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RUSH: Jim Geraghty, our buddy at National Review Online, I think his blog is called The Campaign Spot. He’s come up with an interesting way of describing what has happened in the Drive-By Media. He’s calling it “narrative journalism.” I described this on Monday in my long dissertation on power, not truth. That to powerful people and, in this case, people that think they’re powerful — left, the media, Democrats — the truth of everything is a relative matter, everything’s relative.

There is no truth, that power is much more important than truth, and with power you can make the truth whatever you want it to be. And that’s my version of what’s happening right now in the media. He calls it “narrative journalism.” It’s the same thing. You pick an outcome. You take a story, like the Gentle Giant in Ferguson or Eric Garner, and the narrative is: racist cops, out of control, targeting young black men, and you run with it. You just assume that’s what happened, that’s the explanation, and then everything follows from that, every guest, every story, every premise.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Jim Geraghty has an interesting take on this, the modern manifestation of the media. My description is that the truth is irrelevant, truth is relative. The news now, it’s just an arm of the Democrat Party. The Drive-By Media is simply an element of the Democrat Party that advances the agenda. I don’t think there’s any question about it.

I don’t think it’s an arguable point, even though many would, but it’s so abundantly clear.

It’s right out in the open in front of us. And the evidence here, Ferguson and the Eric Garner case in New York, you have a story, and you create the agenda. You create the end result that you want. You create the details of the story. In Ferguson, “hands up, don’t shoot.” In Ferguson, racist white cop went hunting, found young black Gentle Giant, looked for any excuse whatsoever to kill him and did so, and then grand jury lets him get away with it. Therefore, it’s understandable the community would be outraged.

Never mind that none of that happened. The media, particularly CNN and the New York Times and MSNBC, that’s the story. They have not deviated from that story. That has been the story, and all of their guests have come on and confirmed and acted as though those are the details, those are the stories that make up the entire event. And so the people that watch those networks, that’s what they think happened. That’s what they get. There is no truth. Only powerful people defining the truth. Geraghty calls it narrative journalism.

Same thing in New York. Eric Garner. What happened? A bunch of racist cops saw a big, heavy-set black guy selling something he shouldn’t be selling in front of a store. The store owner had called, and the cops are fed up, went in there, saw a black guy, said, a-ha, and killed him, put a chokehold on the guy, and he’s dead. The grand jury let him get away with it yet again, proving once again that it’s open season on blacks in America. And that’s the story.

That’s the story on CNN. That’s the story in the New York Times. That’s the story on MSNBC, and there’s no deviation from it. All the guests come on and confirm that that’s the story and opine on it that way. The only problem is, it’s not what happened. Now, Geraghty’s theory, as he writes it here. Not a theory. He asks a question. He calls this narrative journalism as opposed to factual journalism. This isn’t journalism. Journalism’s long gone.

What CNN’s doing most of the time on most everything — ditto New York Times, ditto MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, it isn’t journalism anymore. That went way long ago. That’s not the news. You think you’re getting the news? You turn on CNN and you get a storyline of falsehood after falsehood after falsehood and they call that the news? Then they have a roundtable of guests and the guests opine, and they call that news? There’s no news.

News is somebody telling you what happened that you don’t know about. News is somebody going some places where something’s happened and they look at it, they make notes or they film it, and they show you, because you weren’t there. That’s news. That’s not what they’re doing. They are creating, they are bending, flaking, framing, forming conclusions based on a political agenda, a cultural agenda. And they’re just flat-out lying. There is no journalism taking place here whatsoever, and there is an entire political element that is properly positioned to take advantage of all of it. That’s known as the Democrat Party. It has various coalitions in it, including the race industry headed up by the Reverend Jackson and, of course, Reverend Sharpton and anybody else who can muscle in on it, the congressional black Caucasians.

By the way, have you heard the latest on them? They want the parents — have you heard this? The Congressional Black Caucasians have demanded that the parents of the Gentle Giant and parents and the family of Eric Garner be Obama’s guests at the State of the Union. Again, narrative journalism, power, not truth, you name it. Now, Geraghty has a theory.

He asks, could all of this “actually harmful to the causes they seek to advance? WeÂ’ve seen the mediaÂ’s ‘narrative journalism’ insisting that Officer Darren WilsonÂ’s fatal shooting of Michael Brown represented a vivid, awful example of racist police forces recklessly using deadly force against defenseless black men. The grand jury remained unconvinced. They saw too many pieces of evidence and witness testimonies that contracted,” everything that journalism is telling us.

Same thing with Trayvon Martin. “The mediaÂ’s ‘narrative journalism’ contended that George Zimmerman’s, ” a white Hispanic, “shooting of Trayvon Martin represented a brutal crime, revealing a reckless, gun-toting vigilantism loose on the streets of America, preying upon innocent young black men. The jury looked at the available evidence and acquitted Zimmerman.” And Geraghty writes here that all of these lies, it’s not journalism. It’s narrative. Telling your audience the exact opposite of the truth creates expectations, and when the expectations are not met…

You’ve been watching CNN and you are convinced that the Gentle Giant had his hands up and said “don’t shoot” and was trying to surrender, and then the grand jury and the facts come out and you are not prepared to deal with it because you have yet to hear the facts because you’ve been watching CNN, what do you do? It’s contrary to everything that you’ve been told. So what do you do? You get mad. You get ticked off. And Geraghty’s point is that the left is actually hurting their own causes.

I disagree with him on this, by the way. ‘Cause I think they want this chaos. I think they need all of this. They need to be victims. They need the perception to be that the government is a majority, white government stacked deck against African-Americans and Hispanics. They need that. That’s what fuels them. That’s what propels people to the polls. What is playing the race card on Election Day, what is playing the race card? It’s the same thing we’re getting here in so-called reporting out of Ferguson, or Staten Island with Eric Garner.

So the idea that they’re hurting their own cause, I mean, in one sense, yeah, they’re hurting their own cause because they’re not right, and it’s being vividly demonstrated that they’re not right. But they’re misleading. I mean, they don’t look good at the end of the day. And so — (interruption) well, I’m gonna get to that. I’m gonna get to that. But the only way that they can then survive being wrong is to place themselves as victims as well, victims of an unfair country, victims of unfair society.

The thing that nobody’s talking about in all this, the thing that really, really, really needs to be talked about here is what is all of this doing to our country? This is tearing up our country. This is tearing up our society and our culture. It is tearing it up. It is on the verge of destroying the things that provide order and respect. What they are doing is creating a bunch of people who are going to end up having no respect for anything or anybody or gonna be constantly, perpetually angry and on the verge of blowing up. They are destroying the fabric of our culture with this. And to what end?


The thing about the left is they’re never happy. Even when they get what they want, it’s never enough. Somebody called the program yesterday and said, “Do you think if the grand jury in Ferguson had indicted Darren Wilson, that there would have been riots?” Yeah. There are gonna be riots no matter what. And the reason there would have been riots is because then the anger would have been legitimate, “See, we told you, we told you. This guy did what he did, and the Gentle Giant was innocent.” And they would riot in anger, not stand down because the system worked. They would riot out of anger.

Look, they found guys trying to find ingredients to build pipe bombs to blow up the arch in St. Louis. Those guys are gonna do that no matter what happened in the grand jury. So all of this, call it narrative journalism, call it power over truth, whatever you want to call it, it’s ripping this country apart. And that is a concern that I don’t know that too many people are really focused on because all of this is so local in both cases. But who’s at the root of it? I’m sorry to say, the Democrat Party is the root of it, liberalism, the left, whatever you want to call them, they’re at the root of it, and of course most of the media.

None of this could happen without them, and they’ve all thrown in. But it isn’t journalism.

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