By REY FLORES
I am a news junkie. I no longer listen to music in my car, but only conservative talk radio. Therefore, people like me are especially angered by the fact that in our lifetime, we’ve seen journalism devolve into one big, awful joke.
Thank God for the Internet as well. Before that we were pretty much at the mercy of broadcast and print media, having to take their word that they were reporting factual news and not just delivering propaganda to the masses.
When I was in high school, my father had a subscription to Time Magazine. Since I was usually the first to get home from school, I would look forward to the day of the week when Time would be delivered to our mailbox. At that time, Time still had somewhat of a good reputation — unlike today.
My family and I were also part of the millions of viewers across America who would tune in every night to watch Walter Cronkite deliver the news on the CBS Evening News, with his signature signing-off with “And that’s the way it is” on whatever date that day was. Later we learned that Cronkite wasn’t really “the most trusted man in America.”
My parents both enjoyed buying a daily copy of the Chicago Sun-Times, so I was always encouraged to stay abreast of current world events as well as local ones.
While back then newsmen, newspapers, news periodicals, and newscasts were something many of us believed were always honest and unbiased, today we know that “news” programs have always had their biases since the invention of the printing press.
Today, the so-called news media outlets are about as trustworthy as an ambulance-chasing lawyer or politician in Washington, D.C., trying to sell us healthcare. As they say, you can’t trust them any further than you can throw them.
Not only are they untrustworthy, but they are deliberate purveyors of propaganda, false information, and the “fake news” we’ve all come to despise.
Another thing about so-called news programs and news websites today is how the anchors and commentators are no longer just that — they’ll inject themselves into political situations. Instead of doing their job of simply delivering the news, they become the news.
It used to be that anchors and reporters used to deliver unbiased news information, but today they also must put their two cents into everything they are reporting. Basically, all journalists have now been replaced by a bunch of quasi-celebrity TV personalities who opinionate and do nothing more.
Social media like Twitter are also places where these journalists can spew their venom with a total loss of civility. Last week, Kurt Eichenwald, a senior writer at the failing Newsweek magazine, angry about President Trump undoing Obamacare, tweeted out “As one w/ preexisting condition: I hope every GOP (congressman) who voted 4 Trumpcare sees a family member get a long-term condition, lose insurance, & die.” (Eichenwald later deleted the tweet.)
Then we have the whole 24-hour news channels that have way too much time on their hands. They have all the time in the world to keep regurgitating their own biased points and opinions, over and over until you either change the channel, turn off the TV, or simply lose your mind.
Millennials are an especially misinformed bunch, many of them having been raised watching comedians like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Bill Maher. The clowns are not journalists, but cable channels like Comedy Central have made sure to present them and their shows in a news anchor format so that the malleable young cannot discern between a real news broadcast and the ridiculous garbage presented therein.
Worse yet, it wasn’t just the audiences who were being duped and brainwashed: Stewart, Colbert, Maher, and now a gaggle of newcomers all now take themselves very seriously. These entertainers now consider themselves to be experts on American and world politics. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Then there’s the vulgarity of it all, with Colbert making crude homosexual jokes about President Trump and Vladimir Putin, comments which cannot be repeated anywhere, but especially not in a Catholic publication like The Wanderer.
Maher, not one to be outdone when it comes to crassness, has made incest jokes about President Trump and his daughter Ivanka. If any comedian had made such jokes like that about Obama and his daughters, that person would have been tarred, feathered, drawn and quartered, and run out of town on a rail.
The lines between news, comedy, and entertainment have been almost completely blurred. I really couldn’t tell you the difference between a character like CNN’s Don Lemon or Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah. Or that obnoxious Englishman John Oliver and Colbert himself, both smug, four-eyed beta male-types.
The funny thing is that you no longer see these “reporters” even make an attempt to seem like actual journalists. They wear their biases out in the open the way homosexuals unfurl their rainbow flags.
The schools of journalism for decades have been churning out the pretenders you see today. If not the schools themselves, you’ll see former Clinton staffers like George Stephanopoulos on ABC News and tax-evaders like the infamous Rev. Al Sharpton with his own “news” show on MSNBC.
As far as I’m concerned, journalism in its purest form is as dead as a door nail. There is no such thing as honest journalism anymore, barring a few independent news outlets on radio and online.
My recommendation to any young aspiring journalists is that you start taking over the newsrooms of America and shove those radical lefties straight out the door. Let’s make news great again!
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(Rey Flores is a Catholic writer and speaker. Contact Rey at reyfloresusa@gmail.com.)
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