Listen to the Squeals!

Sympathy note to the main stream media:

It sure sucks when someone shows the world how hypocritical you have become and how repellent you find it to actually do your job, doesn't it? You should put some ice on that, and have a nice long think about it.

Eagerly awaiting your demise,

BiW, IAP.


news
–noun (usually used with a singular verb)
1. a report of a recent event; intelligence; information: His family has had no news of his whereabouts for months.
2. the presentation of a report on recent or new events in a newspaper or other periodical or on radio or television.
3. such reports taken collectively; information reported: There's good news tonight.
4. a person, thing, or event considered as a choice subject for journalistic treatment; newsworthy material. Compare copy (def. 5).

I seem to remember a time when journalists reported the news. I'm not a fool. As an attorney, I have examined the human condition in detail. You simply cannot hope to be persuasive if you do not understand that enlightened self-interest is the most powerful force in the universe, even eclipsing other favorite contenders like gravity, and stupidity. This being the case, I think a certain amount of bias is probably unavoidable. The problem is that print journalism and television have embraced that bias with ever fiber of their being, and real reporting has suffered for it.

I'm not really sure when the worm turned, but unless you've pulled a Rip Van Winkle lately, you surely must have noticed that reporters and the major news outlets have been cherry-picking stories, and if the story they have tried to ignore gets out despite their studious inattention to detail, then they grudgingly cough up a piece that is likely to make a reader/viewer dizzy from the spin they put on it, or to lean so far to one side that ingestion as part of a balanced diet is impossible. The examples abound. Iraq. Remember when all they could tell us was bad news? They were in orgasmic excitement at the prospect of influencing policy by showing us how we were losing and were bad people to boot. No stories about the good things like a freed people, free elections, the US building schools, restoration of order, making the average Achmed safer and more secure in his neighborhood and in his home, and when the attacks and deaths started to trail off, so did the reporting. Collectively, they simply could not bring themselves to report what is instead of what they want to be. A person waking up from a 12 year coma and watching the news today might not even realize there is a war in Iraq. This is not the only example. The main stream press purposely avoided even investigating the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter story. Would. Not. Touch. It. But, let a deranged leftist slander artist publish a "diary" of how a female Vice Presidential Candidate's 6 month old son is really her oldest teen aged daughter's child, on the weakest of conjecture alone, and everyone climbs on the bandwagon of innuendo and false reporting, suddenly making the reproductive organs of a teenage girl who is not running for office the subject of fevered hand wringing and conjecture in newsrooms across the country. When discussing the experience and qualifications of this VP with the Presidential candidate of the opposing party, the discussion focuses on mayoral tenure with nary a nod to the more recent multi-year gubernatorial experience. And when that VP tells the Fourth Estate in her acceptance speech that she does not and will not serve at their pleasure, the spastic fits, frothing at the mouth, and childish cries of "Meanie!", "Elitist!", and my personal favorite, "Condescension!" echo from the lips of the carefully coiffed and made-up anchors of the various programs.

How did this happen?

I hope that some day, this will actually be carefully examined by someone capable of drawing objective conclusions, but for the purpose of this post, I will share my theory. As the holder of a political science degree from the University of Michigan, I can safely say that the Democrats have, since the 1930's, tried to make themselves out as the party of intellectuals. They recruited from the halls of academia, and they have always tried to establish their bona fides as the ones with better grades, or the ones who are smarter than the other candidate. Remember the discussion of W's grades? And the more important, but largely unspoken undertone is that they are smarter than the people they purport to represent. Don't take my word for it. Ask Joe Biden. He'll tell you all about it. Oh, wait. He already did.

How does this link into the main stream media's bias? They got access. They were made to feel as if they were part of the club. The Democrats could look out the windows of their offices at the hoi poli that they successfully hoodwinked into dependency on them, and demonstrate how smart they were for the press with their measured responses, and their eleventy seven flavors of nuance, which when distilled through a critical filter of logic generally came down to being no answer at all, which as every observer of politics knows, is the safest answer any politician can give, because when the political winds shift, they cannot be held to having actually taken a position. And in the meantime, the press ate it up. The Dems cast their spell by talking down America, by exaggerating problems, by pretending that the rest of the world gets a say in what we do, and by feeding the vanity that is the Doctrine of Diversity. And because it was all so interesting, and would make such and interesting story, the main stream press got lazy. It shelved critical thinking, and asking difficult or uncomfortable questions of their peers, because it was seduced into the club. And membership has its privileges. Making sure your friends stay in power gives you a degree of power. Constant coverage of these intensely interesting subjects and people makes you smarter by association. Pretty soon, explaining the events morphs into trying to make the stories rather than report them, with little or no accountability, because after all, the public needs us to tell them what is and isn't news, and they are woefully under equipped to discern what the truth of anything is without our gentle and nuanced guidance. These are the same people, who when faced with real competition on the radio and on the internet, claim that things are no longer fair, and despite more choice than ever before in the sources of news and commentary, there is an urgent and pressing need for the return to the Fairness Doctrine.

Last night, a hockey mom from Alaska, who just happens to have been a "small-town" mayor, and oh yeah, governor, with "a speech written by someone else" exposed their foolish public fornication with the least qualified Presidential Candidate in my memory, and with a poised and classy delivery, shamed them for their biased treatment of her and her family. And this morning, they finally found their long-absent fact checkers, who with queasy stomachs and spinning eyes, set their sharpened pencils to work on her speech, wishing that it were her, still avoiding any meaningful inquiry into BHO, his criminal friends, his stubborn insistence on peddling the Politics of Lowered Expectations(TM) for the common man, and why America should slink away into the twilight in favor of other nations not guided by our freedom our promise. They simply refuse to acknowledge that we are on to them, and their days are numbered.