Journalism is Dead—Long Live the Media!

Journalism is dead but conservatives still aren’t doing much about it — here is the great Victor Davis Hanson:

There still exists a physical media in the sense of airing current events. But it is not journalism as we once understood the disinterested reporting of the news. Journalism is now dead. The media lives on.

Reporters today believe that their coverage serves higher agendas of social justice, identity politics, “equality,” and diversity. To the degree a news account is expanded or ignored, praised or blasted, depends on its supposed utility to the effort to fundamentally transform the country into something unlike its founding.

At the recent third president-less White House Correspondents’ Dinner, passive-aggressive journalists whined that they were victims, standing on the barricades against the all-powerful, all-evil—and all absent—Donald Trump. If the attempt was to return professionalism to the evening and eschew the pathological celebrity obsessions of the past, the result was only more confirmation of the self-referential and narcissistic culture of the Washington press corps.

Why should we believe reporters suddenly worried about ethics, free inquiry, and speech?

No journalist who pontificates now about the supposedly First Amendment-violating Trump ever mentions that Barack Obama had Fox News’s James Rosen (and his relatives) monitored, that he surveilled the communications records of Associated Press reporters, or that he spoke with the press far less often than did Trump, and often fixated on Fox News.

Journalists themselves had no problem with colleagues colluding with the Clinton campaign as evidenced in the Wikileaks Podesta trove. There was never much introspection about why the elite press and media corps—loudly progressive and feminist—was decimated by #MeToo Movement allegations of long-standing sexual harassment and assault.

Were there serious worries voiced over journalistic ethics when CNN’s Donna Brazile leaked primary debate questions to the 2016 Clinton campaign? Did journalists speak out when journalist Candy Crowley abandoned her moderator role and turned into an Obama partisan in the 2012 second presidential debate? Were reporters at all worried when the Shorenstein Center cited 90 percent negative media coverage of the Trump campaign and presidency? Did they object much when Twitter and Facebook exiled conservative voices that they found inconvenient?

Read more: American Greatness

Image credit: www.amgreatness.com.