9/12/2009: The Media's Waterloo

The protest that took place in Washington D.C. on September 12, 2009 will mark a turning point in this nation, and an ending point for the Pravda media

This past weekend marked the largest political protest in American history. In Washington, D.C., Capitol Hill police estimated a crowd of 1.2 million Americans showed up to protest a government that is out of control and completely untethered to the US Constitution. Though tied in part to the “9/12” movement, and in part to the nation-wide tea party movement, the overall impetus was a spirit of love for the America of the founding, and a determination to protect and preserve it against a willful and malicious effort to destroy it by the radical left.

We were in attendance. We marched it with our own feet; saw it with our own eyes; and heard it with our own ears. We had just seen museum videos of the largest protests of the past, including Martin Luther King’s 1963 civil rights march and the 1969 anti-Vietnam demonstrations. The protest of September 12, 2009 was larger by orders of magnitude. While much of the movement was and is very opposed to the conduct of certain officeholders—such as Obama, Pelosi and Reid—the overall message is one of love for America, not hate of any person or persons; a message of passionate protection of America’s founding ideals, not a determination to remake them or bring them down; a message demanding a greater sense of personal responsibility to go with cherished individual freedom, not a determination to be free of responsibility.

The ironies of the Pravda media’s non-coverage or denial of coverage of the September 12 protest just boggle the mind. Pravda’s editors are filled by many who participated in and believe the anti-war movement of the 1960’s was pivotal in American history and in their own sense of importance. Yet here was a demonstration three to five times larger, and these same editors have no concept of what has taken place.

Our own view is that September 12 will mark the Waterloo of the Pravda media. It’s not just that the non-coverage and denial of coverage represent one more example of media bias. They do represent media bias, and on a breathtaking scale. But the reason this will mark their Waterloo is that it shows they are incapable of correcting their bias from within. The largest protest in American history is news by anyone’s definition; it would be covered by any journalistic enterprise with even one ounce of integrity. But it wasn’t covered in the Pravda media.

Observers may speculate as to how much of their decision not to cover the protest is grounded in malice toward values they despise or at the very least are unfamiliar with. But in the end, it doesn’t matter what is motivating them. The fact is, nation-moving news is happening right in front of them, and they don’t report it. This is a turning point. Americans, regardless of political affiliation, recognize an abject lack of integrity. They are universally turned off, and they will stop buying Pravda’s product because they now know, more than ever, that it is not a platform of anything remotely resembling honest reporting.

How did this happen?

The bigger picture to us is this: Pravda simply has no one at any level of staffing who has any grasp whatsoever of what moves 1.2 million Americans to protest what is going on with this radical left government. There is a nationwide stirring of the American heart and soul, but Pravda long ago became the domain of secular humanism, unmoved by and antagonistic toward God and faith. Everything to them is just a policy debate regarding moral equivalents, or a story of partisanship and power politics and tactics, but never anything deeper. They do not see America’s unique place in the advancement of humanity’s ultimate quest—which is not about policy debates or political power, but about the understanding of God and of man’s relationship to God.

God-loving Americans do know America’s place in these larger terms; they feel it instinctively and intuitively, whether or not they would agree on the precise religious terms with which to express it. But thought in the Pravda media has been anesthetized to all this by the seemingly safe sanctuary of secular humanism. As a result, the Pravda media will continue to watch their readership decline, subscribers cancel, and advertisers abandon them—all at accelerating rates—but they still won’t have any idea why or any idea what to do about it. They will have to close and start over, because they can’t see what they have to fix. The entire staff needs to be replaced, but there is no one in the chain of command who knows that.

We watched video of a CNN reporter, positioned alongside thousands and thousands of marchers going past her, trying to interview a protester about whether Congressman Joe Wilson should issue yet another apology for rightly proclaiming “You lie!” to Obama when Obama did lie about the scope of government healthcare for illegal aliens in ‘Obamacare’. The CNN reporter asked what the protestor thought of Joe Wilson, and an entire surrounding crowd shouted their approval of Wilson’s willingness to shout the truth that everyone knows but no one in the Congress would stand up and say. And the CNN reporter has no clue what just happened to her, what these protestors think—and she’s still believing the story of the day is not 1.2 million people marching all around her, but whether Joe Wilson should issue a second apology. This. Is. Absolutely. Stunning.

We had always thought that as Pravda’s operating results continued to decline, someone somewhere in the chain of corporate responsibility would recognize the problem and start making the leadership changes necessary to turn things around. But there isn’t anyone; they all think alike—at least at ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

So look for fire sales or outright closure of Pravda media outlets in the coming months. They are like a restaurant constantly serving spoiled food, watching their customers leave sick and angry day by day, watching the flow of new customers dry up, and working 24/7 to improve the glassware and silverware. They don’t have a taste-tester anywhere in the house. The result is going to be an empty restaurant, with no choice but to close the doors and start over at such time as there are new chefs who can detect the difference between fresh food and spoiled food.

This will be painful to the individual enterprises, but cathartic and helpful as new voices and enterprises rise to take their place in America. It is a step of American renewal that will be as historic as the protest of September 12, 2009.

Paul Gable

September 14, 2009