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Forget the Middle-East peace deals or soaring middle-class incomes, one of President Donald Trump’s greatest achievements has been to rip away the curtain and expose the legacy media for who they really are. Like “Oz the Great and Powerful”, the legacy are tawdry hucksters frantically spinning smoke and mirrors. As one Twitter user recently commented to the media at large, “You know we can see what you’re doing, right? And it’s embarrassing.”
The media no longer even pretend to be objectively reporting the news. They don’t even care that we can all see what they’re up to. In fact, they’re openly boasting about it.
Stanford Communications Professor Emeritus Ted Glasser has publicly called for an end of objectivity in journalism as too constraining for reporters in seeking “social justice.”
For decades, aspiring journalists have been taught by academics not to “print the news and raise hell,” but “speak truth to power” – whatever that means. Well, what it means is “their truth”, because the same post-modern academics also insist that there is no truth. (That this is a stunningly self-contradictory argument never seems to come into it.) Objectivity is not just a chimaera, according to these credentialled idiots, it’s a constraint.
In an interview with The Stanford Daily, Glasser insisted that[…]“Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”
[…]Wesley Lowery, who has served as a national correspondent for the Washington Post, also rejects objectivity. In a tweet, Lowery declared “American view-from-nowhere, “objectivity”-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment…The old way must go. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity.”
In other words, journalists are nothing more than far-left propagandists. (Plus ça change, I hear you say.)
Dressing up bias as “advocating social justice,” does not remove the taint of yellow journalism[…]
That relativistic view, of course, would wipe away any semblance objective reporting. Indeed, he is rejecting the very notion of objectivity or any “correct description of anything.”
It is a liberating notion for writers like Glasser and Lowery. They can assume the mantle of social warriors and join whatever movement they prefer. They can then discard pesky notions of journalism as striving to offer unbiased accounts for the public to reach their own conclusions.
News, as William Randolph Hearst said, “is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising.” The legacy media aren’t in the news business any more. They don’t want to see any ideas other than their own in print or online.
Even the publishing of opposing views is now considered dangerous as shown by the removal of New York Times editor James Bennet, who resigned in the recent controversy over an editorial by Sen. Tom Cotton. I supported Bennet’s decision to publish that editorial and denounced the cringing apology of the Times after a backlash. Yet, the same journalistic figures at the New York Times who pushed for his removal have continued to espouse unhinged and untrue conspiracy theories in the name of advocacy.
Hearst, of course, was no slouch at propaganda. But, while Orwell warned against the power of the newspaper barons of old, the fact remained that they had one overriding master they had to serve above all others: the people. If the Hearsts and Murdochs can’t sell papers – which they will only do if their readers trust them – they go out of business. This is why Fox is trouncing all the woke media outlets combined. Yet the legacy media are such rabid ideologues that they simply don’t seem to care. If they lose readers and viewers (and money) hand over fist, they apparently see that as a small price to pay in the service of power.
Yet, in so doing, they are sawing away the very branch on which they sit. If the press were able to topple even presidents in the past, it was only because the public trusted them to tell the truth at least some of the time. If the media openly reject objectivity and neutrality, then that basic trust is demolished.
The louder the media shriek about the Bad Orange Man, the less anyone listens to them.
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