Opinion: ‘American journalism RIP’ or ‘Long live President Trump’
By MORRY MARKOVITZ
Free Canada Press
July 1, 2017 –– You probably can’t come close to imagining how many just-as-incredible-and-horrific stories of the past 12 or more months were never sufficiently exposed to force as prominent a public retraction from CNN in regard to their Russia story as this example of fake news finally received.
MORRY MARKOVITZ
That’s not just a wild guess. That’s MANY other EQUALLY outrageous lies, or more accurately MANY, MANY MANY purely concocted intentional lies, witnessed by me and the sizable minority of other Americans whose logic and 5th grade reading comprehension lessons sunk in.
In fact it’s recently become VERY hard to find—in certain categories of reporting—ANY non-lies at all; just 100% falsehoods over the past many months, each spun over into the next one and the next and the next until so many were always flying around at any given time, and being parroted by all the other news sources without verification, that it’s no wonder so many sane and intelligent people thought (and many still think) there had to be at least SOME truth to the general ideas filling the air over the USA.
There wasn’t.
These are the consequences of the death of the Journalism profession in the US. These are the symptoms of the poison it’s been fed over the past 2 or 3 generations.
“Objectivity‚” the old gospel of the profession, has finally been totally crowded out by the “Advocacy Journalism‚” introduced years ago. “Advocacy Journalism‚” rejects the idea of restricting “News‚” reports to facts, and relegating opinions to their own place on the Editorial pages. Instead, Journalism students now learn that it’s OK to push their own “ideals‚” even in their NEWS reporting. It’s supposedly admirable to push one’s personal views in NEWS-papers and NEWS-reports. It’s “idealistic‚” . . . and hence admirable.
There’s one over-riding ideal essential to the Journalism profession by definition . . . TRUTH. And the ideal which is admirable SPECIFICALLY IN JOURNALISM is thus a rigid loyalty to the specific ideal of TRUTH.
This in turn logically requires an adherence to FACTS above all else. And THAT is why “objectivity‚” had always been— appropriately and very logically — the one overriding quality deserving of admiration in Journalism.
But then along came the indiscriminate wordsmiths and spin-doctors of our modern educational system, who spun and wove and wordsmithed and turned logical thinking inside out. They are the ones responsible for the fatal poisoning of the American Journalism profession, whose inevitable funeral we are now witnessing.
From the beginnings of Trump’s entry onto the political stage in early-to mid-2016, the ongoing decline in the quality of US journalism began to accelerate. On Presidential campaign issues, and on many related issues, it deteriorated so rapidly that by the time we got to Trump’s inauguration, I feel safe to say that not a single speck of truth whatsoever could be found in news reporting on DC politics in any of the major, or “mainstream‚” media.
A total hoax, a massive campaign of purely false news, months of almost nothing but lies from virtually all major networks with a very few honest reporters either quitting and searching for work at other major media (good luck. Honest reporters had trouble finding new jobs because there were almost none available for honest reporters) OR they began working for themselves on their own web sites, OR took jobs with one of the smaller “alternative” news organs which do report only facts (or not-yet-proven “facts” which are clearly identified as such).
This has been a very rapid crash or implosion of the American Press’s image in the eyes of the American people, perhaps similar or even comparable to the rapid acceleration in the loss of trust earned by Congress in recent years, which I believe culminated in a poll near the end of the last Administration, showing that only 9% of American voters gave a positive approval rating to the US Congress.
But even as recently as a year ago no one, myself included, would ever have dared even to IMAGINE that a conscious attempt to impose such a truly massive mis-information campaign in order to hoax the entire US population was even CONCEIVABLE—not even by a single network, let alone by a collaboration of virtually all the major news networks.
But every day it’s becoming more & more clear to more & more Americans that this is exactly what has been going on!! EXACTLY. PRECISELY.
Maybe what brought it on was Trump’s innate ability to trigger the (similarly innate) feelings of hatred which are compressed/suppressed under the skins of most “serious” liberal/progressives, and which brought that “enlightened inner-liberal, ever-smoldering hate‚” to such a boil that it could not be restrained from steaming out of every progressive pore.
As one after the other network or “name‚” news anchor succumbed to far-yellower-than-yellow journalism, the others would get the courage of crowds to “follow the leader” like lemmings, all into the same sewer. And of course, once that happened, no knowledgeable person would have been surprised to learn that the demonstrably weak minds of liberal journalists would be unable to stem the avalanche of barbaric irrationality and hate we then witnessed gushing forth from all major US news media in a virtual tsunami during the past several months. (Yes, you read that correctly. Avalanches weren’t enough. They needed tsunamis too. You see, they are liberal progressives, and committed to being very thorough in their emotional tantrums no matter how much harm to innocents or destruction to life or property that might cause. Admirable . . . no?)
A huge number of Americans have become so justifiably disgusted with the worse-than-just-zero integrity displayed almost uniformly across ALL of the major media networks during the past year or so, that the US major media now have a near impossible task in front of them to convince the American voter that ANYTHING they report can ever be trusted again except (possibly) sports scores. I say “worse” than zero integrity because they have not merely failed to report the truth, but they have ACTIVELY initiated false news created out of whole cloth, INTENTIONALLY, in order to mislead their audiences into false views of reality. IE, this has not been just news which lacked any accuracy, but news which was NEGATIVELY accurate, because it offered almost EXCLUSIVELY IN-accurate content—ie, content of NEGATIVE value rather than merely of no value..
Hard to believe the extent of it. VERY hard. But facts are facts. If a thorough history of this period of America’s news industry is someday compiled into a documentary film, the gasps of “maximum possible” shock and absolute disbelief will begin early on, and then will spend hours CONTINUALLY INCREASING to well beyond what most people today would regard as “maximum possible.”
The most extreme “wacko conspiracy theorist” nut-job could not imagine anything as far beyond the pale as what the American Press has revealed in its actual behavior from the spring of 2016 to the present time.
The lesson to be learned is this: NEVER UNDERESTIMATE people’s capacity for mass hysteria, mass paranoia, mass seething hatred of their fellow men, mass self-delusion, and mass reversion to prehistoric-levels of irrational behavior bordering on barbaric.
The classic example of this phenomenon offered in the West is usually Nazi Germany and its Holocaust, of 3 generations ago. However, history has just allowed us to witness that such insanity is still very much alive and well in human hearts and minds (or perhaps more accurately, in what SO many self-described human beings actually lack in the way of GENUINELY HUMAN hearts and minds —see especially Nazis, communists, socialists, sadists, psychopaths, sociopaths and crusading Liberal-Progressives).
For reminding us of this important phenomenon, the still-civilized among us should offer our thanks to members of the American Press. By the many generous examples of their own infantile actions & behavior, the Press has reminded us of—and helped to drive home— the truly regressive nature of the Progressive personality, and by the infantile level of their thinking, they have reminded us of the barbarically regressive nature of modern Progressive “concepts‚” and “thought.‚”
Deserving of a very special thanks is the CNN network, which pushed the envelope of infantile prevarication in news reporting to new boundaries. Stubbornness in its initial refusals to admit errors even after they’d been exposed, throwing tantrums over matters of fact or over factual events they disliked, willingness to report “news‚” for which they had zero evidence or support, even to the extent of granting unsupported rumors the status of headline reporting, stubborn refusal to abandon an irresponsibly lax policy of verification even after it had resulted in long successions of proven-false narratives, and MUCH MORE, have all added up to making CNN the #1 star example of modern “fake news reporting,‚” and an outstanding example of how quickly and (semi-?) permanently that can destroy a news organ’s credibility with its public audience. THANK YOU, CNN!!
Morry Markovitz is a retired scientist, economist, author and businessman who still actively trades in commodity futures markets.
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