The Poison of Media Bias...

Two articles in the WSJ underscore the problem of media bias. Not just in the US, but also abroad.

The core of the problem here is "activist journalism", which I remember being taught at my one journalism class when I did my undergraduate degree. We spent most of the time learning the basics (who, what, when, where and why) and learning to write small columns parsimoniously.

Then there was a guest speaker. Can't remember who it was anymore, but he was hugely entertaining, telling us how we could change the world by shaping public opinion, and of course we needed to do that by going after The Man, The Establishment. Was, of course, a professional journalist.

Who doesn't deserve the name because of the mixture of opinion and facts. As bloggers we can do that: no one expects, to paraphrase Joe Friday, "Just the facts, ma'am".

The problem is that media bias is poisonous and insidious and increasingly resembles either the hagiographic obscenities of the Stalinist kept press or the vitriolic hate-mongering of what is euphemistically called the "Sturmer" press (the pet journalists of the Nazis) or what passed for journalism under Mao and the Soviets and their captive puppets.

In other words, it's nothing more than propaganda. We've been fed a constant stream of it, cloaked in the remnants of what once was a rightfully proud profession, one that is destroying itself because it is incapable of reform and recognition that they have more often failed to report the news properly.

The New York Times still refuses to admit that its Pulitzer-prize winning reporter was a stooge of the Soviets, reporting that there was no famine while millions died for purely political reasons (and the Ukrainian famine was a purely political famine, designed to forever break that country's independent farmers and landed gentry: it worked because it killed most of them off).

The poison of a small innuendo here and a false reportage there, coupled with deciding that contrary evidence isn't "newsworthy" is slow and insidious, like small doses of arsenic mixed in food. No one understands then how someone healthy can then slowly waste away, unless "there is something wrong with them".


If you're a journalist today and don't ask yourself why journalists are held in such low esteem, then you are not doing your job.

If you're a journalist today and decide to toe the line and not report on, for instance, the corruption in the Democratic Party, then you are not doing your job.

If you're a journalist today and think that terrorists have a right to be heard and understood, then you are not doing your job.

If you're a journalist today and believe that it's better to go with the flow and save your critical thinking for another day, then you are not doing your job.

If you're a journalist today and think it's better to have good relations with "highly-placed sources" and to repeat what they tell you, rather than finding out what is really going on, then you are not doing your job.

If you're a journalist today and think it's perfectly okay to be discriminating in what you report and to push an agenda, then you are not doing your job.



If you're a journalist today and can look yourself in the mirror without wincing, then you are the problem.