January 26, 2018
The New York Times got into the
anonymous sources game this week when they announced that they found
four people to tell them what most people already knew or assumed:
Trump wanted to fire Mueller because Mueller has conflicts up to his
ears.
But this makes big news because media
hates Trump, and needs desperately to bring him down because he like
many people these days question the open editorial bias organizations
such as the Times, the Washington Post, and CNN arrogantly display.
This is all a pissing contest on the
national level, a historically self-appointed guardians of the
universe media trying to defend its turf, at a time when there are so
many alternate sources of information many people are clearly turning
away from them as purveyors of truth.
Media in the past has had a monopoly on
truth, the sole access to information people needed to make judgments
about our leaders.
Yellow journalism (what we call Fake
News these days) has been with us since the invention of the printing
press – perhaps even back to the days when monks did inscriptions
of Biblical verse.
America was founded on press as being
The Fourth Estate, meaning that it serves as watchdog over the other
three branches of government on behalf of the people.
What makes media different is that WE
are not elected, go through no process by which the public can be
assured we have no biased or self-interest, but yet we have as much
power as God.
Press has always been made honest by
the integrity of the individuals involved, true journalists that vow
to remain as unbiased as possible. One of my editors claims this is
not possible and so that the best we can hope for it to be “fair”
when we attack someone.
I disagree. A reporter who feels too
strongly about a subject should walk away from the story and let
someone without that bias handle it.
But we have become lustful for power,
especially news organizations that judge their popularity by internet
hits. Editorial decisions are no longer made on the basis good and
bad journalism, but on who a media outlet's viewers are, and steering
stories to tell them what they want to hear, rather than what they
actually need to know.
I watch editors slant stories to
satisfy their own biases, flexing their muscles to show how important
this or that media is, or allowing reporters – such as with many
stories in The New York Times – to use inappropriate purple prose
to influence how readers are expected to react to facts.
When press goes bad, there is very
little to hold it accountable.
If a politician slams a media outlet
for being biased, other media circle the wagons and defend that
outlet, seeing the attack as something against all media.
We never police ourselves. We do not
hold ourselves accountable to anybody – partly perhaps because each
media fears that once we open the door and let the public see just
how vulnerable we are to abuse of power, nobody will take us
seriously again.
This is made worse by the fact that we
now have competition, and no longer are the three networks of talking
heads telling America how to think.
And much of the abuse of power these
days is all about nostalgia for days when we served as the high
priests of truth, and our word became the Bible by which the world
set its moral compass.
The problem is we still pretend we
provide truth, and we still lust for power, and we still seek to
steer public opinion down paths of our choosing.
But when the moral compass we provide
is skewed, we lose any right to be taken as purveyors of truth, and
we become as corrupt as the politicians we pass judgment on.
We've stopped even being fake news, we
just turn into a pack of liars.