This is pretty funny. Mehdi Hasan is a British broadcaster who moved to the US in 2015 to work for Al-Jazeera. He built a reputation as a fiery liberal commentator who boldly Speaks Truth To Power, became a US citizen, and I admit I was surprised when he got a regular spot on MSNBC. Didn't they already have a fiery liberal commentator who boldly Speaks Truth To Power? I suppose one more won't hurt.
On Labor Day, Hasan posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter:
First off, Churchill probably didn't say this. It's a good thing the leftish media are more accurate than Faux News, isn't it?
But, second, that quotation may accurately reflect Churchill's views.
I don't mean to single out Churchill, of course. Much of the English ruling class liked fascism, and so did much of the American ruling class. From David F. Schmitz's Thank God They're On Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965 (University of North Carolina, 1999) :
American businessmen were no less enthusiastic about Mussolini and his government. Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan remarked after his first meeting with Mussolini that the Italian dictator was “a very upstanding chap.” He wrote later that Italy was “going to be a great country despite its very limited resources.” Otto Kahn, of Kuhn, Loeb, praised the recent change of government in Italy at the 1925 meeting of the International Chamber of Commerce. “Parliamentary wrangling and wasteful impotent bureaucracy” had been replaced by an “efficient and energetic … government,” which had united Italy in “a spirit of order, discipline, hard work, patriotic devotion and faith.” Ralph Easley of the National Civic Federation wrote to Thomas Lamont after visiting Italy, “I think, were we in Italy, we would all be with Mussolini.” And Judge Elbert Gary of United States Steel remarked while in Rome in 1923 that “we have here a wonderful renaissance of youthful energy and activity. A masterhand has, indeed, strongly grasped the hand of the Italian state.” Gary added that he felt “like turning to my American friends and asking them whether we, too, need a man like Mussolini” [40].
In this case, Mehdi Hasan was complaining because most respondents to a Wall Street Journal poll don't believe that the US economy is in good shape, that inflation has continued to rise, and the like. I saw some criticisms of the poll's methodology, but I'm less concerned with that here than with an elite journalist's contempt for his audience and for democracy.
He followed up the first post with this one.
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I've written before about corporate media hubris, its practitioners' fantasy that their job is to instruct the public in what they consider the correct direction, and their outrage when the rabble doesn't go along with them. Why does Hasan think that "the media," bad as they are, are responsible for this state of affairs, or that they could fix it? The corporate media have been pushing corporate propaganda for many years, yet voters reject that propaganda on issues like taxes, health,care, education, "wokeness," etc. The most liberal media outlets were sure there'd be a Red Wave last November, and they were very disappointed when it didn't happen. They also were sure the US economy would go into recession, and there too their hopes have been frustrated. Does Hasan despise the voters who voted down anti-abortion initiatives, or those in Ohio who rejected a GOP attempt to make it harder to amend the State Constitution? The same media boosted Donald Trump but he lost the popular vote both times. (It was the anti-democratic Electoral College, meant to keep elections in the hands of elites, that gave him the presidency in 2016.) The fascinating thing about this multibillion-dollar industry is that it is largely irrelevant. How can the news media instruct the public in the first place when so much of their information is skewed at best, wrong at worst?
The best argument against elitism is a five-minute conversation with an elitist.
P.S. One major reason I've been inactive the past couple of months is that my eight-year-old laptop had slowed down to the point where it was almost unusable: it would freeze for several minutes, and I didn't have the patience to try to write anything more than brief social media posts. I found a good replacement online, and after a few days transferring files to it from the old one I'm slowly getting used to having a working computer again. I hope to get back to work here, I have a lot to say.
