The public is turning the channel on what used to be the markers of its weekly existence.

Victor Davis Hanson observes at National Review,

The public is turning away from the institutions that used to unite Americans — the NFL, mainstream news, late-night TV, movies . . .

…The NFL in truth was living on borrowed time — a strangely anachronistic gladiatorial spectacle exempt from the nitpicking of a therapeutic society. Not anymore.

The players claim racism while also assuming that they are excused from the traditional liberal antidotes to disproportionate racial representation. Weirdly, the athletes apparently think that a league in which 75 percent of the players are African-American reflects a time-honored commitment to merit. That might be true, but it is a logic that has never done Asian-American students much good when fighting de facto quotas that limit their merit-based representation at marquee universities.

…More than half the country no longer watches network news or reads the major daily papers, given that they often spout only talking points meant to advance progressive agendas.

But bias was only one symptom of a multifaceted fatal disease. Ben Rhodes, a former alter-ego deputy national-security adviser to Barack Obama, once confessed, in an on-the-record interview with the New York Times in 2016, that he had easily manipulated journalists about the Iran deal by feeding them propaganda. He dismissed reporters as young wannabes who “literally know nothing.” For once Rhodes, brother of the president of CBS News, was right: Reporters were easy to sway because they were biased and — even more important — because they were incompetent.

Suddenly after 30 years of serial quid pro quo harassment, sexual assault, and rape, Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein is no longer a progressive Malibu deity. Overnight he became a modern ogre or at least a gross reincarnation of a schizophrenic sexual predator like Harry Cohn or Louis Mayer. What changed in 24 hours — other than that he became a dashed Humpty Dumpty that could not be glued back again?

Does anyone believe that the media did not know about Weinstein and the larger culture of sexual intimidation and coercion that fuels Hollywood? Or were there too few in Hollywood who could charge that Weinstein did things that they never would?

Either journalists were too afraid to cross such a progressive icon, or too inept to recognize the lethal ripples from this buffoonish Trimalchio who plunged into the Hollywood muck three decades ago. Or perhaps they were simply too lazy to investigate thousands of rumors and stories and run them through responsible journalistic audits and checks in order to produce an honest account of a criminal sociopath.

As Ben Rhodes also said, reporters are an echo chamber, largely due to slothful ignorance. Have one talking head call Mike Pence’s walkout from an NFL a “stunt” and within 30 minutes the next 60 will simply parrot the same noun, without any effort to amplify, reject, or modify the borrowed boilerplate.

The media do little preemptive reporting. One day, North Korea is issuing its usual boring threats, and the next day it is said to have nuclear missiles capable of taking out Portland or San Francisco. Do such weapons appear out of nowhere? Were there any prior investigations in 2015 and 2016 when these nuclear missiles might have become first deployable?

Late-night talk shows and comedy are also a declining enterprise. Most working people no longer stay up late at night to watch television. If they do, they expect entertainment, not a final dose of day-long political indoctrination to disrupt their sleep.

Even when the hosts pose as social-justice warriors on the barricades, they are quite timid and ordinary: Donald Trump and his family deserve easy obscenities while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were off-limits.

Harvey Weinstein is exempt due to the progressive (but still medieval) practice of exemption and indulgence: If Weinstein gives to good causes in the abstract, then he has purchased the right to indulge without audit in bad concrete behavior. When Weinstein was caught — in the Larry Summers fashion of trying to save his job at Harvard by creating a multimillion-dollar feminist fund — his first move was to seek an offset by promising to fight the NRA, and his second move was to create a multimillion-dollar feminist fund.

The public is turning the channel on what used to be the markers of its weekly existence.

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