© 2018 Jim Spence - Here’s a good question for all Americans to answer on the
eve of another American election. Is the media the enemy of the people?
All educated Americans want freedom of the press. But do we also
want advocates instead of fact finders working at these jobs? How did
journalism die?
It seems to have started with the advent of CNN and the twenty-four-hour
news cycle. When we began to get "news" all day every day we moved from a press
that was mostly fact finders to a profession that got crowded out by agenda
driven advocates. There is simply not that much "news."
You could see it all unravel in slow motion with the
transformation of people like Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw. When Fox splashed on to the scene, we got a taste of
something new. We saw agenda driven advocates pushing to the right instead of only
to the left. There was room for Fox because the media had drifted so far left
before Fox arrived, that drift left a gaping hole in the marketplace. Notice I
said, "marketplace" not a "search for the truth."
Fox essentially took half of the “market”
and the rest of the “news” media kept pushing even farther to the left to try
to get what market share remained, from others who were also tailoring their
narratives to leftists. Sadly, when you are in the advocacy business and you
are pushing only a left wing agenda, it is a highly crowded space. There are
literally dozens of morally outraged correspondents preening for the cameras
all day every day.
But we have not answered the question. Is the media the
enemy of the people? I would say NO. All of the left-wing media outlets have both
friends and enemies and their friends are people. The same is true for Fox. Fox
has friends and enemies.
What about those of us who don’t want to have someone with a
narrative in mind to go searching for tidbits to support their narrative and
call it “reporting.” It is important to realize how deeply advocacy has been
embedded in the culture of the news media. Virtually every news media outlet in
the U.S. (except Fox) and virtually every public school in the U.S.
indoctrinates Americans in the hopes of assisting Democrats. The same is true
with the entertainment industry. The goal of pop culture is to help Democrats.
Their efforts work. You can see the effects in the ways that those being
manipulated parrot the talking points. Kavanaugh doesn’t have the temperament. Nazi’s
weren’t socialists. It is all about regaining a majority in the U.S. House of
Representatives and possibly the U.S. Senate now that the Supreme Court battles
are over for the time being.
Many of us recall Johnny Carson and then Jay Leno. These top
shelf talk show hosts made fun of every sitting president during my lifetime
every single night. It all stopped with the arrival of Barack Obama. For some
reason Obama was a hands-off guy at NBC. Suddenly pop culture had changed. For Obama’s
eight years Americans could not find a late night comedian willing to crack
jokes about our president.
My how things have changed. These days late night comics
have not only resumed the joke cracking about the president, they have gone
straight to crucifixion. It is all part of the shift leftward by pop culture. Scan
the news and you will find countless headlines written by outraged columnists who
blame Trump and the Republicans for everything including hurricanes. He is also
blamed for the nut job who sent non-working bombs to Democrats earlier this
month. Yet there was not a single peep from these same “fact finders” about the
root cause of a deranged Democrat-supporter who actually shot at and hit Republican
Members of Congress at a softball game in Virginia. You had to watch Fox to
discover the shooter was a Bernie Sanders disciple.
Is the news media the enemy of the people? Of course not. No
more than Bernie Sanders was responsible for the supporter who shot Steve
Scalise. However, the vast majority of those working in the news media, public
education, and entertainment industry, are the enemy of something even more
precious, they are the enemies of the solemn duty to engage virtuously in a
fundamental search for truth……not advocacy. Not sure about all of this? Just
ask former CBS news correspondent Sharyl Attkisson.
Posts
