The New York Slimes
All the news that’s bullshit
Back in the late 1980s when I started my career in
mainstream media (after nearly two decades being involved in underground
press,) I went back to college to brush up on my reporting skills and
journalistic ethics.
My professor and old school journalist from Rochester turned off the spell-check on our
classroom computers, telling us that reporters needed to know how to spell.
While I never completely got the hang of spelling, some of the
ethics sank in – which is a lesson as lost to contemporary mainstream
journalism as the ability to spell is with me.
Some news organizations are worse than others. National
Propaganda Radio makes no pretense at being fair – which explains why President
Obama gave them a medal for bushwhacking Nancy Reagan years ago.
Crap News Network is so distorted that it could easily
service as one of those trick circus mirrors or a lyric for the Rolling Stones
song in which cops are criminals and sinners are saints – almost everything it
reports is largely the opposite of what it seems, with its news copy crafted by
some low level intern from the National Democratic Party. Diogenes would have
burned his lamp out long ago seeking anything honest in their broadcasts.
The Washington Puke is even worse, if only because its
publishers are seeking to recover old glories they briefly found while
investigating Watergate in the early 1970s. Their whole purpose in life is to
search under every rock for some possible Republican scandal they can uncover
the way they did in the pace, and so desperate are they, they are not above
creating a conspiracy where none exists.
Many people have higher hopes for the New York Slimes,
because it’s hype always painted it as “America’s newspaper” when most of us in
the alternative press knew just how inaccurate a perception this is, and how
opportunistic Slimes has been, much like the recently fired FBI director, who
played all sides in an effort to retain a position of power, its editorial content
leaning towards whatever power broker that promised to give them clout, a
conservative paper in the 1960s when most of us were against the war, and now a
proponent for giving President Obama sainthood while giving the GOP a much
hotter place to reside in its slanted reporting. While Slimes still prints an
occasional brilliant piece from time to time, you often need a magnifying glass
to find it and a lot of toilet paper to deal with open prejudice behind its eloquent
purples prose that quickly fades into yellow journalism.
Yellow journalism has always been with us. Even Ben Franklin
has a touch of hepatitis. But these days, jaundice appears to be epidemic among
mainstream media where in the past it was generally on the fringe or the
invention of some ego maniac with ambitions to be so powerful he could start a
war with a bottle of ink, though even then this was considered a shameful abuse
of power in the eyes of his peers.
The big difference is that nearly all of mainstream media
wants to become Citizen Kane, and there is nobody left to hold them accountable
for their abuses.
President Donald Trump claimed media is biased and unfair.
He’s right. It is. Nearly every news outlet in the county
has taken sides in what is largely political theater, creating conspiracies,
spreading misinformation or innuendo with no shame or apologies. But it is not
up to The President or any elected official to hold media accountable, it is up
to media, and we are not doing it.
Press associations are so consumed with protecting the First
Amendment they left these outrageous media outlets get away with murder, and
still blame cops and others for their blue wall, when media has a wall many
times thicker and more dangerous than any Trump could build along the Mexican
border.
Part of the problem is the concept of The Fourth Estate,
which lets loose on the world brainwashed college kids who have all the clout
of elected officials but none of the safeguards, nor any checks and balances
except for greedy publishers consumed with internet clicks and equally biased
editors who learned to spell but learned nothing about ethics.
The high and low point of contemporary journalism came at
the exact same moment in time: Watergate.
Two men along with a host of other brave and dedicated
journalists stood up against one of the most oppressive and corrupt regimes in
American history, and brought it to its knees, an act unparallel in
contemporary journalist history – but one which came with unfortunate
consequences, inflating the ego of the Fourth Estate so that we mistakenly
believed we had a place on Mount Olympus along with the political gods actually
elected by the people. Instead of being guardians and watchers over the public
good, we came to assume that we were a political power ourselves, and so as a
result of years of inflated ego, we have out of control media outlets such as
CNN, The Washington Puke and the New York Slimes all seeing to repeat what
honest hardworking journalists accomplished when they did their jobs the way
they were supposed to in the 1970s.
Watergate also changed the rules of journalism. The
reporters that investigated Nixon used relatively new tools that later – and
continue to be today – became abused by reporters and editors with far fewer
ethics and far less talent.
What made the Watergate investigation work were the internal
rules set by a remarkable publisher and an outstanding editor of the Washington
Puke at that time, which were designed to uphold ethical standards and to limit
mistakes. While mistakes were made, and innocent people’s careers suffered as
collateral damager, on the whole, those reporters performed admirably.
But the Washington Puke has since resorted to all the bad
habits typical of yellow journalism, not seeking truth so much as a repeat of
its former glory, looking for dirt first, not objectivity.
Worse can be said of Crap National Network which has set
itself up as some kind of moral barometer and truth-sayer when it lacks
morality or truth or even the basic ethics my old professor expected from the
most novice student reporter. It is difficult to know if CNN is deluded or
corrupt, but its reporting certainly implies both.
Since National Propaganda Radio has little credibility when
it comes to objectivity, I am not surprised or disappointed at its continued
bias. Whereas the New York Slimes like the Washington Puke, demonstrates just
how far our noble profession has fallen, and since they are both arrogant and
unabashed in their prejudice, I can’t see their recovery any time soon –
especially because we all know power corrupts and absolute unregulated power
corrupts absolutely – because there is nothing for them to be accountable to
except a sales chart.