‘I believe that if you rely on the print version of the New York Times, the first time you will learn about the Thomas controversy will be in tomorrow’s paper. Assuming they cover her resignation.”
‘I believe that if you rely on the print version of the New York Times, the first time you will learn about the Thomas controversy will be in tomorrow’s paper. Assuming they cover her resignation.”
The last issue of the NYT will roll off the presses in 2015.
Pace Steyn, “going over the falls.”
While the inability to adapt to new media is a problem for legacy behemoths, like NYT, it’s not their biggest problem.
No, the core problem for the legacy media is the decades old abandonment of objective, fact-based reporting in favour of opinion-shaping through editorial filters, op-ed masquerading as news, fact-shifting and raw political bias. Unbeknown to media elites at the time, the decision to transform news rooms into political engines was the death knell of outlets like NYT.
The new media simply confirmed consumers’ suspicions that they were being fed politicized news. Consumers adapt quickly. It’s not easy to undo the mindset of an entire generation of “journalists.”
I’ve seen alot of MFM coverage of this, for example on CFTO’s 6 o’clock news yesterday, but they’re all self-censoring the ‘go back to Germany and Poland and America’ comment, instead just saying she ‘criticized Israel’.
They’ve also left out the context of it being at a Jewish event being held at the White House. As commenters elsewhere have remarked, would the MFM not be telling us all of the details had e.g. Rush said at the White House on Martin Luther King Jr. Day that ‘Africans should go back to Africa where they came from’? No way.
I do not believe that journalists have ever been “objective, fact based” reporters. They have all had their biases and agendas. The reality now is that citizen journalists have access to the public through the internet and can out these charlatans. Career death cannot come soon enough to this “profession”.
A small thing but it speaks volumes about how the corporate media has politically filtered our information for generations.
Good to see the matrix getting unplugged.
I predict, in a year or two, we will hear from Thomas again. She will have a full on Ahenakew moment, it will be pitiful to witness.
Mark nailed it!!
Congratulations Ms. Thomas on an illustrious career that spanned decades. Job well done.
It’s not easy to undo the mindset of an entire generation of “journalists.”
~Mark Peters
Right you are.
Solution:
Editorial control over what gets printed.(plus make sure all the big stories like Climategate are covered)
Journalists with the wrong mindset go unpublished or have to rewrite until they get the story right before publication.
It’ll never happen but that is the only way to salvage the newpapers.
From what I read last year they know they’ve permanently lost half their market so they’ve decided to double down and go more hardcore Left to try and retain that part of their market share.
aka, they have went tabloid.
“From what I read last year they know they’ve permanently lost half their market so they’ve decided to double down and go more hardcore Left to try and retain that part of their market share.”
oz
The irony is that the Left in general and at all class levels indulge less in reading and information (that matters) than the Right.
It is even more ironic that any of the BIG news sources like NYT, Times, Newsweek, CBS, NBC etc…don’t at least try to move towards the right and try to steal some of FOX or DRUDGE markets. In a sea of lefty media mediocrity there is very little choice for right of centre print or viewing…You would think more businessmen would be tapping in a seemingly sure investment.
I guess it also confirms that the Right has more business flair than the Left will ever have.
Are they just waiting for bailouts? Typical.
Sorry certain commenter, just remember the old saying – hero for a minute, bum for a lifetime. No matter what good she may have done, she erased it and that’s the last memory we shall have of her.
While I agree that journalism has become increasingly political and biased, and I agree with the need for wholesale change, I don’t think I want news media to totally disappear. I think there needs to be something out there against which news reporters and analysts need to compare.
Also, even with the Internet, without “traditional”, big-money news outlets I think there’s a risk of losing press and speech freedoms down the road, if for no other reason than there being no one big enough to fight for them (i.e., defeat in detail), and that must not happen.
As a musing, I think that the more-rapid downfall of news organisations came when they started to call it “journalism” instead of “reporting”. The use of the word has an implication of daily reporting (“journal” from jour = day). But I think it takes more (and implies more) from the use of a journal…that is, a written recounting of thoughts and opinions and feelings, with some facts thrown in. Journals need not concern themselves with factual rigour or ethics, as they are personal diaries. And there are schools that teach and perpetuate that sort of thing, too, since, as mentioned, it’s about shaping opinion.
I think that we should stop calling it journalism (oxymoron: journalistic standards/ethics), and start insisting on news reporting again, without too much editing and just enough extra information to establish accurate context. Investigate the stories and their background information, instead of just accepting something as true. Identify opinion and analysis as such, instead of hiding behind reputations (and arguing from authority) that have long since been squandered. Stop looking for the soundbite, and instead work on the substance of the event/occurrence. Don’t let editors “fix” articles to omit certain key story details. Be open and honest about one’s political slant. And yes, defund the CBC, which no longer really has a justifiable public mandate to fulfill.
These are just my thoughts, but I’m most likely preaching to the choir.
There has been much comment (elsewhere, not here so much)that its a shame Helen had to go after one off-the-wall comment like that. I mean, she 90 right? Give her a break, goes the refrain.
Let’s have a look at recent precedent, shall we? Michael Savage got banned from Britain, he’s never -ever- said anything like Helen Thomas said.
Rush Limbaugh got bounced from his dream gig, football commentator on ESPN, for saying The Truth about sports media treatment of Donavan McNabb. Rush Limbaugh has never said anything racist or anti-semitic at all, much less something like Helen Thomas.
I’m sure many more examples can be recalled from recent events, where Conservatives have been fired over… well nothing really, just being Conservatives.
Sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose in this case, even the gnarly, ancient, goose brained anti-Semite Helen Thomas.
Resigning sounds more ” honourable ” than being fired but the facts show the day before she supposedely resigned, her agency told her they would not represent her anymore.
in other words;
Thomas was dishonorably “fired”.
Her agency “fired” her and that is a fact.
The resignation story is damage control – that is all it is.
Helen Thomas only cemented in the mindset of those who know better what they knew already: a lot of journalists are just horrid people.
“…a lot of journalists are just horrid people.”
I agree with Osumashi but I’d go further:
A lot of journalists, academics and politicians, intellectually and morally poisoned by neo-liberalism, have allowed themselves to become horrid persons.
And another thing:
Yesterday, I followed a suggestion and link from blog ColdHardFacts. I earnestly recommend the my fellow SDA readers and writers take the few minutes to read the article.
(www.coldhardfootballfacts.com/Documents/D-Day_5-09_NYT_editorial_6-7-44.pdf)
This is the New York Times lead editorial from June 7, 1944, the day after D-Day. Written by the grandfather of today’s Editor-in-Chief, Pinch Sulzberger, it expressed very noble and true views and sentiments. Simple and profound, actually.
It is simply unimaginable that the New York Times today would publish such an editorial. Pinch and the “progressive” “journalist” staff would be appalled.
MOST IMPORTANTLY, as ColdHardFacts cogently noted, it shows how far extreme leftward that Western neo-liberalism in general and the Democratic Party in particular have come in these decades. Ditto for all the leftist parties in the Anglosphere.
The editorial starts:
“The President’s prayer [Roosevelt’s D-Day radio prayer] last night was the nation’s prayer. This nation was born in the only revolution in history made in the name of God. It was borne of the conception that the rights of man are not conveyed to him by any accident of class or color, race or creed, are not conferred or withheld by any government, but are given him by God as the inalienable birthright of the human being…It is to defend this inherent right of the human being, the right of free will against the most ambitious tyranny ever that ever shadowed the earth that we are today storming the beaches of Europe with the legions of all the people, conquered and marked for conquest, who would rather die fighting than live as slaves…” From the New York Times!
Steyn always delivers.
Great editorial, Dave in Pa. I can’t think of,or even imagine,ONE editor,journo,or journo prof understang the true meaning of even 1/10th of those 66 year old words.