The Media and the Court of Public Opinion

What do Trayvon Martin, the fitness of airline flight deck and cabin crews, and Climate Change have in common? The Mainstream Media.

In each of these cases the MsM has been at the forefront of convincing the populace that the view of the world that it chooses to espouse is the only one out there.

In the Trayvon Martin case, the media has been leading the charge to arrest the shooter, George Zimmerman and possibly have him charged with a hate crime along with, at the very least, manslaughter. It has gone out of its way to paint Zimmerman as a gun happy, self-appointed, racial profiling, neighborhood watch Nazi. It has tried to take what little circumstantial evidence that has become available in the public domain and turn it into a noose to put around Zimmerman’s neck. The Sanford Police Department and State Attorney’s Office, much to their credit, have been loathe to take the bait and have promised to see this case through to its logical and legal conclusion.

The recent Jet Blue incident where the Captain had a yet to be determined episode which caused a Vegas-bound aircraft to divert to Amarillo Texas, is just the latest in a string of events where airline crewmembers have presumably gone off the deep end in the past year. The media has turned it into a flight safety issue and conflated it with pending legislation on flighttime and duty limitations and minimum pilot qualifications. What does this mean? Possible psychological evaluations for crewmembers, where if you have anything which puts you at risk for becoming mentally unstable or may have shown signs in the past of any sort of episodic behavior, your career could be cut short.

Global Cooling, no make that Global Warming, no make that Climate Change, has been at the forefront of the world’s consciousness since Al Gore’s Academy Award winning film “An Inconvenient Truth”.  We are continually bombarded by the facts about why we are in an era that will make or break us if we do not take action to stop, or at the very least, arrest the amount of greenhouse gases we are pumping into the atmosphere. Sea level rises, loss of habitats, mass extinctions and the like are thrown into a witches brew of doomsday scenarios, the better to scare us into compliance with what those touting the message (and those who are behind the curtain pulling the strings) want.

A free and unfettered press is supposed to be one of the cornerstones of a democracy, that is, if it has any hope for long term survival. What has occurred in this country in the past 40 years however, is that we have a press that has lost its objectivity and has become incapable of remaining neutral in any argument that has the potential to shape (or reshape) our society and the world in general. It has, in fact, become complicit in supporting one side over the other, much to the detriment of the people it is supposed to serve. Ideals such as truth, blind justice, common decency, and courtesy have been swept aside to make room for partisan agendas.

A look at the three examples listed above should give everyone an indication as to what has been unfolding.

The only people who know what happened in the Trayvon Martin case are George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin.  Young Mr Martin is dead and as the saying goes, dead men tell no tales (the science of forensics notwithstanding). We have been treated to security videos leaked from the Sanford PD showing Mr Zimmerman being brought in for questioning with no apparent/visible injuries, despite having claimed that he had been set upon by the late Mr Martin and roughed up to the point that his nose had been broken and bloodied, and there was a gash in his skull where it had been banged against the ground in the scuffle. The media and the race pimps (who have been adding to the narrative) had a field day with this. The only problem is the fact that the police report told a completely different story. Zimmerman had received medical attention at the scene (i.e. cleaned up). One of the officers also remarked that he looked pretty beat up and the back of his shirt was grass stained and soaking wet (it had been raining that evening). Then there’s the fact that a certain cable news network, that shall remain unnamed (but is affiliated with a certain bird of bright plumage), sought to sully Mr Zimmerman’s reputation by cutting and pasting a discussion he was having with a 911 operator to make it seem as if he was intentionally profiling young Mr Martin. The actual unedited taped conversation reveals Mr Zimmerman doing nothing more than answering a series of questions from the operator.

Damn those pesky little facts!

No one knows exactly what happened to the Jet Blue Captain, except that he had been acting erratically just before the flight and that his behavior only started to go downhill as the flight progressed. The investigation into what happened to him, just as with the Martin case, will be done behind closed doors (as has always been the case, so as not to prejudice the outcome). But that has not stopped the press from deciding that crewmembers should not be allowed to set foot in an aircraft without some sort of psychological evaluation being conducted on their fitness to fly. Being a pilot is a high stress job, given the fact that you are responsible for the safety and security of not only yourself but dozens, if not hundreds of folks. Any mistake that could possibly end your life would do the same for your charges in the back. Consider the fact that you have to be medically cleared to fly twice a year, depending on what seat you’re in. Consider the fact that you are going to have to get evaluated twice a year, both in a simulator, as well as in the aircraft. The level of scrutiny that you have to endure on a routine basis is not for the timid and takes a special breed. But none of that interests the media, they only see a problem and as far as they are concerned, that problem needs to be fixed.

Climate change has gone by other names in the past. During the 1970’s, scientists warned us that we could be entering a new ice age based on the amount of carbon dioxide we were pumping into the atmosphere. They dubbed the phenomenon Global Cooling. During the first decade of this century, scientists warned us that the greenhouse gases we were pumping into the atmosphere would lead to a warming effect that could bring on all sorts of disastrous consequences. They dubbed it Global Warming.  They presented us with all sorts of data to prove their point. The gold standard of research institutions was the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in England. The same CRU whose leaked (not hacked) emails gave the public a glimpse into the chicanery that was being foisted on it. To add insult to injury, the winters in Europe and North America were more harsh than usual during the same timeframe. The Global Warming moniker was dropped and the Climate Change label was quickly adopted. The media trumpeted the message to the public like a mythical siren luring a sailor to his doom on the rocks. Granted, there has been evidence that we are undergoing some sort of climatological change, but whether it is man caused or just another phase in a system we have yet to understand, has become the real argument, but you would think that by the way those who believe we are the cause of it all (and their foils in the media) are acting, that the science is settled and anyone who would deny the truth must also think that the Earth is flat.

I don’t know about you, but I revel in being a creature of intellect and not emotion (much to my spousal unit’s consternation). It’s the one thing that helps me remain a skeptic in the case of arguments where questionable logic is being thrown about, especially when the object of the argument is to get one to react on an emotional level and not on an intellectual one. As a military officer I watched people get taken advantage of, not out of a sense of duty, but out of a sense of loyalty or obligation. Our emotions can be taken advantage of, but not our intellect.

The media and its sideline supporters seek to make the arguments they put forth emotional in nature. Since they cannot win the argument by intellectual means, they have sought to do so by exploiting the most vulnerable part of our humanity, our emotions. As with Pavlov’s dog, they know that a certain stimulus, having been applied over a predetermined period of time, will produce a desired result. The problem comes when the ridiculousness of what they’re attempting to do starts to overshadow their own argument. It is then and only then that the blinders will start falling from the eyes of those who have been bamboozled by their illogical ramblings and machinations. The more ridiculous their antics become, the more obvious it becomes to an even greater swath of the populace.

Winning in the court of public opinion only lasts as long as you can hold the attention of your audience. Once you’ve lost that, it’s all over but the shouting.