Camille Paglia, well-known feminist author and devoted contrarian, has taken to bashing the liberal media’s “shockingly unprofessional” failure to cover the viral series of undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officials enthusiastically haggling over aborted baby parts.
In part one of a three-part interview with Salon (to whom she loves to give periodic lengthy interviews) Paglia holds up the liberal silence on this story as an illustration of the “persisting insularity of liberal thought in the media.”
When the first secret Planned Parenthood video was released in mid-July, anyone who looks only at liberal media was kept totally in the dark about it, even after the second video was released. But the videos were being run nonstop all over conservative talk shows on radio and television. It was a huge and disturbing story, but there was total silence in the liberal media. That kind of censorship was shockingly unprofessional. The liberal major media were trying to bury the story by ignoring it. Now I am a former member of Planned Parenthood and a strong supporter of unconstrained reproductive rights. But I was horrified and disgusted by those videos and immediately felt there were serious breaches of medical ethics in the conduct of Planned Parenthood officials. But here’s my point: it is everyone’s obligation, whatever your political views, to look at both liberal and conservative news sources every single day. You need a full range of viewpoints to understand what is going on in the world.
Paglia later boasts that her first news source every day is the Drudge Report, which she describes as “such a pleasure to read.”
“Drudge is invoking the great populist formula of tabloids like the New York Post and the New York Daily News, which were pitched to working-class readers,” she says. “The tabloids were always the voice of the people. I admire the mix on Drudge of all types of news stories, high and low.”
She goes on to deride Jon Stewart, whose style of snarky comedy she believes “debased political discourse” and is “horrible for young people.”
I cannot stand that smug, snarky, superior tone. I hated the fact that young people were getting their news through that filter of sophomoric snark. Comedy, to me, is one of the major modern genres, and the big influences on my generation were Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl. Then Joan Rivers had an enormous impact on me–she’s one of my major role models. …And that’s my standard–a comedy of personal risk. And by that standard, I’m sorry, but Jon Stewart is not a major figure. He’s certainly a highly successful T.V. personality, but I think he has debased political discourse. I find nothing inmcisive in his work. As for his influence, if he helped produce the hackneyed polarization of moral liberals versus evil conservatives, then he’s partly at fault for the political stalemate in the United States.
As for who she does think makes a good comedian—Donald Trump.
He takes hits like a comedian–and to me he’s more of a comedian than Jon Stewart is! Like claiming John McCain isn’t a war hero, because his kind of war hero doesn’t get captured–that’s hilarious! That’s like something crass that Lenny Bruce might have said! It’s so startling and entertaining.
In another part of the same series, she compares Bill Clinton to Bill Cosby.