The Nazis were unlucky. Had they started the war seven decades later, Germany won’t suffer a crushing defeat. Media would scream over the Allied body count and call for abandoning alliance with Russians who routinely perpetrated war crimes. Fans of ancient Japanese culture would rend their T-shirts protesting strategic bombing of Japan. American pilots would be court-marshaled for bombing German civilians. Democrats would declare the war lost in Pearl Harbor and sufficiently won on Sicily, calling for peaceful settlement. Pundits would declare clash of civilizations, New World vs. Aryan, which has no military solution. Guess what - that political, ideological, and civilizational problem did have the military solution.
The fundamental change since 1940s could be described as victory of utopists. That Platonic crowd, reinvigorated by Rousseau, did not die out with the Soviet Union. The plague of rationalism infected free societies. The Enlightenment expanded from the attempt to understand the Universe to the notion that the Universe is entirely comprehensible. If comprehensible, it could be planned and corrected. Informational age strengthened the idea of everything’s comprehensibility. Leftists imagined they could be omniscient. Throughout the history, people solved conflicts the old-fashioned way: they fought them out. Leftists, taken by the utopian belief in human rationality, imagine talking the conflicts out. Thus the UN, Arab-Israeli peace process, and incessant conferences.
Liberal media, for its part, are neither wicked, nor anti-American. Journalists, following the utopian mould, imagine that they know better than crowds, especially than the lowly soldiers who fight in dirt and disgusting blood. Journalists feel they must benefit the public with their advice – and valuable advice, by definition, runs against the commonly held (and therefore likely correct) opinion. Initially, media go ahead of the public mood. At that point, media are very patriotic. Then the public mood catches with flaming headlines, and the media can no longer lead. At that point, media switch to criticizing whatever decision government or the army takes.
History doesn’t offer examples of dealing with the modern problem of media that shape public opinion. The Church held similar sway before, though on much smaller scale. Just like with the Church, media grip on society cannot be reformed, but will be eventually broken – preferably, through some new technology which offers more diverse information.
In the meanwhile, media from Arab-paid BBC to Arab-financed Al-Jazeera are enemies and legitimate targets.
