By Selwyn Duke

Quite predictably, Rudolph Giuliani has withdrawn from the presidential race.  His campaign had hit the skids, and, if he couldn’t win in Florida, with all its transplanted New Yorkers, he couldn’t have won anywhere.  Yet his decline in the polls was also predictable, and, in fact, I did predict it.

I hate to toot my own horn (well, not really), but, as someone I’m not very fond of, Mario Cuomo, once said, "If you don’t toot your own horn, sometimes there isn’t going to be any music."  Besides, Giuliani’s demise wasn’t very hard to predict; it’s just that the mainstream media are occupied by folks who could double their IQs with one serving of fish.  Anyway, I’ll set this up.

About a year ago, Giuliani was riding a wave of popularity and enjoyed a 20 point lead in the polls.  The media were singing his praises, speaking as if he were the anointed one.  I found this preposterous, so here’s what I wrote on February 24th, 2007:

. . . I simply point out that Giuliani is a ship that only floats in New York Harbor. He is far too liberal to get the Republican nomination.

I’ve never witnessed a more laughable game of collective “Let’s pretend” than the media’s Giuliani coverage. Even Dick Morris, the erstwhile Clinton propaganda minister who fancies himself the Niccolo Machiavelli of the third millennium, has called Giuliani the man to beat.

He’s more like the man who will be beaten – and by more than one candidate, mind you.

Again, it wasn’t a difficult prediction.  Yet, this raises some interesting questions: How could the media — virtually in its entirety — get it so wrong?

There are many facets to this.  First, the media aren’t in touch with reality; by and large, it comprises leftists who exist in an echo chamber.  Consequently, they start to mistake their beliefs and those of their fellow travelers for external reality.  Thus, if a Giuliani candidacy seems viable in their little circle of liberal friends and colleagues, they tend to extrapolate that to much of the rest of the nation (although, when in a different emotional state, they’ll portray much of America as being occupied by yahoos).  Yet there is far more to it.

A bigger factor is that the media are inherently dishonest.  They’re more concerned with peddling  their agenda and grabbing headlines than reporting the Truth.  And this came into play here for two reasons: First, had Giuliani been nominated, it would have guaranteed a race between two liberals in November.  Second, and this is by far the biggest factor, it was a sexy story.

It was about a member of the glitterati, a former Big Apple mayor, a man with a personal life sufficiently corrupt to make him seem fashionable to the libertines in the media, who was running for the highest office in the land.  Ah, what grist for reportage.  Believe me, the media were so blinded by the story that they never really thought too deeply about whether or not they were expressing Truth.

This is one of the main problems with the media.  The priority is "getting the story" regardless of whether or not it has substance; you see, most reporters and commentators are numb to Truth.  Why?

Because they are relativists and don’t believe in it. 

And that’s as much as I’ll delve into philosophy today. 

What I will say is that this is just one reason why the mainstream media are dying.

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