The Atlantic’s Ron Fournier made a not so modest proposal this week. He believes the media should boycott Donald Trump until he does the things Fournier says he should do.
Before I criticize his idea, let me note that I read most of his work and have admired him as a journalist and writer for a long time.
Sure, I want to see Trump’s tax returns. I’d like to see everything Ron would like to see, and more. As for the “Russian connection,” it takes more than a claim by a Democratic party operative and a piece in Slate to make something credible. As I’ve said in a prior piece, it took the FBI a year to determine they didn’t know who may have hit Hillary’s server. But we know in two days the Russians hacked into the DNC server because “experts.”
Fournier says political journalism has to change to meet the challenge Trump has presented. Change the rules because you can’t do your job? Now that sounds like journalism.
But boycotting The Donald isn’t enough. Fournier wants media to ban his “surrogates.” You know, those talking heads you see on TV that represent the candidates. It seems fitting Ron would link to a Media Matters “article.” Always a great Soros for news. I mean source.
More silence from a profession that professes more speech. Oh, and punish those whose speech you don’t like for good measure. Anyone else hear the Republic crashing?
Look, Fournier is a pundit. He’s there for his “learned” opinion. To be fair, I’ve seen him hit Hillary really hard too. And maybe to save his journalistic integrity just a tad, he finally gets to Hillary in the last paragraph of his piece. He’d like herself to give up the Wall Street transcripts (please…).
Yet the same Ron Fournier called Barack Obama “the least transparent president in the nation’s history,” but never called for a Barack boycott. Obama tried to prosecute reporters.
Given Hillary Clinton’s remarkable avoidance of the press, outside the most controlled of situations, and her campaign’s apparent go fuck yourself attitude. “We’ll have a press conference when we want to have a press conference” signals a continuation of Obama’s transparency plus Hillary’s epic secrecy.
Of course, being the Washington Post, the piece slams Trump throughout instead of Hillary’s controlling arrogance.
Politicians can only be this arrogant with the media’s acquiescence.
Plain and simple, it isn’t the job of journalists to try and silence speech. I can’t even believe I’m saying that. It’s dangerous and stupid.
While usually a writer who asks us to “do better,” Fournier’s suggestion does worse. It feels like the rant of a frustrated and bitter man.
Fournier says he doesn’t come to his boycott conclusion easily. So before you silence a presidential candidate, here’s a question for Ron and other journalists:
Why don’t voters have confidence in the press?
The elite media, on the left and the right, pound Donald Trump every hour of every day, yet he’s the GOP nominee and holding his own for now. Despite their best efforts over time they’ve gained little traction.
Does the media’s frustration and desire to silence a candidate come from the fact the voters have silenced the media?
© 2016 carlgottliebdotnet
carlgottliebdotnet 
What we have here is not “the failure to communicate” (“Cool Hand Luke”)…but the failure of the communicators to understand and appreciate their role and ITS LIMITS.
What has come out here is that Ron Fournier has blasted out to the public exactly what he has, under cover, thought his role actually was…a kind of Human Resources interviewer who’s been delegated the power BY the American public to “screen” candidates FOR the American public. He should be a mediator that aids and abets the American public in its own INDEPENDENT assessment of candidates…but that might not turn out the way Ron Fournier wants it to turn out…and that is the crux of the problem.
Fournier would help in that assessment by reining in his own prejudices and sincerely laying out as best he could what he came to know…but Fournier does not operate in total good faith…with himself, first of all and with the American public secondarily.
The over-reach in his role reflects a lack of faith in the common man that actually reflects a compulsion to back a point of view he semi-consciously knows is invalid.
Why the semi-conscious bad faith?
Sounds like…seems abundantly clear that…Fournier is an elitist…not the worst..but one with just enough of the condition as to allow the wheedling out of the respective elements…and allow us to understand just why Trump is so effective as a Political TAT test…revealing over and over again a “painful condition”…the elitist who’s been hung out to dry…desiccated.
Yes….I am smiling….lol…aren’t you?
The elitist suffers (Dr Jung) from a condition known as “idealism”, different than merely having ideals.
In what way?
“Idealism” means worshipping functionally a set of ideals without taking into account the validity of the contrary ideals….the “other” ideals that need to be brought into complementarity. When you look at the yin-yang symbol..you just don’t see a set of opposites…you see a set of opposites brought into complementarity by what amounts to a third force…Married? It’s called “love”…
The “idealist” worships “peace” but never sees the value of war even when necessary to sustain peace. To admit to the validity of the opposite would be a violation of his sense of how to worship an ideal…and seeing it as a “god” of sorts, would mean never sullying it by casting a shadow on its “omnipresent, omnipotent” validity.
So, America has been bleeding out in the name of its ideals…we protect others around the globe without thanks or even something of economic value to offset the cost. We allow others to manipulate currencies to create tariffs in everything but name to keep their own industries thriving, and we can only continue to function by printing up money to buy our own debt!
That debt subsidizes consumption domestically and the profits of multi-nationals who prefer foreign labor and American dollar profits.
We have been forced by elites to accept Open Borders…to erode our sense of national identity, to put on the ashes and sackcloth of extreme moral masochism…to accomplish what?
This denigration of “We, the People” is a natural, as it were, and absolutely inevitable result of the basic character of the elite. They maintain power by keeping “We, the People” off-balance projecting the “who’s-at-fault-here” onto us, so we are unable to make basic demands for ourselves and to enact policies to take care of ourselves. The elite want to push, it seems, a kind of Messianic One-World order…that they could “order” about…with all the “unruly nationalist kids” under the thumb of their New Masters…the Internationalists…the Wise Men who have learned to put aside all manner of local and personal need for a total universal and impersonal worldview. Yes…they actually hear some kind of “Internationalist-Wagneresque-Gotterdammerung” music in their own minds…
As a businessman, Trump knows that the US needs to address its needs…or go under. His POV is poison to elitism because it is not just an antidote to the problems of the US, but an antidote to elitism itself. Fournier, the National Review, Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street, the MSM, the left in general, all feel the loss of power and the DEVALUATION and the DEFLATION inherent in his candidacy.
That is the secret to Trump’s success.
Every time the elite oppose Trump, whose actual polices are rational and necessary and just, they reveal that the elite’s character structure cannot abide its loss of power, and they express their dysfunctional side ONCE AGAIN in the very attempt to “correct” Trump…ha ha ha….a very spiral of defeat, what is called “enantiodromia”, the “tendency of things to change into their opposite”.
Trump’s manner, the kind of well-meant brash self-promotion, doesn’t offend the regular guys (Dangerfield!) because we see it as mostly, if not totally, well-earned. For me, in particular, Trump’s persona, for elitists who want that presidential high-priest of goodness persona, is just another aspect of Fate or God or Whatever furnishing one righteous kick-in-the-butt to the elite…and another reason that we smile…lol..as we experience “deja-vu all over again”.
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Brief, more succinct note on elitist character structure with thanks to Jung and W Reich.
Everything we do in life is based on (Jung) a “feeling function” evaluation or (Reich) an expression of character.
“Feeling function” is a complement of interpretation (ie, thinking) and sensation. For Jung, it comes out of the Self, the “higher order” of the totality of the psyche. In other words, a command from within that you had better obey. And, if coming from the Self, reflects a successful integration and complement of competing values.
If you are compelled to override the true feeling, as it were, or if you are so dissociated from the feeling function that it never manifest at all, you live as an egocentric, even if you are a slave obeying masters without.
An “egocentric” because your position is that you are morally bound to obey…the “without”…who override your “within”, your Self.
By substituting egocentric judgments for the Self’s judgments, you become arrogant, self-exalted, and parasitic. Your “will-to-power” possesses you. Incomplete and lacking harmony within, your “will-zur-macht” will have you marching into “Poland” whenever it can…
This all comes about as a result of a neurotic childhood where anti-Self values were imposed on the child, either over- or under-disciplined. The parents constellate the basic Royal Couple of Masculine-Feminine of value, principle and orientation. They are your “household Gods”…
One of my favorite sayings is from Wilhelm Reich: “One Ivan the Terrible, cannot enslave 40 million Russians, but 10 million Russian mothers can.”
In other words, if you are functionally crippled by Mom, you will lack the requisite will to revolt against the impositions of others…and/or you will end up abiding/rationalizing/or providing secondary justification, even active participation in oppression.
This “wounding” that Reich talks about creates some sense of depression..makes it more difficult to love and to sustain successful marriages. Authoritarian discipline becomes necessary…as opposed to “functional” discipline.
The elitist, especially the modern intellectual and his followers on the left, uses his mind to provide rationales for his worldview. He’s functionally blind regarding real meaning and is, for all intents and purposes, a kind of “Moonie”…ie, someone who needs de-programming….if his brain could still handle such a great undoing and redoing of his basic character.
So, there you have it…more coming….ha…
The elitist for Jung is an inflated individual who has self-identified with great concepts without the balance of the opposing principles and concepts…has a god-like view of himself, and a tremendous need to parasitize others….he has in effect substituted his ego for the Self.
The elitist for Reich is an individual whose upper-body control of his emotions and sexuality is over-done, if he’s on the right, a “stiff” traditionaolist. Also has a tendency to parasitize. In the last few generations, the intellectual elite, coming from the left with an overemphasis on mind as opposed to feeling, has destroyed the basis of authority in the family and in the world by de-coupling sex from love, sensation from interpretation…
Just a brief summary. I know it took me years to work through these concepts functionally….and I’m not sure just how to introduce them the best way.
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