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.