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Column: Time Magazine Hates the Illogical Masses

Posted on 14 October 2020

Time magazine is a pale shadow of its former self, which might explain why they seem to hate the masses. After all, they spent most of 2016 packaging their ugly anti-Trump rants in between nasty anti-Trump covers. Remember the cover where Trump’s orange face melted into a puddle? Because he was going to lose? Hence the ongoing rage. In the October 19 edition -- with the quaint cover image of a menacing cloud of coronavirus being pumped out of some kind of smokestacks in the White House roof – they promoted an article on the “Age of Unlogic: The disorienting experience of interviewing voters who can choose their own reality.” Liberal journalists congratulate themselves for being on “Team Reality,” and never seem to care that a big chunk of the public has decided they’re egotistical jerks. The author is Charlotte Alter, the daughter of old Newsweek scribe Jonathan Alter, who wrote two books glorifying Barack Obama, one hilariously titled “The Center Holds.” Charlotte, 30, is a Time “Senior Correspondent” who demonstrated her affection for the average American voter with this tweet on September 3: “You think voter logic is like: A > B > C >D,” but “In actuality, voter logic is more like:  A > Purple > Banana > 18". Let’s insert that into the sales pamphlet to get new subscriptions to Time magazine. No wonder when you do a Google search for “Time magazine circulation,” one of the “Questions people ask” is “When did Time magazine stop printing?” It hasn’t....yet. In her September squall of tweets, the Time writer was venting to her fellow liberals that she had spent three days talking to voters in Kenosha and Racine, Wisconsin, and “There's this mentality on Twitter that's like ‘THIS one huge scandal will sink Trump with THIS group of voters’ and I can conclusively report that this is [BS].” Some of this frustration came through in the magazine. “Nobody seemed to be talking about” the furious headlines, the “news about Trump reportedly calling fallen soldiers ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’; news about the death toll from COVID-19 passing 200,000; Trump’s admitting to journalist Bob Woodward on tape that he has intentionally downplayed the virus.” Guess what? People who aren’t die-hard Democrats easily sense that this is badly disguised campaign advertising. When they dismiss it, Time says they are guilty of “Unlogic,” defined as “reason distorted by suspicion and misinformation, an Orwellian state of mind that arranges itself around convenient fictions rather than established facts.” But an anonymously-sourced claim that Trump maligned fallen soldiers is not an “established fact.” The idea that trying to avoid echoing the media’s corona-panic means Trump killed people is not an “established fact.” Journalists often mistake their own opinions – like there’s no way Trump can win, or there’s no way we could locate an isolated sliver of good news on coronavirus – for “established facts.” In this same Time magazine that rages against people who “choose their own reality,” they celebrated “Next Generation Leaders” like transgender activist Munroe Bergdorf. They ran an op-ed railing against fakery and misinformation from Sacha Baron Cohen, who is infamous for trolling unsuspecting people with fake personalities. And up front they promoted Jonathan Alter choosing the alternate reality that if the hero of his latest book, Jimmy Carter, had beaten Ronald Reagan in 1980, he might have “bought the planet precious time” against the threat of climate change. As the campaign concludes, the media are counting on voter fatigue about the “chaos” generated by Trump to elect Biden. What they don’t seem to realize is that many voters also have significant fatigue over the endless chaos promoted by the Trump-loathing media.