Sunday, January 7, 2018

The Post can't save The Post



The New York Slimes

All the news that's bullshit




January 7, 2018

Steven Spielberg is on a mission to save the credibility of The Washington Post at a time when only the most naive believe it can be.
By hearkening back to the good of days of Watergate, Spielberg hopes to get people to remember just how great a paper The Post was and still must be, making a goddess of its charlatan publisher when even Spielberg can't possibly believe she is.
Kay was always a political opportunists, using the Washington Post as her vehicle for power, a broker who fortunately had two great reporters and two great editors come together at the right time,
Forbes – which has listed The Post as among the 20 most reliable media outlets in the country – is also trying to do damage control since the Post as well as seven or eight of the publications listed are slanted, power hungry media outlets getting their clicks off being biased for the left.
The Post, the film, is fairy tale about a paper that for one brief instant shone as a real news organization before plunging deep into his own hype.
Journalism became a shame as a result of the unnamed sources craze The Post started, and imitators soon destroyed the credibility of the industry with desperate efforts to gain the name infamy The Post won on the backs of those two hardworking journalists.
Forbes gushes on about how The Washington Post hires the best reporters. If so, there is a significant question about what they mean by best, since most of the crap that comes out of the Post these days violates every journalism ethical standard.
The movie attempts to compare Watergate to contemporary Washington, and Nixon to Trump, in an desperate effort to overturn an election the Democrats lost. But the reporters in Watergate did not start out trying to bring down a president the way the current Washington Post did, nor did it try to fabricate news to build a case based on rumor and innuendo. Watergate started with a real crime and the reporters followed real leads.
This is not to vindicate Kay, the publisher then. She was always a political hag, much in the way George Soros is, pulling the strings of power, trying to reshape policy, even at the expense of truth, a true social matahari who Spielberg attempts to reshape into a heroine.
Although her reporters did their job, so did she, leaving a dishonest journalistic legacy that the Washington Post has continued to follow ever since.
The current war between The Post and Trump is less about truth or justice or even the American Way, it is about credibility. Trump refused to fear The Post, and so put the paper of record for inside the beltway in an embarrassing situation, needing to flex its muscles to show that it can't be pushed around.
The problem is like Spielberg, many of the news associations see Trump's attack on the Post as symbolic on all press. To some degree they are right. But the fact that nobody votes for a news organization or reporters, and yet we wield massive power – so that when we have abuses like the Post's, we see our own profession becoming a joke.
Instead of defending The Post or making movies to improve its status, journalists and movie makers must make it clear that abuse of power doesn't only happen in the white house, clearly demonstrated by the abuse of power in the press room – with crappy little papers like the Huffpost, and questionable news outlets like CNN following suit.
By biggest disappointment, of course, is The New York Times – from which I expected more than purple prose stories that slam Trump, stories so full of negative adjectives and adverbs there is little room for fact or truth.
But then, we live in a time when the credibility of all press is in question, and no matter how we huff and puff and try to blow the white house down, we only destroy ourselves, because as corrupt as the Post claims Trump is, so is the Post.
And even Spielberg can't save it.




email to Al Sullivan

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