By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, October 15, 2020
In the 21st century, hallmark American and international
institutions have lost much of their prestige and respect.
Politics and biases explain the lack of public confidence
in organizations and institutions such as the World Health Organization, the
Commission on Presidential Debates, the Nobel Peace Prize, the Pulitzer Prizes,
and the Academy Awards.
The overseers entrusted with preserving these
institutions all caved to short-term political pressures. As a result, they
have mostly destroyed what they inherited.
The World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros
Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is the first person without a medical degree to hold that
position. Why? No one really knows.
In the critical first days of the rapidly spreading
COVID-19 pandemic, almost every statement issued by Tedros and the WHO about
the origins, transmission, prevention, and treatment of the virus was
inaccurate. Worse, the announcements predictably reflected the propaganda of
the Chinese government.
The bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates was
formed in 1987 for two purposes: to ensure that during every presidential
campaign, candidates would agree to debate; and to ensure that the debates
would be impartial and not favor either major party.
Unfortunately, in 2020, the commission so far has a
checkered record on both counts.
Conservatives have argued that the moderators of the
first presidential debate and the vice-presidential debate — Chris Wallace of
Fox News and Susan Page of USA Today — were systematically asymmetrical
in their questioning.
The moderators asked both President Donald Trump and Vice
President Mike Pence to explain prior controversial quotes and then to reply to
critics’ accusations. The moderators did not pose the same sort of gotcha-type
“When did you stop beating your wife?” questions to Democratic presidential
nominee Joe Biden or vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
Although the vice-presidential debate was conducted with
proper social distancing, along with screens and testing to protect the
candidates, the commission abruptly canceled the second live presidential
debate for safety’s sake and insisted it be conducted remotely.
Yet White House doctors have cleared Trump, who recently
contracted COVID-19, as both medically able to debate and no longer infectious.
The public perception was that a remote debate would
favor the frequently teleprompted Biden, who has been largely ensconced in his
home during the last six months, and would be less advantageous to Trump, who
thrives on live, ad hoc television.
Susan Page is currently writing a biography of Trump’s
chief antagonist, House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). The designated
moderator of the now-canceled second president debate, Steve Scully of C-SPAN,
once interned for Vice President Joe Biden.
The Nobel Peace Prize has been subject to criticism over
the years for failing to adequately recognize either diplomatic or humanitarian
achievement.
Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization
won the prize in 1994, despite conducting lethal terrorist operations. He
allegedly gave the final order to execute U.S. Ambassador to Sudan Cleo Noel
and two other diplomats in 1973.
In 2009, the Nobel Peace Prize went to President Barack
Obama, despite the fact that Obama had only been president for eight months
when the prize was announced. Many felt the award was a political statement —
aimed at empowering Obama and criticizing the policies of his then-unpopular
predecessor, George W. Bush.
Much later, Geir Lundestad, the longtime director of the
Nobel Institute, confessed that the prize committee had indeed hoped the award
would strengthen Obama’s future agendas and wasn’t really in recognition of
anything he had actually done.
“Even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize
was a mistake,” Lundestad lamented in his memoir. “In that sense the committee
didn’t achieve what it had hoped for.”
Earlier this year, New York Times reporter Nikole
Hannah-Jones won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on
the 1619 Project. She has argued that 1619, the year African slaves first
arrived on North American soil, and not 1776 marked the real founding of
America.
Almost immediately, distinguished American historians
cited factual errors and general incoherence in the 1619 Project — especially
Hannah-Jones’s claim that the United States was created to promote and protect
slavery.
Facing a storm of criticism, Hannah-Jones falsely
countered that she had never advanced a revisionist date of American’s “real”
founding. Yet even the New York Times — without explanation — erased
from its own website Hannah-Jones’s earlier description of 1619 as “our true
founding.”
The annual Academy Awards were once among the most
watched events in America. In 2020, however, Oscar viewership crashed to its
lowest level in history, due in large part to backlash against the left-wing
politicking, sermonizing, and virtue-signaling of award winners.
Recently, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, which oversees the Oscars, announced that it will adopt racial,
gender, and sexual identity quotas for nominees — refuting the ancient idea of
“art for art’s sake”
Such ideology has also infected, and thus tarnished, the
Grammy and Emmy awards, and left-wing virtue-signaling has also become part of
the NFL and the NBA.
The lesson in all these debacles is that anywhere
ideology trumps science, public service, history, art, and entertainment, ruin
surely follows.
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