In his most recent editorial, Matt Taibbi provides countless examples of how “journalists” are clearly not honest, ethical professionals any longer. Get past his strong detest for Donald Trump and the rest of the piece illustrates the current sad state of journalism:
The main thing accomplished by removing those types of editorials from newspapers — apart from scaring the hell out of editors — is to shield readers from knowledge of what a major segment of American society is thinking.
It also guarantees that opinion writers and editors alike will shape views to avoid upsetting colleagues, which means that instead of hearing what our differences are and how we might address those issues, newspaper readers will instead be presented with page after page of people professing to agree with one another. That’s not agitation, that’s misinformation.
Show trials have existed throughout the history of totalitarian regimes, not to deliver justice, but to scare the population into strict compliance with the state. In 2020 the Leftist Cult known as “Progressivism” has clearly communicated to all, with journalists at the front of the list, that any deviation from the official Woke narrative will be met with cancelation & shaming, enforced by mob rule, both online and sometimes in person. The scared sheep, formerly known as journalists, have received the message loud & clear and will now comply. For they know the consequences if they don’t.
The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of “balance,” i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This vision of media stressed accuracy, truth, and trust in the reader’s judgment as the routes to positive social change.
For all our infamous failings, journalists once had some toughness to them. We were supposed to be willing to go to jail for sources we might not even like, and fly off to war zones or disaster areas without question when editors asked. It was also once considered a virtue to flout the disapproval of colleagues to fight for stories we believed in (Watergate, for instance).
