Michael Tracey:

So why, exactly, has the scope of these riots been so assiduously downplayed, and the opinions of those who experienced them first-hand been largely ignored? A number of potential explanations ring true. For one, media elites desperately do not want to undermine the moral legitimacy of a ‘movement’ that they have cast as presumptively righteous. And highlighting that urban minority populations are generally less enthusiastic about a movement whose mantra is “Black Lives Matter” would be embarrassing for obvious reasons.

The white liberals and Leftists who claim to be so sensitively attuned to the feelings of minorities clearly spend very little time actually talking to working class non-white people — or at least those who happen to fall outside their activist cohort. If they did, they would be saddened to discover that, unlike them, working class non-whites frequently express “small-c” conservative cultural attitudes.

Formerly, I would have described myself as skeptical, jaded, even cynical regarding the national media. I now realize that I knew they are never to be trusted the same way a Fijian knows that snow is cold. I knew it, but I didn’t know it. I might have sardonically agreed with Thomas Jefferson that “the man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers,” but I now have to admit I have never encountered people more misinformed than those who inhabit the media ecosystem 24/7. A merely ignorant person can be easily taught, but an educated idiot will cling to his delusions like a feral animal. I suspect that when I’m old and senile and require a handler, I will still clearly remember how aghast I was in the summer of 2020, watching the media and public health experts blatantly sacrifice their credibility in service to a political narrative. It might be worth a newspaper subscription if only to read “journalism’s” obituary with great pleasure.