The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Their Propaganda, and Ours

Posted on | January 17, 2014 | 8 Comments

Michael Moynihan has a splendid piece at the Daily Beast:

In the bad old days of the Cold War, those Americans sympathetic to Moscow could purchase clumsy Kremlin propaganda at various radical bookstores, stocked with glossy magazines and turgid tracts about collective farms and Stakhanovite iron output. . . . But the spread of capitalist technology has greatly benefited state-run propaganda, allowing them to reach the stupid and credulous with much greater efficiency, but with a predictable lack of nuance.
And there is something addictive about television stations like RT, the Kremlin-owned conspiracy mill that has collected 1.2 billion YouTube clicks, and PressTV, the Iranian-government sponsored television network that investigates Jewish conspiracies. . . .

Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, from the Daily Beast’s “Women in the World” page, here is some feminist propaganda:

One would assume that greater visibility of female political leaders would encourage women to run for office. But given the added — and many times uncalled-for — media scrutiny female political leaders face, women often see them as examples of why not to seek candidacy. A recent survey conducted by the University of Adelaide and YWCA reveals that Australian women are more hesitant to run for office after Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s run-ins with bad press. According to the survey, 8 out of 10 women over the age of 31 are less likely to pursue a career in politics while 57 percent of women between 18 and 21 years old felt discouraged by the press surrounding Ms. Gillard.

Julia Gillard had “run-ins with bad press”? And this is different from male politicians . . . how? For that matter, Margaret Thatcher was thoroughly hated by the left-wing press in her day and, more recently, Sarah Palin was savaged by the press.

If you want to know when things went wrong for Gillard, look back to October 2012. The opposition leader, Tony Abbott, called for the ouster of the Speaker, Peter Slipper, after the latter — a Gillard ally — had gotten tangled up in a sexual harassment scandal. This would further erode the thin margin of Gillard’s parliamentary majority, and Gillard responded with what became known as The Misogyny Speech, arguing that Abbott’s own history of sexism disqualified him to criticize Slipper. Her speech was widely celebrated by feminists, but Gillard looked both desperate and hypocritical:

“The moment Gillard rose to defend Slipper and keep him in office, she chose to defend the indefensible, to excuse the inexcusable. The government had spent a month vilifying Tony Abbott for having ‘a problem with women’. But when one of the bulwarks of the government was exposed as having a problem with women, it was suddenly acceptable.”

Gillard never recovered from that, and Abbott became Prime Minister when his party scored a decisive victory last September. From this, the lesson feminists want to teach is that Gillard “had run-ins with bad press” and “media scrutiny” is bad for women?

It’s not just Russia and Iran that peddle conspiratorial propaganda. Our own media are crammed full of the stuff.

 

Category: Australia, Feminism, Media Bias

Comments

8 Responses to “Their Propaganda, and Ours”

  1. McGehee
    January 17th, 2014 @ 9:08 am

    Our establishment media are staffed by people who would have admired the role played by Pravda and Izvestiya under Brezhnev.

  2. Sleep Well, Barack’s Got Your Back With the NSA | Regular Right Guy
    January 17th, 2014 @ 3:05 pm

    […] Their Propaganda, and Ours […]

  3. Dave Mears
    January 17th, 2014 @ 7:53 pm

    “One would assume that greater visibility of female political leaders would encourage women to run for office.”
    Why would one assume that? I used to know a politically ambitious woman. Her motivation and interest did not require trailblazers. Conversely, there are any number of fields where people who look rather like me are prominent, but to which, despite their numbers, I have no ambition to join.

  4. richard mcenroe
    January 17th, 2014 @ 8:47 pm

    One of the funniest moments in my young life was trying to order a copy of Chinese dissident Chen jo-Hsi’s anthology “The Execution of Mayor Yin” at the Red Star bookstore off Union. I wouldn’t have that much fun again until I tried to order Corsi’s Swift Boat book on John Kerry at the Bookstar in the People’s Republic of Studio City before the 2004 election.

  5. concern00
    January 17th, 2014 @ 11:36 pm

    And Australia’s Abbott is doing what all good conservative politicians should – winding back a useless and economically destructive carbon tax, revising an equivalent of our common core, putting the brakes on illegal immigrants, trying to block the endless budget leaks of 6 years under the loony left and desperately trying to avoid the homomafia’s push for the destruction of marriage. It puts UK conservatives to shame…and maybe ours as well.

  6. Steve Skubinna
    January 18th, 2014 @ 1:21 am

    “Would have?”

  7. McGehee
    January 18th, 2014 @ 9:23 am

    If they’d been alive back then. Remember, Brezhnev died in 1980-something. Chris Matthews and a few others might be old enough to remember, but that’s about it.

  8. NoFixedAddress
    January 18th, 2014 @ 7:04 pm

    http://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2014/01/misognyny-hunter-shows-arab-princes-who-wears-the-pants.html

    and

    http://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2014/01/her-excellency-julia-gillard-delivering-the-ecssr-post-misogyny-memorial-lecture.html