Both you (RobaWho) and Mr. Cunningham have hit the nail on the head with a hammer. I want to hit the media with a sledge hammer, despite having been a cardcarrying member (including in VN).
Why are today’s journalists so left and so pisspoor?
1. They are taught by older leftists who have moved from being journalists to being teachers. They spread their leftist poison at prestigeous journalism schools, which are often nor more than “Hate America” schools of slanted journalism and anti-American propaganda.
2. Most if the old-timers from WW2, Korea and many from Vietnam have passed away (for Karnow and a couple of others from VN, fu*k them). In WW2 you were pro-America; the same for the Korean War. Vietnam was a lot less clear as a “war” then the previous ones.
All four Pulitzer Prize winning writers I knew and often had lunch with have passed away, but they were among the best in their day: Mollenhoff, Kluckhon, Don Isaacs, Jim Lucas. And for Latin America, the late Daniel James.
Many damned fine journalists covered it, and some died. I met a bunch of them when I was there (Bradshear, Kirk, Parsons, Shaplen, Fried, etc.) who wrote the truth because they went out to find it for themselves, esp. Joe Galloway who I have not met.
A few others, especially from the TV networks were fools if not outright traitors. I’m surprised that Dan Rather got back alive since so many soldiers hated him for his anti-America, biased reporting. The same for Don Webster and Morley Safer. All of CBS (known in Nam as the Communist Broadcasting Company).
3. The “truth” has been changed in its meaning since the Watergate era. Now it is “Get the Republicans/Conservatives” and in most cases, coverup or ignore the Democrats/Leftists.
The best example of this today is the nearly total coverup of Barack Obama’s marxist/communist past. Try to find a really serious, penetrating story on the life history/contacts of Valerie Jarrett, Quentin Young, Milton Cohen, Alice Palmer, Rep. Danny Davis, Frank Marshall Davis, David S. Canter (Soviet asset) and his partner Leroy Wolins (another Soviet asset, both Communist Party USA members and Chicago power players, along with Canter’s other red buddy Don Rose, who is still alive).
Do you know who actually owns Obama’s Chicago mansion? It ain’t Obie.
Who is Anita Dunn and why was this Maoist picked to be one of his top advisors? The same for Valerie Jarrett’s watching Maoist revolutionary Van Jones for years before getting him as the White House Green Czar. How about the sexual weirdoes in the Administration, as well as the plain old failures who now have Cabinet positions (Arne Duncan, Janet Napolitano, plus John Brennan, former UN Ambassador Susan Rice) and Obama’s secret contact with Syria’s dictator papa Assad, Robert Malley? Malley’s father was not only a founder of one of the Soviet-connected Egyptian Communist parties (there were 3 factions), but he was a key Soviet media/disinformation publisher in France for years until the French threw the whole family out of the country as security risks. Bet you didn’t know that, or even see it in any major newspaper/network in the country.
4. We no longer have the will to “win” at the top levels of the military (Dempsey, Shinseki, etc). The deadly “Roles of Engagement” are killing our troops in Afghanistan and no key military leader has spoken out openly against them (with the possible exception of those purged in the last 6 months).
5. “Justice” has a new meaning at the Dept. of Justice under Eric Holder, a veteran racist and leftist if there ever was one. He was Clinton’s buttboy on pardons for communist terrorists (FALN and Weathermen), among other things. Today, the “white man” is the target of non-existent civil rights violations while black extremists get a walk (i.e. the Black Panthers, black city councilmen from New York who want whites beaten or killed, etc).
Jane Fonda walked because the Nixon administration didn’t know how to prosecute her (and there was a good possibility that it would have happened if Watergate hadn’t derailed a planned congression investigation/hearing). Code Pink gives money to the Al Qaeda forces in Fallujah and the Bush administration does nothing while Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin (the avowed anti-imperialist red) get continual news coverage when they fart.
6. There are few veteran “Internal security” journalists left in the business with the deaths of Ed Montgomery, Ed Hunter, Herb Philbrick, Phil Luce, etc. Those remaining are with the possibly exception of Larry Cott, are younger, with myself being 68; Cliff Kincaid at lot younger (Accuracy in Media and www.usasurvival.org), as is Trevor Loudon (www.keywiki.org and his “blogspot”; Tina Trent, esp.; Matthew Vadum, the new kid on the block who is still older than Methuselah, but damned good (Capital Research Center); and the wonderful guys who have carried the load at David Horowitz’s “www.frontpagemagazine” and its “www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org” websites (Glavoz, Perrago, etc).
Most journalists today “know nothing” (like the indomitable Sgt Schulz), about history, espionage/subversion, disinformation as a tactic, and who the bad guys are in today’s world.
7. Communist/sympathizer penetration of the news media. As old as the hills with guys like Walter Duranty covering up Soviet economic genocide in the Soviet Union/Ukraine Famine; KGB agent Wilfred Burchett writing for the marxist Guardian in the US as well as ocassional for the New York Times, while having fundraisers for him given by the Hollywood Left including Jane Fonda, Norman Lear, Scheer, etc). Other communists have been on the staff of the New York Times (an admitted former CPUSA member obit writer who was being fed positive information on “the Left dead”); Calvin Zon (Socialist Workers Party), Washington Star; Lionel Martin, CBS stringer, Havana; Abdulah Schlieffer, Jerusalem, PLP maoist; Charles R. Allen, NBC special go-to-authority on Nazi war criminals; Gary Porter, the pro-Hanoi writer who had good contacts in the NYTimes and Wash. Post; plus the far-left media syndicates, Liberation News Service (an SDS-related operation), Pacific News Service, another SDS-influenced pro-Hanoi news operation; now Inter-Press, and others syndicated with similar names.
Their crap appears in newspapers across the country and unless some of us spot them and try to challenge their writings, people accept them as legitimate journalists, not anti-American activities with a computer.
The same for the old Communist Party started Radio Pacifica, today less marxist but non-the-less far left radio network.
I won’t even mention the crap that pose as “journalists” on MSNBC and some on CNN. They must have been recruited from insane asylums across the US because nobody can tell me to my face that Matthews, Schulz, and O’Donnell are sane. Al Sharpton a news commentator and radio show host? Proof that crime pays and lies are believed even in the face of the truth. How do you say Tawana Brawley, folks? And Al, where’s all that fundraising money you got to promote her “innocence” as a rape victim of an non-existent crime?
As someone described Sharpton today on the radio, he looks like he’s from “Fred’s Fashion Mart”. Secret: ZZ Top didn’t write “Sharp-Dressed Man” for him.
I could go on but you get my drift. Most journalists today are anything but. The may write, but even a monkey with a typewriter can “write”. It is what you write, how, and in what manner that differentiates the honest journalist from the leftist hacks and liberal wannabes.
Unfortunately, a couple rotten apples WILL spoil the barrel and we’ve got a whole orchard in the mainstream media new poisoning our newspapers, airwaves, and journalism schools.
And you can count on the EPA NOT to destroy this disease because they are among the biggest media whores on the environment in the country.
Thank God for the internet, Fox News/Radio, and a few independent newspapers who still try to publish/speak the truth. And this includes “FREEREPUBLIC.COM”, the voice of pro-Americans.
It’s a long hard fight we have to clean out the anti-American diseases who pose as journalists, but with the late Andrew Breitbart having the forththought to create a new organization devoted to producing new, pro-American journalists, and with the great Media Research Center keeping tabs (and publishing their results) on what the leftist media is saying or distorting, there are some places to go for the truth.
I guess that oldtimers like myself need a saying about our devotion to the truth. How about, “I’ll stop writing when you pry the keyboard from my cold, dead fingers”.
MadMax, VN/Cambodia journalist, Fall, 1970, still in the game and hopefully kicking the Left’s ass down the road and over the “cliff”.
There is a strong correlation between population density and the percentage of leftists. From any demographic pool the countryside develops mostly self-reliant conservatives and the city develops mostly government-reliant vain envious leftists. The mainstream media is traditionally headquartered in cities. As a city's density and geographic size increase it becomes difficult to hire a balanced newsroom. All the people within commute distance live in high density. Once the management becomes leftest, they try to hire like-kind. That is part of the reason communist sympathizers tend to get hired by the mainstream media.
The internet though makes it possible for a news organization to spread out and lower costs, so things will change. The first successful nuclear attack on a big city will trigger a major migration out of the cities into the countryside.
MadMax, I salute you as a distinguished Patriot Emeritus! Thank you for your Vietnam service as well as your equally vital, ongoing service in the war against communism in America’s media, government, schools and culture. I deeply respect your knowledge, experience and wisdom. Thank you for continuing the fight. Freepers should follow your lead by taking this fight into our local neighborhoods, becoming aggressive “Community Educators”, always vigilant at exposing collectivist clap-trap loudly, publicly and tastefully.
We MUST all learn to anticipate, then leverage every useful idiot we encounter by skillfully shredding their falsehoods and unpacking their imbedded assumptions - for third party consumption! When we realize every confrontation is for the benefit of those witnessing the confrontation, FAR more than converting the useful idiot, we’ll understand that every Marxist Moron offers us a powerful “teaching moment” - useful idiots are pennies from Heaven, IF and ONLY if, we are prepared to leverage each idiot encounter.
Thank you again, Patriot. As an aside, RobaWho and Rob Cunningham are one in the same. It’s a true pleasure to make your acquaintance, sir.
Mark
read later, bump.