It is hard to believe that there are many people on the political right that do not know about or understand what Victor Davis Hanson writes about in the excerpts below. What is amazing then, is that few Republicans or conseratives have a plan to do anything about getting information to the uninformed and misinformed that doesn’t include billions of dollars in media buys that support the very liberal press they know is the problem.
In a column this week, Hanson tells the story of Dan Rather, Brian Williams, and George Stephanopoulos — men furthering their careers, getting rich, and pushing the leftist agenda even as they pose as “journalists.” He then writes:
Add up all junk journalism — the Rolling Stone’s serial lies about false rape stories from Sabrina Erdely, the Jayson Blair myths, the New Republic stable of fabricators, the Fareed Zakaria plagiarism — and one can see why the public distrusts the news in general and those who provide in particular.
The problem with current reporting is not the bogeymen of the free-for-all internet, where there are no laws in the arena, but the blue-chip grandees who suffer the additional wage of hypocrisy.
Titles and associations, not character or talent, created a sense of entitlement that so often leads to overreach. Not all, but most of our junk journalists are progressives, given the creed that sometimes a memo, a story, an angle might have to be stretched a bit too far for the noble aim of helping the people, or for assuaging one’s own guilt of becoming well-off and celebrity-conscious from muckraking journalism.
Hanson then relates a couple of rather disgusting examples of how he was cited in articles by people demonstrating the worst kind of journalism. It’s worth reading and not suprising to anyone who has been misquited or misrepresented in the press.
Here is Hanson’s close:
Turn on Brian Williams, read the L.A. Times’ lead stories, catch NPR on the radio, and it is often just liberal activism, careerism, and narcissism on the part of an elite who believes that their own activism exempts them from the contradictions of their own lives, as if privilege is not privilege if you crusade 9 to 5 on behalf of the unprivileged.
Read the entire article here.
Image credit: PJMedia/VictorHanson.com.
