If the Charedi world wants to continue that level of intellectual discourse they need a few more of their people to follow in Jonathan’s footsteps. Many of whom have the brains. But sadly the vast majority of them are increasingly doing the opposite. Reducing the amount of secular knowledge they learn. While they may be produce a few Talmidei Chachamim worthy of that appellation, they are producing little if any products that can match Jonathan’s erudite communication skills.
His unfailing ability to tell it like it is with such eloquence can be found in his latest Mishpacha column. Therein he correctly excoriates the hypocrisy of the left and their amen chorus in the mainstream media. True, Jonathan’s politics run heavily rightward, but it is nevertheless hard to dispute the evidence he brings to bear that supports his argument.
In a column entitled: Let’s Debate That which discussed the question of whether the media can still be trusted to report the facts or to only report those facts which are filtered through their political perspective, Jonathan makes the following observation that indicates a bias that not so much fits their own political perspective, as it does the political demographic they serve:
With the proliferation of news sources in the Internet age, the media business model switched to one in which an outlet aims at a particular demographic and feeds it what it wants to hear and avoids what it does not. Ninety-three percent of Fox News viewers vote Republican, and 95% of MSNBC viewers Democratic. As a consequence, editors are more concerned with not offending the target audience than with getting the story right.
…the real problem with regard to media trustworthiness is that graduates of elite schools, marinated in campus post-modernism, do not believe in objective truth, but only in competing narratives. And for them, the proper response to a “bad” narrative is to counter it not with facts and arguments, but with suppression.
It is with this in mind that the decidedly left wing ‘legacy media’ that champions Democracy as an inviolable principle of the free world has abandoned that concept when a democratic election results in a government that does not fit their politics. That happened in 2016 here and in 2022 in Israel.
The way I see it, Jonathan makes a very strong argument that the media can no longer be trusted to report all the objective facts. Increasingly their political views are being characterized as the only real moral ones. Opposing views are characterized as anti democratic.
With respect to the recent elections in Israel, the fact that their electorate chose a right wing government is being vilified as anti democratic. That the right wing won the lection in a free and fair election doesn't matter to them since their left wing more ‘moral’ agenda has been rejected by the majority.
Jonathan makes another observation that supports his premise:
…the real problem with regard to media trustworthiness is that graduates of elite schools, marinated in campus post-modernism, do not believe in objective truth, but only in competing narratives. And for them, the proper response to a “bad” narrative is to counter it not with facts and arguments, but with suppression.
The recent demand by Penguin Random House employees and others in the publishing industry that Random House revoke its contract with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, because her joining in the majority opinion in Dobbs constituted an “assault on inalienable human rights,” captures the mindset.
One might counter Jonathan's narrative about the left wing abandonment of democratic principles when election results do not follow their agenda by pointing to another election. The one in the 30s when Adolf Hitler was democratically elected to lead his country. Hitler’s 3rd Reich was hardly a democracy. This is not about comparing Netanyahu to Hitler. It is about electing someone democratically that produces a undemocratic government.
But there is a difference between Hitler’s 3rd Reich and Netanyahu’s new right wing government aside form the massively obvious one. Netanyahu did not declare himself dictator and then had all of his ideological opponents assassinated. Netanyahu will serve a 4 years term and then be subject to another election whereby Israeli citizens can judge those 4 years and vote accordingly.
The mainstream left wing media as well as the right wing media would do well to listen to Jonathan’s assessment of their inherent biases and no longer filter their facts to fit their demographic audience. In the event that this does not happen, readers, viewers, and listeners should listen to media whose political perspectives are the opposite of their own. And to do so with an open mind (and I emphasize open mind). The one thing they should not do is only follow media whose politics align with their own. Short of having the kind of debates Jonathan says would be ideal - that is the best we can do.
