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The Elite Media’s Selective Outrage
How The Intellectual Bourgeoisie Attempts To Drive Public Opinion
The presence of mass media in our life increased rapidly since the 50s. The Media depend on advertising for revenue, thus needing to grab human attention. Therefore, they sensationalize stories and exacerbate a certain ideology using the negativity bias (the tendency for people to focus more on negative information than positive information) in order to boost their audience i.e. to sell available brain time to promoters.
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As the intellectual bourgeoisie acceded to power in the ’70s, the progressive left seized control of the cultural foundation of Western societies: arts, cinema, literature, schools, universities, newspapers, magazines, radio, television etc. They took over key institutions as advocated by Gramsci (i.e. the “long march through institutions”). They became the mass media spreading and exacerbating their ideology on screens in front of the passive masses.
This cultural elite’s (the new left) political ideology is in a nutshell a shift from the social (class struggle) to the societal (race, gender, sexuality…). Their philosophy, a lousy regurgitation of the Frankfurt School rhetoric, recognizes minorities as victims of systemic discrimination and the occidental civilization as the origin of all evils.
Mass media provided the perfect vessel for the transmission of their orthodoxy, thanks to sub-cultural media – films, series, music, etc. In other words, the entertainment filling the mind with the frivolous, the futile, and the playful – progressive concepts became associated with amusement and lightness. Entertainment displaced political debate in the emotional realm. Individuals no longer formed ideas and thoughts based on facts, reason, and reality but on fiction, in relation to immediate pleasure and social pressure.
The new left increasingly abandoned and demonized their traditional constituency, the indigenous proletariat, in the profit of unconditional defense of the so-called oppressed minorities. The principle of common interest disappeared in favor of the protection of such perceived oppressed minority groups.
The legislation even granted advantages to counteract alleged inequalities (positive discrimination) while the white working classes, factual victims of the violence inherent to the neoliberal capitalist system, rarely benefited from similar social prerogatives.
The bourgeois cultural elite even deified minorities to such an extent that they developed an unhealthy fascination for deviant individuals from those groups – criminals, thugs, drug dealers, etc. – whose immorality is understood as a liberation from so-called systemic oppression of Western societies.
As a consequence, they hastily take offense when someone from the indigenous working class, who actually lives among the Lumpenproletariat (In Orthodox Marxism, the underclass devoid of class consciousness), dare to voice any criticism against lawlessness from minority groups. Some even unabashedly blame the illegal actions of extra-European delinquents on white people (e.g. misconduct because of systemic racism).
Ironically, the progressive bourgeois only rub shoulders with non-Western minorities when they get their dinner delivered via apps such as Uber Eat or order a drink in multinational franchise coffeehouses such as Starbucks.
Furthermore, the cultural elite, without any remorse, offers, to popular vindicate the white working class as a scapegoat. They objectively essentialize people by virtue of their skin color, validating woke concepts such as “white privilege” while factually being the most privileged group in reason of their economic status.
Consequently, the proletariat ultimately ended up being victims of both the economic inequalities inherent to the neoliberal capitalism system and the thirst for revenge from minority communities thinking of themselves as oppressed.
And with mass media in the hand of the bourgeois cultural elite, those white working classes are also being denied the legitimacy of justifiable outrage. Such was the case for the gruesome killing of Lola Daviet, a 12-year-old girl whose body was found on October 2022 stuffed inside a trunk on wheels in a courtyard outside the apartment block where she lived.
Lola was white and had blond hair. She was born in an indigenous working-class family from the north of France, a former mining area devastated by deindustrialization. The police quickly arrested a suspect, Dahbia B., a 24-year-old Algerian woman who had been illegally residing in France for the past three years. She was under an order known as an OQTF (Obligation de Quitter le Territoire Français: obligation to leave French territory).
The details released by the media were horrific. Lola had been stripped naked and raped before she was asphyxiated and eviscerated. The numbers 0 and 1 were written in red ink on the bottom of each of her feet.
the reason for the popular outrage and the coverage by famous figures from the right, such as Éric Zemmour from the party Reconquête!, calling the killing a “Francocide” (the assassination of native French), the mass media were forced to relay this shocking assassination.
However, it took four days for French President Emmanuel Macron to acknowledge Lola’s murder. Yet, over those four days, Macron found time to tweet a commentary on the death of dozens of Algerian demonstrators in Paris in 1961, claiming that “France does not forget the victims”, and he also swiftly congratulated Karim Benzema, a French football player of Algerian origin, for winning the Ballon d’or, the award honoring the best player of the year.
As per the members of the progressive left, they were only quick to condemn the so-called political exploitation by the right. They accused those who dare to voice their outrage about this horrible murder of being racist bigots stigmatizing immigrants. They demonized legitimate popular anger in order to earn virtuous brownies points.
Conversely, following the death of George Floyd in 2020 – a criminal convicted for robbing at gunpoint a pregnant woman – that prompted Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the same progressive left constrained us, on the ground of equality and social justice, to protest, to kneel, and put our fists in the air.
George Floyd did not deserve to die but he was a delinquent. Yet, in virtue of the color of his skin, the world was mandated to stop and we were all required to spark outrage about his murder. Lola Daviet did not share this privilege. She did not have the right phenotype; therefore, her assassination should remain brief news stories quickly forgotten.
Understanding the media relays behind those affairs allows us to understand the power stakes hidden, often linked to the dominant class. While the popular outrage publicized Lola’s killing, it was the mainstream media, the bourgeois class, that publicized George Floyd’s death. And it was this bourgeois class that strive to silence the collective anger over Lola’s murder.
As such, on May 2023, France 5, a French public service TV channel, broadcast a documentary called “La fabrique du mensonge Affaire Lola, chronique d’une récupération” (The factory of lies, Lola, chronicle of a – political – appropriation) in which instead of honoring Lola, the state propaganda, the official media story guideline, criticized the so-called far right appropriation serving to fuel a racist discourse on immigration and insecurity.
In short, the cultural elite’s selective outrage, the new left (woke) ideology, has given rise to a world of inverted values in which we defend offenders by fear of stigmatizing them.
A world in which we shame those who mourn the horrible murder of a child who has not the accepted victim’s skin color.
A world in which everything is done to protect the criminals by virtue of oppression and everything is done to abandon and punish the innocent people designated as oppressors.
A world in which the hypocrisy of selective outrage dominate and in which “white privilege” means having your death go completely unnoticed by the society at large.
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The Elite Media’s Selective Outrage
Brilliant essay. I prattle on about this to anyone who will listen - they typically don't because I sound like a loon - and a boring one at that. A few years ago, when my then-teenager was aghast that I didn't know anything about the Frankfurt School and Continental Philosophy (associating such terms with breakfast) I started listening to old college lectures and reading some writings by Marcuse. For me, it smacked of elitism and had nothing to do with uplifting the lives of the working class.
I do sort of quibble about your assertion on advertising. I read Marshall McLuhan's "Mechanical Bride." The hatred of the middle class oozes from each page. While I dislike advertising and its manipulation, I do appreciate that it was a way for those lower on the economic ladder to feel as if they were part of 'royalty.' Two essays from the book truly encapsulated the elitism for me. In the essay on the use of 'Gallup Polls', it quoted Gertrude Stein making fun of American GIs and their need to follow popular opinion and how 'France had been saved' from this. It took two seconds to unravel that a gay Jew living in France, who survived outside of a concentration camp, must have been a collaborator. And indeed it appears that she was. But that she would make fun of this while her fellow Jews and other desirables had been exterminated was beyond grotesque. The other memorable essay was the disdain for an ad placed in a newspaper that described how the Bill of Rights was about what the government shall not do. For McLuhan, a professional class would always be preferred over the smelly rogues looking to limit government.