’t be short-circuited by blustery memes or glib campaign slogans.”

There were no “dire consequences” for the working class, or anyone else, if the two-month CR had failed to pass. This kind of reporting is an embarrassment, but typical of what remains of the “mainstream media.”

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/12/the-persistence-of-the-media-meta-narrative.php