Giving Yellow Journalism a Bad Name

I used to be a newspaper reporter and editor. I still do some investigative reporting for the Chalcedon Foundation, where I am a contributing editor. So I know a thing or two about journalism, and I used to be rather proud of being a newspaperman. It seemed an honorable profession–speaking truth to power, informing the public, exposing corruption, and all that.

Not any more!

Several times yesterday, listening to the canned AP news on the radio, I heard loose talk about “massive” or “deep” or “sweeping” or “drastic” budget cuts. This was how they described the dread “sequester”–a plan to cut $85 billion from a federal spending package of $1,000 billion and change.

Cutting 85 from 1,000 is “drastic”? We expect Washington to lie to us, but must the big news agencies lie, too? If you had a thousand jelly beans and I took 85 of them, you probably wouldn’t even notice.

Even with the “massive” cuts, our dear leaders will still have plenty of money for sensitivity training sessions, Lear jets for all the bigwigs, vacations galore for the Worst Family, subsidies for Planned Parenthood, money-laundering schemes disguised as grants for “green” enterprises, and fancy fighter jets for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Thanks to our lying, lazy, running-dog news media, our low-information voters are turning into no-information voters.

PS–Speaking of spewing out misinformation, I just noticed that the link I provided to the Chalcedon Foundation takes you to a Wikipedia article characterizing my employer, my publisher, a worldwide Christian ministry, as a hate group that wants to put homosexuals to death. They get this information from another hate group, a real one, the Southern Poverty Law Center. Please ignore this load of lies. For information about Chalcedon, please visit our website, http://www.chalcedon.edu .