by
M.
Richard Maxson
Much
of Western media is a mixture of sensationalist accusations, fear
mongering, half-truths,
and slanted opinion. There is no real news in
this country.
A German Parliamentarian
may have put it best when he said, “Americans don’t want hard
news, they want to be entertained.” That is
exactly what we get. National news starts off with bum, pa bum, pa
bum, the anxiety of
the music to build the fear and anticipation and then at the end
there is always the “fluff piece.” Did you want to know what is
going on in the outside world? Sorry people, you don’t need to
know. We know what’s best for you to see and hear. Just get with
the program.
This
type of narcissism echoes Soviet level reporting. The tragedy of
those lies in the Soviet media was that reporters were forced to lie
to save their lives. Stop toeing the party line and you might find
yourself doing hard labor in a Siberian gulag. The tragedy of
these lies in the United States is that the narcissistic reporters
are doing this voluntarily. The notion of honest reporting is utterly
alien to them. For them, truth is always defined by their ideological
needs. Even worse, if they stop toeing the party line, they might
find themselves without a job.
American
journalist Stephen Kinzer sized
it up like this,
“The great curse of our press in the West is willingness to accept
the official narrative.”
Blatant,
obvious untruths or half-truths are attacks on common sense yet
“American
journalists are merely stenographers,” he
said. “They’re
sitting down at a press conference, they write down what some
government spokesman says, then they go and print that in a
newspaper. If
it is more important they
call the State Department, and the Defense Department, and several
think tanks, and some congressmen. And they think, ‘Well I sure
covered the landscape on this one!’”
World
news is even worse. “It’s
amazing to see how many people have built reputations as commentators
on foreign countries and world affairs who have never been there,
have no idea...of what those countries are,”
Kinzer said. “It’s
because they are seeing the entire world from Washington’s Deep
State perspective,
and don’t think there is any other perspective worth having,”
he added. A
perfect example is Russia and Ukraine.
We’ve
come to accept bad journalism as truth. That is to say, we’ve come
to accept political bias and unbalanced inquiry into various subjects
as good honest journalism, when in reality it’s subjective opinion
passed off as certain truth. In other words it’s a lie
covered in some truth.
We’ve
seen these extreme
voices dominate the airwaves for much
too long. Often, the
arguments presented are purely identity
politics, or based on
progressive ideology with zero push back. No
one will, or is allowed, to question the
narrative or you will be called a spreader of mis-information, a
racist, or a white terrorist.
It’s very rare to
see a healthy debate, or for some networks to even give space to
opposing sides. There’s an air of hyper-partisanship, no matter
what network you tune into.
Those
of us that use critical and analytical thinking to find the truth are
quickly labeled and categorized. The
greatest "conspiracies" of the past year? The Wuhan Lab
Leak, the Hunter Biden Laptop, the truth about Fauci and
the pandemic, the Kennedy assassination,
the
list goes on and on. Each time, we
reported the facts
we
were called insane and accused of spreading "disinformation."
It’s
truly amazing to
watch
the decline of this profession into such willing subservience. We
don’t have any core of regular columnists or people trying to
challenge established narratives. We do have voices that pop up
periodically, like
Ariana Pekary, producer at MSNBC. She’s
left the network and, on her exit, wrote an extremely scathing letter
about the nature of its programming. New York Times, Bari Weiss who
quit and described
a hostile work environment in which her colleagues would much rather
‘cancel’ her than allow her to express a different opinion.
Andrew Sullivan, formerly of New York Magazine, had a similar lament.
He spoke of his endless frustration at the lack of diversity of
thought.
These
are writers with integrity but
they’re so drowned out by the regular columnists who just voice the
same script
over and over again. The job of journalists is to rebel against the
narrative. We are out there as the eyes and ears of the world. If you
don’t want to do it, fine, but don’t pretend that you’re doing
it, and sit in your little cubicle and think of the stereotypes
you’ve been fed and just regurgitate them. The
United States no longer has journalism in the main stream media,
not journalism, it’s just public relations.
