by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review<\/p>\n
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The public is turning away from the institutions that used to unite Americans \u2014 the NFL, mainstream news, late-night TV, movies . . .<\/p>\n
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The familiar cultural order of the last half-century is crumbling \u2014 partly because of larger forces beyond its control, partly from self-inflicted wounds, and partly because of the chaos following the election of the outsider Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
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NFL, Go to Hell?<\/p>\n
In the early 1950s, the National Football League was small, poor, and not America\u2019s pastime. It may soon become that way again \u2014 if it is lucky.<\/p>\n
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Since Colin Kaepernick opened the lid of the NFL\u2019s Pandora\u2019s box, the demons just keep flying out. The result is decreased viewership and attendance and the tarnishing of a multibillion-dollar brand.<\/p>\n
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To save their NFL investment, some networks now try to avoid airing the pre-game national anthem altogether. The alternative is to show dozens of confused and pampered multimillionaire athletes kneeling in defiance. The cameras only selectively scan the stadium crowd and detour around empty seats. ESPN talking heads glance sideways at one another in hopes that colleagues will cool their accustomed virtue-signaling social-justice rants that are as hypocritical as they are incoherent \u2014 rants that cost them viewers and maybe their own jobs.<\/p>\n
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The NFL in truth was living on borrowed time \u2014 a strangely anachronistic gladiatorial spectacle exempt from the nitpicking of a therapeutic society. Not anymore.<\/p>\n
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The rich white owners are in no need of antitrust exemptions or public subsidies. But they might require a diversity officer to make the franchises look more like America.<\/p>\n
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The players claim racism while also assuming that they are excused from the traditional liberal antidotes to disproportionate racial representation. Weirdly, the athletes apparently think that a league in which 75 percent of the players are African-American reflects a time-honored commitment to merit. That might be true, but it is a logic that has never done Asian-American students much good when fighting de facto quotas that limit their merit-based representation at marquee universities.<\/p>\n
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The NFL is becoming as violent as boxing or martial arts, but with thousands, not hundreds, of athletes suffering head trauma. Participation is falling off in its de facto farm and minor leagues in high schools and colleges, on the theory that a smack in the head might end up later as a tremor in the hand.<\/p>\n
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The old idea that Americans set aside their Sundays for friendly get-togethers, free of weekly political spats and depressing news, has been ruined by the constant editorializing of the players.<\/p>\n
Yet they are unable to articulate a consistent gripe other than confusing the First Amendment rights with workplace rules that all Americans abide by. If the League successfully mandates that its paid employees cannot express their gratitude by wearing a small decal on their helmets to honor the dead of 9\/11 or slain policemen, then certainly the NFL can also ask its employees to stand for the national anthem.<\/p>\n
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In sum, there are so many things wrong with the NFL that far from being a national pariah, Colin Kaepernick is likely to be sainted for convincing the nation that we had plenty of reasons beyond his own self-indulgent narcissism not to watch professional football at all.<\/p>\n
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\u2018They Literally Know Nothing\u2019<\/p>\n
Journalism is also dying. Newspapers cannot compete with online news. Online news cannot find a way to fully support traditional reporting. Bloggers and autodidacts fill the void. And they do it for little or no money. Yet often readers cannot tell the difference in work or ethics between a Columbia journalism grad and a guy in his basement.<\/p>\n
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Reading itself is perhaps becoming pass\u00e9. Podcasts, film clips, emoticons, and emojis are the new pictographs of an increasingly illiterate public.<\/p>\n
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A recent Pew survey showed that only 5 percent of news coverage was positive to Donald Trump, proof of what journalists such as Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times and CNN\u2019s Christiane Amanpour stated was desirable \u2014 and a reflection of what Glenn Thrush of the New York Times and Dana Milbank of the Washington Post thought was natural campaigning.<\/p>\n
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More than half the country no longer watches network news or reads the major daily papers, given that they often spout only talking points meant to advance progressive agendas.<\/p>\n
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But bias was only one symptom of a multifaceted fatal disease. Ben Rhodes, a former alter-ego deputy national-security adviser to Barack Obama, once confessed, in an on-the-record interview with the New York Times in 2016, that he had easily manipulated journalists about the Iran deal by feeding them propaganda. He dismissed reporters as young wannabes who \u201cliterally know nothing.\u201d For once Rhodes, brother of the president of CBS News, was right: Reporters were easy to sway because they were biased and \u2014 even more important \u2014 because they were incompetent.<\/p>\n
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While reporters have been wildly \u2014 and falsely \u2014 reporting that Donald Trump bragged to his inner circle that he wanted a new force of 10,000 nukes, they remains clueless about the great events of our age.<\/p>\n
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Suddenly after 30 years of serial quid pro quo harassment, sexual assault, and rape, Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein is no longer a progressive Malibu deity. Overnight he became a modern ogre or at least a gross reincarnation of a schizophrenic sexual predator like Harry Cohn or Louis Mayer. What changed in 24 hours \u2014 other than that he became a dashed Humpty Dumpty that could not be glued back again?<\/p>\n
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Does anyone believe that the media did not know about Weinstein and the larger culture of sexual intimidation and coercion that fuels Hollywood? Or were there too few in Hollywood who could charge that Weinstein did things that they never would?<\/p>\n
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Either journalists were too afraid to cross such a progressive icon, or too inept to recognize the lethal ripples from this buffoonish Trimalchio who plunged into the Hollywood muck three decades ago. Or perhaps they were simply too lazy to investigate thousands of rumors and stories and run them through responsible journalistic audits and checks in order to produce an honest account of a criminal sociopath.<\/p>\n
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As Ben Rhodes also said, reporters are an echo chamber, largely due to slothful ignorance. Have one talking head call Mike Pence\u2019s walkout from an NFL a \u201cstunt\u201d and within 30 minutes the next 60 will simply parrot the same noun, without any effort to amplify, reject, or modify the borrowed boilerplate.<\/p>\n
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In truth, we don\u2019t count on the traditional media for much of anything anymore. For some reason, it cannot apprise the public of anything fundamental about the most horrific shooting in American history, at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival on the Las Vegas Strip. After more than two weeks, journalists still have not found out much about the motive of the shooter Steven Paddock \u2014 or how Paddock assembled a vast arsenal and elaborately planned to commit mass murder without anyone else knowing.<\/p>\n
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Online news pages like those of Google and Facebook lazily ran with wild stories of conspiracies and terrorist plots, all unconfirmed and unsourced \u2014 while the basic facts about why and how Paddock shot so many were all but ignored.<\/p>\n
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The media do little preemptive reporting. One day, North Korea is issuing its usual boring threats, and the next day it is said to have nuclear missiles capable of taking out Portland or San Francisco. Do such weapons appear out of nowhere? Were there any prior investigations in 2015 and 2016 when these nuclear missiles might have become first deployable?<\/p>\n
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If North Korea within 48 hours can be reported as having a nuclear intercontinental missile, can we expect that a far more adept Japan or South Korea already has the same capability? Don\u2019t trust the media to tell us; they are exhausted to the point of irrelevancy after spending over a year chasing the Holy Grail of Trump-Russian collusion.<\/p>\n
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The reporting on the northern California fires in the Napa wine country was equally unreliable. Without much fanfare, huge flames appeared out of nowhere and became the most destructive and lethal fires in California history. Yet for nearly a week, the death and destruction hardly made the news. No one knew even the approximate number of the missing and dead, why exactly so many fires broke out where they did, and whether the state response to the disaster was effective. If the media could ignore the blatant perversities of Harvey Weinstein for 30 years, another day or two of delay would have made no difference \u2014 if they could have instead given the nation an account of lethal fires and rampant devastation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Mock Heroics of Late-Night Television<\/p>\n
Late-night talk shows and comedy are also a declining enterprise. Most working people no longer stay up late at night to watch television. If they do, they expect entertainment, not a final dose of day-long political indoctrination to disrupt their sleep.<\/p>\n
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If the NFL ruined Sunday relaxation, so too Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, and the rest have done the same to late-night television. The rub is not just that nearly a dozen performers have fragmented the static old audience that Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett, or Jay Leno and David Letterman once split.<\/p>\n
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Instead, the different stations, times, faces, and voices now all blend into one dull, predictable sameness. Pick any issue and the hosts\u2019 views are lockstep. Expect entertainment, and you will at some point get not only politics but also lectures about how you are under-informed but, listen up, because the face on TV will improve your moral lot.<\/p>\n
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Even when the hosts pose as social-justice warriors on the barricades, they are quite timid and ordinary: Donald Trump and his family deserve easy obscenities while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were off-limits.<\/p>\n
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Harvey Weinstein is exempt due to the progressive (but still medieval) practice of exemption and indulgence: If Weinstein gives to good causes in the abstract, then he has purchased the right to indulge without audit in bad concrete behavior. When Weinstein was caught \u2014 in the Larry Summers fashion of trying to save his job at Harvard by creating a multimillion-dollar feminist fund \u2014 his first move was to seek an offset by promising to fight the NRA, and his second move was to create a multimillion-dollar feminist fund.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The public is turning the channel on what used to be the markers of its weekly existence.<\/p>\n
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Slowly and by hit and miss, Americans are learning that they do not need to go to a theater to see another Harvey Weinstein movie; or watch network news or read traditional journalism; or, on NFL Sunday, see more zillionaires in their luxury boxes above grow giddy as their employees below score, only to see a showboating player kneel on all fours to mimic a urinating dog, which is apparently less offensive than standing for the national anthem.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review The public is turning away from the institutions that used to unite Americans \u2014 the NFL, mainstream news, late-night TV, movies . . . The familiar cultural order of the last half-century is crumbling \u2014 partly because of larger forces beyond its control, partly from self-inflicted wounds, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1124,1116,1105,1104,1092,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2Mi","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":10653,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-glass-house-of-the-nfl\/","url_meta":{"origin":10682,"position":0},"title":"The Glass House of the NFL","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 5, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 The league\u2019s national significance is rapidly diminishing, due to hypocrisy and hyper-politicization in a once-loved American establishment. \u00a0 The National Football League is a glass house that was cracking well before Donald Trump\u2019s criticism of players who refuse to stand during the national\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Sports"","block_context":{"text":"Sports","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/sports\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10605,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-nfl-house-of-cards\/","url_meta":{"origin":10682,"position":1},"title":"The NFL House of Cards","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 26, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson National Review The Corner The problem with the NFL is not just Donald Trump, but the greater dilemma that the league\u2019s reason to be has become predicated on a labyrinth of lies. 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Democrats see too little identity politics rather than too much as their trouble, and thus are redoubling on what has been slowly shrinking\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Conservatives"","block_context":{"text":"Conservatives","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/conservatives\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/amgreatness.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/TDE-TrumpGreenBacklash-1024x576-1024x576.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10686,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trumps-constructive-chaos\/","url_meta":{"origin":10682,"position":3},"title":"Trump\u2019s Constructive Chaos","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 26, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Defining Ideas Almost daily, President Trump manages to incense the media, alarm the world abroad, and enrage his Democratic opposition. Not since Ronald Reagan\u2019s first year in office has change and disruption come so fast from the White House. Let\u2019s consider foreign affairs first. In response\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Sports"","block_context":{"text":"Sports","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/sports\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12484,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-nfl-is-on-the-brink\/","url_meta":{"origin":10682,"position":4},"title":"The NFL Is on the Brink","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 17, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review The\u00a0National Football League celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. This should be a time of self-congratulation for the brutal sport, which has no similar counterpart outside the United States. The NFL\u2019s megaprofits dwarf those of other professional sports in the U.S. The Super Bowl,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9708,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-the-anti-israel-sentiment\/","url_meta":{"origin":10682,"position":5},"title":"Why the Anti-Israel Sentiment?","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 5, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review World opinion against Israel comes from a great many factors \u2014 especially a certain ancient one. Secretary of State John Kerry, echoing other policymakers in the Obama administration, blasted Israel last week in a 70-minute rant about its supposedly self-destructive policies. 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