When Maggie Sullivan, ‘Media Columnist’ for ‘The Washington Post’ (Stuff’s venerated, but actually unhinged and execrable, Aunt) vomited forth over the pages of said unctuous journal last week positing that the time for ‘fairness’ in coverage of the United States President has come to an end and that the paper should forthwith end any association with objectivity and elect to print just one political side – theirs – of the news, it may have been satire; except it was far from funny.
Only a blind person could not see that particular birdcage-liner’s contempt and outright opposition to any and all aspects of the incumbent’s presidency, beginning on the very Day One: January 20th 2017
That the woman implores Wapo to become a propaganda-zine might not seem to relate to our lives, but it does, because it’s the lock-step goose-step modus operandi of the extreme left, just another manifestation of global cancel-culture, shouty people denying opposing voices any hearing.
Sullivan is influential, believe it or not: “Before joining The Post, she was The New York Times public editor”, and more importantly,
“She was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 2011 to 2012, and was twice elected as a director of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, where she led the First Amendment committee [cough]. While living in Manhattan, Sullivan taught in the graduate schools of journalism at Columbia University and City University of New York.”
And that’s why her rant is newsworthy but not in a nice way. She is looked up to by young people, she’s considered a mentor in an industry she now openly advocates the debasement of for purely political reasons, and for that, from a lover of newspapers, she deserves nothing but utter contempt.
She is a disgrace to her profession:
“First, we need to abandon neutrality-at-all-costs journalism, to replace it with something more suited to the moment.”
As if Wapo was ever ‘neutral’ towards Trump. Next comes the punchline, she’s a good’un:
“Call it Fairness First.”
That’s about as honest as ‘New Zealand First’.
“I’m talking about the kind of fairness that serves the public by describing the world we report on in honest and direct terms — not the phony kind of fairness that tries to duck out of difficult decisions by giving ‘both sides’ of an argument equal time, regardless of their truth or merit.”
“Regardless of their truth or merit” – let that sink in.
It’s not as though Sullivan is without cognisance:
“I often talk to news consumers — citizens by another name — who insist that they want ‘just the facts’ reporting. They’re understandably frustrated that they can’t seem to find that when so many news organizations, especially cable news, seem to have chosen political sides for commercial purposes. They want news that is unbiased — that doesn’t come with a side helping of opinion. Just tell me what happened, they say. I’ll make my own decisions about what it means.”
The dangerous thing is that frankly, like all her sneering, contemptuous, cohort, she doesn’t give a damn for what “news consumers — citizens by another name” want or expect. Like a selfish child Sullivan laments:
“We simply are not getting across the big picture or the urgency. This happens, in part, because those news organizations that haven’t chosen up sides”
That would be “the big picture or the urgency” according to her personal political embrace, and “haven’t chosen up sides” means they haven’t chosen her preferred side.
Her jottings would have made Mussolini proud. I’m not sure she hasn’t been abducted by aliens from 1920’s Italy and regurgitated in the 21st Century to remind people what Signor’s propaganda posturings may have looked like through Fascisto press.
Closing with comedy, Maggie wanders where the hills are alive with the concepts of illusion, where ‘democracy’ is her, and only her, echo:
“In this new era, my prescription is less false equivalence, more high-impact language and more willingness to take a stand for democracy.” As long as “democracy” means telling only one side of the story.
“The news media need to change. Yes, radically. The stakes are too high not to.”
Things may need to change, that’s for sure, and short of using the “high-impact language’” Margaret speaks of. Since this is a polite site, I do surmise she needs some hint as to my personal feelings of best wishes toward her imagined future in the ‘radical’ one-eyed ‘regardless of truth or merit’ news-world she longs to inhabit and, using a terribly vulgar euphemism for coitus followed by a non-specific travel suggestion, I reckon she should reward such well-intentioned advice immediately.
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