I’m ashamed that I was once a “journalist,” a newspaper reporter and editor, back in the day. To be sure, in the 1970s it was still an honorable profession in which we who practiced it took pride. Things that are routinely done today, and called “journalism,” would have once moved real reporters to contempt. We would have laughed off the press table anybody who behaved like that. But nobody did.
Well, that’s all changed.
Poynter, an “institute” funded by the Dark Lord, George Soros, supposedly for “training writers and reporters,” has listed 29 top conservative news providers as “unreliable” and “un-news” (https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/techwatch/corinne-weaver/2019/05/02/journalism-institute-poynter-tries-blacklist-29). The list was compiled by some commie who works for the Far Left hate group, Southern Poverty Law Center. One might almost think the whole thing was a joke.
But of course the newest thing in journalism, the newest technique, is to write up the story before you do the interviews, before you see the video, before you have any of the information–because as long as the story fits the “narrative”–modern-day nooze-talk for big fat lie–you’ve done your job.
This is what happened in two notoriously shameful examples of narrative journalism–the Covington High School kids and the Jussie Smollett case. In both, the alleged journalists in the nooze media–along with Democrat politicians and assorted Hollywood losers–dove in headfirst: only to discover, quite soon afterward, that the story didn’t happen like the way they were reporting it. They didn’t care.
Once upon a time, even reporters who were total wastes of space in their personal lives still tried to live up to standards–standards like accuracy, thoroughness, truth-telling, fair play, that simply don’t exist anymore.
The result is a mainstream nooze media that’s unworthy of our trust: we know they’re lying to us. I call it the Walter Duranty school of journalism, after the New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer for being Josef Stalin’s cheerleader and public relations agent.
Remember Dan Rather and his “fake but accurate” story of George W. Bush and the National Guard? Even as late as 2004, a big nooze gasbag like Rather could (and did!) actually lose his job for bamboozling the public and getting caught. That was only 15 years ago!
The speed with which our mainstream “journalism” has deteriorated is a frightening thing to contemplate.