Journalism is Dead. Long Live the Media!

American Greatness ^ | 5-12-2019 | Victor Davis Hanson

[Sir Napsalot]

There still exists a physical media in the sense of airing current events. But it is not journalism as we once understood the disinterested reporting of the news. Journalism is now dead. The media lives on.

Reporters today believe that their coverage serves higher agendas of social justice, identity politics, “equality” and diversity. To the degree a news account is expanded or ignored, praised or blasted, depends on its supposed utility to the effort to fundamentally transform the country into something unlike its founding.

[a fool in paradise]

Journolist’s cabal of JINOs plotting and colluding on the day’s talking points and who would ask which questions at “press conferences” exposed the fraud.

Hundreds of partisan hacks were masquerading as journalists and it continues in other forums and channels of communication.

[PGalt]

ping

[gaijin]

Victor Davis Hanson and daughter, in better times at Pepperdine

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks a little elbow grease.

[Sir Napsalot]

Niiiice !!!

[GOPJ]

Were there serious worries voiced over journalistic ethics when CNN’s Donna Brazile leaked primary debate questions to the 2016 Clinton campaign?

Did journalists speak out when journalist Candy Crowley abandoned her moderator role and turned into an Obama partisan in the 2012 second presidential debate?

Were reporters at all worried when the Shorenstein Center cited 90 percent negative media coverage of the Trump campaign and presidency?

Did they object much when Twitter and Facebook exiled conservative voices that they found inconvenient?

Are journalists concerned when campuses shout down visiting lecturers or pass speech codes to restrict free expression?

Was the strange Obama-era state surveillance of fellow journalist Sharyl Attkisson of any importance to the journalistic brotherhood?

Did they fret that the Obama-era FBI likely inserted informants into a political campaign, or deliberately deceived a FISA court to spy on an American citizen?

Have journalists signed any of their accustomed collective outrage letters over the New York Times’ Nazi-like anti-Semitic cartoons, and its pathetic sort of, sort of not initial apologies?

The reason MSM 'journalists' won't make it - like in the past - is because their 'news' is biased and they're not trustworthy. It's really that simple.

[enumerated]

And what’s even scarier: the fake news of today becomes the fake history of tomorrow.

Every single damning thing that VDH says about the modern media’s corrupt accounting of current events can equally be said of the modern academia’s accounting of historical events.

After all, where does media stop and academia begin? Are not the dispensers of “history” subject to the same corrupt forces as are the dispensers of “news”?

“History” is never cast in stone. There is never just one true version - even if there was, who is to say that version will always be selected by today’s professors at today’s schools and universities as the version to teach?

Of all the writings, past and present - the PHD dissertations, the academic research, the historical essays, the best-selling books and articles, the Wikipedia piece, the required readings and textbooks pushed by history teachers and professors - who decides what will be taught as history?

The same rash of agenda driven Leftist progressives that hog the microphone in today’s ”newsrooms” also control the lecterns and podiums of today’s classrooms and lecture halls.

Historical revisionism (fake history) is every bit as rampant as agenda driven reporting of current events (fake news).

FReepers should be every bit as suspicious of academia as we are of the MSM - I no longer have any kids in school - but some of the ideas my grandkids come home with.... I’ve tried to encourage my children to home school their kids but they don’t have the time - I’m trying to talk them out of sending my grandchildren to liberal arts college - unless they are keenly focused on chemistry, physics or medicine or something tangible - skip college altogether.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

The Associated Press was formed before the Civil War. And although there are competitive wire services, all have the same effect. They all have the effect of promoting cooperation among journalists. And the behavior of journalists in that environment is a demonstration of the veracity of Adam Smith’s critique:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

For commercial rather than philosophical reasons, journalists follow the rule that “If it bleeds, it leads.” That is, journalism is systematically negative, on purpose, and journalists know it. So much is simply the working of the journalism market, and cannot be fruitfully challenged. The problem, and it is a big one, is the “conspiracy against the public” whereby all major journalists are controlled by the need to get along and go along with the claim that “all journalists are objective.”

Now, trying to be objective is a worthy goal, and one which could help keep you from libeling someone and getting sued. But being objective is just that - a goal, not a state of being. And certainly not a permanent state of being which you attain and can subsequently take for granted. Such being the case, conducting a propaganda campaign to the effect that “all journalists are objective” is dishonest. And given that journalists are knowingly negative, that claim amounts to a claim that “negativity is objectivity” - which is the claim of the cynic. It follows that the “journalistic objectivity" claim is cynical.

All major journalism is cynical, and cynicism can be thought of as “extreme skepticism.” But there is a flaw in that formulation: while skepticism is about doubt, cynicism is a posture of negative certainty. And if one considers that cynicism towards one thing maps to naiveté towards its opposite, cynicism can even be seen to be a form of naiveté.

The dysfunction of journalism is that it inherently tends towards cynicism towards society and concomitant naiveté towards government. In essence, journalism is looking for reasons for the government to do more. Democrats have no qualms about that, and they align themselves very well with the political slant of journalism. Consequently, Democrats do not get libeled, though Republicans routinely do. The effect of the unanimous 1964 SCOTUS Sullivan decision - which emphatically said that government officials have a high bar to cross to be allowed to sue for libel - is, de facto, an anti-Republican holding. It entitles Democrats not only to their own opinions, but also to their own facts.