Posted on 12/26/2016 3:50:42 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
Many people, especially liberals, were surprised that Trump won the election. The surprising thing for me was that so many people were so surprised.
What, do liberals actually believe their own lying media? That is shocking. The media have an approval rating below 20%. Surely anyone confronting this stat must conclude that the media are hopelessly incompetent and/or crooked.
The New York Times went way off the deep end, announcing a few months ago that defeating Trump was more important than telling the truth. So they had to send a post-election apology to their readers: we're sorry, we'll try to be better in the future. Good luck! That's like a prostitute announcing she wants to be virginal again. The sad truth is, it's been decades since the New York Times tried to practice real journalism.
Okay folks, given the total confusion in the journalistic profession and among the public, I want to present a simple explanation of why our journalists are so awful. Every Social Studies class should cover this material.
Here's how the situation is supposed to work. Real journalists, when they hear an assertion, immediately try to determine whether the assertion is true or false. This is exactly what journalists should do. It's what scientists do. It's honest, valuable work. We need much more of it.
Unfortunately, liberal journalists operate in another world. They do not care about true or false. When they hear an assertion, they immediately try to determine whether it will help their agenda or not. If it won't help their agenda, they know they must immediately attack it (often by declaring it "thoroughly debunked" or "fake news.") Or they simply ignore it. You see how eagerly they turn themselves into hacks. They are not journalists at all, rather they are counterfeit journalists. They understand spin and propaganda. They are best suited for work at marketing agencies and PR firms.
To take one small example. Many peoples noted that for years Obama claimed on his literary website that he was born in Kenya. Is that claim true or false? A real journalist would ask President Obama, "What's this about being born in Kenya?" However, a liberal journalist knows immediately this claim is a major problem. There might be a contradiction in Obama's life story. Mentioning this will hurt the liberal agenda. So here is the obvious answer for these people. Don't mention it. Look the other way. Attack the President's critics as "birthers," apparently a horrible group although clearly Obama was one himself.
There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of similar assertions, important points that have never been discussed in our liberal newspapers. The newspapers pretend that anything they don't want to hear is foolish, irrelevant, blatantly false, or whatever a gullible public will accept on a given day.
In an ignorant world, any reality can be sold to the public. That's our world.
One of the most startling examples occurred during the recent election, when Hillary was observed to stutter or stumble. Liberal journalists declared that any discussion of Hillary's health was insane, conservative conspiracy, or sexist. She was announced 100% healthy and any deviation from that view would not be permitted. And this against a backdrop where many millions of people had seen videos of Hillary experiencing health problems. Do you wonder that the public was ready to accept Trump's criticism that the media are crooked?
The real damage that people like Obama and Hillary do is they encourage bad journalism, because they can't survive without it. Liberal journalists are mainly obsessed with protecting liberal leaders. These fake journalists lie and break the rules. Then they have to lie and break more rules. You could see the corruption spreading through the politicized people around Hillary, and then among people in other agencies.
You might expect politicians such as Hillary to break rules and tell lies to protect themselves. But it's the job of the journalist to protect the rest of us from these liars. Journalists should be like the referees in a football game. They must be impartial. They must strive to be objective. They must not belong to political parties or factions. They must not, in effect, be secret agents working against this country. That is when the Fourth Estate (press) becomes a Fifth Column (traitors).
The New York Times and the other mainstream journalists behave like floozies. Being objective is hard work and no fun; but jumping in bed with your favorite candidates is a thrill. The New York Times bragged years ago that objectivity was impossible. Reclaiming any sort of legitimacy will be difficult. Their subscribers are deserting and their stock is dropping.
I was hopeful that the setbacks to our newspapers would be a catalyst for epiphany. They would realize they are committing suicide by not reporting honestly. But so far I haven't seen any improvement. Has anyone?
I saw a flash of it right after the election - some real self-reflection on the part of a few of them. But it immediately disappeared and they went back to their usual ways. That is the doubling down they always do.
A good article but I don’t like the references to Trump’s opponent with the affectionate term “Hillary”. “Journalists” pretend that she’s a modern, self-made woman, but in reality Mrs. Bill Clinton got her power the old fashion way for women-by being married to a powerful man.
They’re not real journalists, in the way we used to have journalists. They are nothing more than mouthpieces for the DNC.
They’re not awful...they’re paid off traitors to the Republic.
The old National Review covered this with a special issue back during the Reagan years, but their warnings fell for the most part on deaf ears.
Bookmarked.
This article didn’t explain specifically why journalists are so awful. It only said that they operate in another world, but it didn’t explain why they operate in that world.
The short answer is that journalists are so awful because modern “objective” journalism was founded that way by Walter Lippmann, he even lays out his plan for manipulating people in his books.
Because we pretend they’re important. Most of the world journalism is primarily tabloid style and everybody accepts that’s how things are. They don’t consider journalists important so journalists don’t get to let anybody down.
"Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a lady -- except a newspaper can print a retraction."
-- Adlai Stevenson
You are right, I kept myself focused on journalism and not on the broader ideological compulsion. Basically, our media were taken over by the same people that took over the universities and the public schools, which is what I usually write about.
Here’s an article that explains how the Communist international during the 1920s and 1930s infiltrated major parts of our society.... and they’re still there.
K-12: Occupied Territory
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/12/k12_occupied_territory.html
Liberals think and act like out of control 7 year old children. Everything you need to know or understand about them comes from that observation.
They have always been terrible & partisan!
Go back and read old newspapers, then the political parties/factions sponsored their own newspapers. They were as biased for their particular side as biased can be!
I guess what’s different now is we have allowed the fiction to exist that they are some politically disinterested noble “literary knights” doing selfless good & righting the wrongs of the nation and the world. Another thing that’s different is the conservative media voice was largely (Until recently!) allowed to atrophy. This “abandoning the argument” has allowed one side to dominate and basically not only set the agenda but claim there is only one way to think, look at a problem and solve it!
This is slowly changing thanks to the Internet. That’s why the giving up of “US control” is so potentially dangerous.
“...modern ...journalism was founded that way by Walter Lippman...”
Thank you for this info!! Freepers are astute enough to see that the journalists working for the main stream media are really just a bunch of leftist blogsters (blogger/hipster) using the MSM as a giant leftwing blog; the root of why and how they all got that way needs to be explored! I will read the books of Walter Lippman.
I want to go deeper into the reasons why and how the journalism majors just about all marched in lockstep off the cliff into leftist land.
Journalists are negative (“If it bleeds, it leads) and they know that; it is a conscious choice. Only a cynic would claim that negativity is objectivity. In addition, candor about why you might not be objective is the first requirement of any attempt at objectivity.Therefore, a journalist who claims to be objective is a cynic who is not even trying to be objective.
You can find the freely downloadable audiobook version of it here and the full text is here.
Thank you! I will request this from my local library as well.
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