RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/03/when-journalism-dies/

The truth dies with it

It’s hard to know what to make of the international press corps. Overwhelmingly white and college-educated, most have presumably ignored professional opportunities that pay orders of magnitude more money than journalism — and generally don’t get them killed. If you’re smart enough to tease the truth out of the confusion, nuance, and outright propaganda of most war zones — and most countries — you’re probably smart enough to do pretty well on Wall Street. Or in the restaurant business. Or flipping houses in Florida. And yet, every year, idealistic and ambitious young people troop off to make almost no money reporting on the world’s tragedies and failures. I hardly have a friend in the business who hasn’t been shot, kidnapped, blown up, detained, or threatened with execution. And yet they persist. I’ve lost one close friend and numerous acquaintances to war.

If you ask my fellow journalists why they do it, many will resort to the tired piety that someone must bear witness to the world’s horrors, but let’s have some honesty here. Journalism is one of the most important jobs in a democracy, and my involvement in the profession is a source of profound pride, but we don’t need to pretend selflessness to have merit. No other profession — lawyer, logger, preschool teacher — bothers to, so why should we? Journalists are some of the most ego-driven people I know, as well as some of the most principled, and they’re willing to risk their lives on both counts. Their supposed addiction to adrenaline can be thought of more accurately as an addiction to having a life of great meaning and consequence. What’s addictive is feeling different from everyone else, cut from a different cloth. Which indeed many of them are.

I’d now like to take a moment to get a semantic issue out of the way. Many people will tell you — or scream at you — that objectivity is a myth and journalists are just partisan hacks trying to advance their own agenda. Fair enough — some are. But such people aren’t actually journalists; they’re something else. News hosts who put on enormous amounts of make-up to make enormous amounts of money inflicting damage on our nation by lying about reality are (thankfully) outside the scope of this article. Now that that’s out of the way we can state that a journalist is a person who is willing to destroy his own opinions with facts. A journalist is a person who is willing to report the truth regardless of consequences to herself or others. A journalist is a person who is focused on reality rather than outcome.

Truth-tellers are everywhere in our society because we rely on them to survive. Trial judges, weather forecasters, safety inspectors, structural engineers, and radiologists all provide unvarnished opinions so that we can lead safer, better lives, and the press is no different.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/22/dementia-and-double-standards/

Every once in a while media bias is so flagrant, it’s worth pointing out.

At an event in North Carolina last Thursday, President Joe Biden called out for a congresswoman with whom he claimed he’d just been photographed. She was, at the time, in Washington, D.C.

At an event in New Hampshire the next day, presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared to mix up Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley when talking about Jan. 6.

Guess which mental lapse was ignored while the other was covered by the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, ABC News, The Hill, PBS, and countless other news outlets.

About a minute into his speech about the taxpayer money he’s dumping into high-speed rail, Biden veered off his teleprompter and apparently forgot where he was, or what day it was.

“Where’s Deborah?” he asks, referring to Rep. Deborah Ross, who was in Washington. “Did she — I just had my picture taken with her. That’s probably why she left. (Laughter.) No, all kidding aside — but, anyway — you — oh, she couldn’t be here, actually. That’s not true. I got it mixed up.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/todays_journalists_seek_power_not_truth.html

NPR, The New York Times, and other leftist propaganda organs parading as reliable news publications wrapped up 2023 by jeering House Republicans for passing only twenty-seven bills that became laws.  Hyperventilating like out-of-shape Chris Christie clones perpetually catching their breath, the Fourth Estate’s most prestigious windbags could not hide their priggish condescension: Republican legislators simply cannot legislate, they huffed in unison.  

I know the “Yes, Daddy, govern me harder!” crowd gets goosebumps every time the ignoramuses and perverts in D.C. create a new rule that comes with the threat of a good spanking, but it still amazes me how desperately today’s “journalists” desire for the government to tell them what they can and cannot do.  

The United States of America has been around for two and a half centuries.  During that time, tens of thousands of federal laws, rules, regulations, and executive orders have been created to squash and squeeze Americans’ natural liberties into smaller and smaller sanctioned containers suitable for TSA inspection.  It would be interesting to know just how many more decades of legislating and how many thousands of additional recorded laws it would take before the masochists at The New York Times finally feel as if they have been sufficiently governed!

Mr. Edward Holman commented recently that the creepy JournoList community of leftist “reporters” who collaborated to push narratives and news coverage favorable to Barack Obama during his rise to power crippled the profession permanently: “A free press cannot secretly conspire to rig elections by coordinating to destroy candidates, movements (TEA Party, MAGA, etc) they dislike with false accusations by anonymous sources.”  I heartily agree.  The propaganda “journalism” legitimized by the JournoList cabal was as loud of a death knell for objective reporting (and the enduring independence of the press) as they come.  

Equally demonstrative of journalism’s demise has been the corporate domestication of reporters and their lamentable transformation from an unruly gang of rebellious muckrakers and misfits who naturally despised the status quo into a docile pack of housebroken and primped-up poodles all desperate to service the “ruling class.”  You don’t get anything as noxious as a JournoList to eat through the body politic like a parasite through its host without first initiating a widespread campaign to spay and neuter those journalists in the profession packing cojones as well as brains.  

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/good-riddance-to-mehdi-hasan/

The MSNBC host’s fact-challenged invective won’t be missed.

MSNBC has bid farewell to yet another anchor whose penchant for insipid demagoguery far outstrips any actual talent.

Mehdi Hasan, who slanders conservatives nearly as much as he slanders “Zionists” (wink, wink), announced last week his intention to quit MSNBC. The news came not long after the network axed his weekend show that nobody watched.

“With this show going away,” Hasan told those who happened to tune in that evening, “I’ve decided that it’s time for me to look for a new challenge.”

Attracting viewers seemed plenty enough of a challenge, but okay.

MSNBC last November announced a weekend reshuffling, citing as chief among its reasons the looming 2024 presidential election. And among those to get the cut was none other than the British-born Al Jazeera English and Intercept alumnus. In response to the news, a member of the House of Representatives famous for her antisemitic remarks demanded that the network reverse its decision, suggesting that Hasan’s loss of his show, which launched in 2021, was somehow an affront to “free expression.”

“Mehdi is one of the most brilliant and most prominent Muslim journalists in the U.S.,” said Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar. “It is deeply troubling that MSNBC is canceling his show amid a rampant rise of anti-Muslim bigotry and suppression of Muslim voices. Anyone who cares about free expression should be concerned.”