Speaker Says Audiences Need To Hear The Truth
CHAUTAUQUA — Jonah Goldberg believes cable TV news is bad for America.
The political commentator said the biggest players in media are telling their audiences what they want to hear instead of what their audiences need to hear.
“It happens at the New York Times, and it happens at MSNBC and it is everything that’s going on at Fox as far as I’m concerned,” he said to audience members Wednesday at the Chautauqua Institution Amphitheater as part of the theme “New Profiles in Courage.”
Goldberg said he has received many written communications telling him that how he betrayed his followers by not telling them what they wanted to hear.
“But I always just sort of thought that the core job was to tell the truth, as you see It. it doesn’t have to tell the whole truth. Sometimes, it doesn’t mean you can’t admit you were wrong about something,” he said.
Goldberg said former President Donald Trump used the presidency as an institution for his own personal needs and his own personal cult of personality instead of asking what his role should be.
He said a lot of problems that the United States has with institutions is that they are used for one’s or a group’s own needs. He used an example of the Academy Awards where one movie star after another goes in front of a friendly audience and says hostile things about people who are not in that audience.
“And they (movie stars) get celebrated for their courage and bravery,” he said.
Goldberg said normal Americans see this way in which people have been using elite institutions as a way to make fun of or denigrate or condescend to other people.
He said in the future the Republican Party and the Democrat Party may look different because members have become so extreme.
“And I can definitely see one of these two parties dying,” he said. “In an era of negative polarization, if the reason for one party to exist is because people hate the other party so much, when one party dies, the other party loses its reason to live.”
Goldberg said he can see the U.S. having a major scrambling, but the two parties will still be called Republicans and Democrats.
“But what they stand for and what they are can be very different in 10 years time, and that would probably be a good thing,” he said.
According to assembly.chq.org, Goldberg is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the former senior editor of National Review. As a speaker, Goldberg helps audiences appreciate the essential nature of politics by examining the underpinnings of liberal and conservative ideologies, economic policy, and the changing role of modern-day media.
A fellow at the National Review Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, Goldberg is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning; The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas; and, most recently, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy. A nationally syndicated columnist, Goldberg is also a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of the popular podcast “The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg.”