To
quote Groucho, not Karl, Marx: “I wouldn’t want to b e a member of any club
that would have someone like me as a member.”This
pretty much sums up the current state of media in America, where membership
re3quires that its journalists subscribe to a particular ideology or become
outcasts.Sometimes
mistakenly described as “The Fourth Estate,” media has taken on the erroneous self-perception
that it somehow compares to elected office such as president or congress or appointed
office such as the U.S. Supreme Court – when it is actually a self-appointed
position with nearly no oversight or honored system of ethics.Journalism
today has largely degenerated into (or perhaps always was) little more than a
powerful special interest group, like the NRA, except instead of shooting
bullets, it kills people with headlines and slanted news coverage.Unlike
someone seeking to buy a weapon, a journalist rarely must go through a criminal
background check or obtain a permit to operate in his or her lethal profession.In
fact, until recently almost anybody could become a journalist with little more
than a high school education but wielding unbearable levels of power with
little restraint beyond their editor or publisher, who also equally have no
oversight.Media
has always sold itself as the checks and balance against government abuse with nothing
to serve as check and balance of its own abuses.As
with politicians, journalists a prey to corruption.I’ve
known a number of corrupt reporters, some took up unholy alliances with the
politicians they were hired to cover, even going to far as to sleep with and
spy for, and sometimes work for the campaigns of the politicians.These,
of course, are clear violations of journalist ethics and subject to
termination, if you can actually convince their editors or publishers that such
transgressions have taken place.But
the media industry itself as a much deeper corruption, something not just
tolerated by its membership, but promoted and protected by a brother-and-sisterhood
of high priests who have become the religious leader of a liberal faith.Generally,
reporters who do not subscribe to this orthodoxy are isolated and eventually
driven out of the priesthood. There are some exceptions, token conservatives
kept on to maintain the fiction of objectivity, but never part of the inner
circle of faith.In
my experience, I have met an editor with a feminist agenda, who flatly refuses
to even play lip service to media’s façade of objectivity, actively and knowingly
slanting stories to embarrass or humiliate conservative politicians she covers,
going as far as to encourage fledgling reporters under her charge to do the
same. In her mind, “conservative” is not a political choice, but position of
evil that she feels responsible to expose if not destroy.Some
editors do not even believe in objectivity at all, one-time journalists who have
become advocates of a liberal agenda, reading all the proper slanted liberal journals,
subscribing to all the proscribed liberal testaments of faith. The best these editors
can hope for is to be “fair,” which means to make sure to get a comment from
the subjected being gutted by the current news story.Still
other editors hide their agenda behind their reporters, loading them up with
loaded questions that ultimately produce the slant the editor wants in their first
place, and then throw up their hands when someone accused the editor of being
slanted. Such people are the first to defend media as objective, partly because
they cannot have its lack of objectivity exposed without also exposing their
own.There
are, of course, conservative journalists, working for networks such as Fox. But
mainstream media tends to dismiss these as journalists who have fallen from the
true faith and have opted to adopt the dark side of the force. Conservative
journalists may not be evil in themselves, but they serve an evil purpose.Part
of the blame for the liberal slant in contemporary journalism must fall on the
shoulders of American universities through which modern journalist must pass in
order to take their eventual place in the priesthood. Mainstream universities
have become so politically correct that when people talk about a liberal
education, they mean it literally. Once indoctrinated, it is difficult if not
impossible to become objective.But
even old school journalists including some working as columnists on major New
Jersey daily newspapers have sipped the Kool Aid, and use questionably objective
sources such as The Washington Post as their scripture, in some cases, these newspapers
actually reprint the original stories as if Biblical verse.Journalism
is not and perhaps never was The Fourth Estate.It
is simply another special interest group like the NRA or Black Lives Matters
with true believers setting a particular liberal agenda in order to spread its
liberal faith.Real
independent reporters exist – even in the most corrupted media such as CNN, The
Huffington Post or The Hill, but as with black lists of the past, such people
do not dare speak out too loudly or too often against the liberal orthodoxy without
risking loss of credibility or employment.There
are varying degrees of true-believers just as there are varying degrees of
sports fans. Not all tattoo their faces with the New York Yankees logo or inflict
their inflated sense of self-righteousness on the unsuspecting public.But
the tattoos are there on the faces of the major players, such as The Washington
Post and The New York Times, spreading their agenda in the guise of truth, acting
self-appointed arbitrators of truth, hiding their ill will behind the First Amendment
the way the NRA hides its behind the Second – merely selling a news product a
public that mistakenly accepts it as fact.
