By DEXTER DUGGAN
Before GPS, there were “maps,” those stiff, folded pieces of paper in the car’s glove compartment — did some drivers call it the map compartment instead? — that showed motorists how to get around.
What if the map showed that Indianapolis was ten miles west of Phoenix, or Salt Lake City north of Quebec City? That the ocean on the east was the Pacific, and the ocean beyond California was the Atlantic? What use would the map have been? Or, for that matter, the GPS if it was no more reliable these days?
People looked to newspapers — and, later, also electronic reporting — for guidance of another sort in their daily lives. What were the facts they reliably could base decisions on?
The old-fashioned openly partisan press — where “Republican” or “Democrat” in the title on the masthead showed exactly who the paper favored — had been replaced by a hopefully more neutral recording of events, if not flawlessly so.
True, for decades many of the big dailies in the latter twentieth century — and the electronic newsrooms that took their cues from the newspapers — showed more of a willingness to give Democratic Party politicians the benefit of the doubt, and viewed Republicans more with suspicion.
The network news from New York didn’t exactly seem balanced? Whatever the telecast emphasized or minimized maybe pretty well reflected what already had been on the front page of that morning’s New York Times, written and edited not so far from networks’ Manhattan headquarters.
Over the years, a generic complaint against newspapers, whether their editorial pages were liberal or conservative, was that their official opinion views seeped over onto or even determined coverage on their news pages.
But contemporary slanting stopped even trying to be subtle as the twentieth century wound into the twenty-first. By the time braggart Donald Trump vied with deep-dyed corruptocrat Hillary Clinton for the presidency in 2016, Times writer Jim Rutenberg openly conceded the dominant anti-Trump vinegar in reporters’ veins.
Reporters entertained the repellent antics of liberal Democrats Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton but grew grimly determined to stop Republican Trump.
As the subsequently victorious Trump presided from the White House without hoaxes being able to expel him, supposedly neutral journalists grew all the more frantic, vicious, and untruthful.
Recently there were some notable instances of newsrooms successfully imposing their writers’ personal political views on upper-level newspaper management. If such Trump-like swagger by supposedly neutral reporters broke out into public view in a few cases, the rotten results also were fed to other media consumers daily.
Last week’s hardcopy issue of The Wanderer, dated for June 18, noted two incidents. In one, fierce New York Times newsroom opposition caused the removal of editorial-page editor James Bennet and the reassignment of his deputy Jim Dao.
(The Wanderer page one, “In the Glare of the Flames — Rioters’ Rule Doesn’t Look So Different from Old Red Guard.”)
The Times’ opinion editors’ thought-crime had been publishing an opinion column by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, expressing the view that federal troops actually might be needed to combat the danger of rioters, looters ,and arsonists popping up around the nation.
Even if the Times’ left-wing newsroom ideologues strongly disagreed with Cotton’s common sense, his was an idea probably shared by the majority of worried Americans. That newsroom meanwhile routinely had tolerated all sorts of other advocacy on the opinion pages, including those of permissive pro-abortionists and even a Taliban leader.
In addition, the veteran executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, Stan Wischnowski, was purged because extremist Inquirer staffers were angered by a three-word headline, “Buildings Matter, Too,” above an article by the paper’s architecture critic lamenting both “deadly racism” and also rioters’ damage to downtown Philadelphia.
To acknowledge left-wing rioters’ destruction of businesses, housing, and the provision of the daily requirements of life spelled the end of an executive journalist’s job.
Another example of newsrooms being ideological warzones, with all the firepower coming from the left side, was reported on June 15 by National Public Radio regarding the Los Angeles Times.
Forget the color-blindness that the civil-rights movement once sought. Replace it with the color-crazed. Old race-obsessed Louisiana, which had measured people’s portion of black blood with words identifying them like quadroon and octoroon, wasn’t all that different from the LA Times.
NPR reported: “Some journalists have used terms such as ‘internal uprising’ to describe their anger over racial inequity at the paper. Scores have participated in intense internal debates over the LA Times’ coverage of recent protests and hiring practices, to the point that senior editors have weighed in, promising to listen and learn.”
And these left-wingers don’t like too much acknowledgment of what’s actually worrying most Americans. One writer, NPR reported, “said the newspaper had focused too squarely and too often on the question of looting,” which allegedly constituted pandering to its white readers.
According to NPR, the writer continued, “We can’t constantly pander to our primarily white audience with stories like this that affirm their biases.” Such complaints brought a pledge from the paper’s executive editor, NPR said, that there’d be a formal review of how the Times covered and characterized the protests.
Just remember that the next time you try to read about downtown being under assault.
An example of the flames-fanning that dominant media descend to when pushing their propaganda occurred after the tragic fatal shooting of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta on June 12.
A video showed Brooks running away after he grabbed a Taser from one of two police officers who had been interviewing him about his sobriety as they stood in a Wendy’s restaurant parking lot at night. Police were called to the restaurant after Brooks fell asleep in a car, blocking the customer drive-through lane.
Tasers are less lethal than firearms, but there’s still some possibility of their causing serious injury or death.
After the fleeing Brooks turned over his shoulder and fired the Taser, an officer pursuing on foot fatally shot him.
A longer, 43-minute video showed the officers and Brooks chatting at length in a respectful manner, although he was unsure what city he was in. Brooks didn’t slur his words but altered his story about exactly how much he had drunk, and of what alcoholic beverage. When one officer said they were just trying to make sure he was safe to drive, Brooks calmly replied, “I know, man.”
He offered to leave the car parked in the lot and walk home.
After a breath test that Brooks consented to, one officer said, “I think you’ve had too much to drink to be driving,” and said to put his hands behind his back as the officer started to handcuff one hand. Quickly changing his manner, Brooks began resisting while the officers repeatedly said to stop fighting and to get his hands off the Taser.
However, a “news” article posted June 15 at the strongly left-wing UK Guardian began by fancifully describing the incident as one of “an unarmed black man who was shot twice in the back by a white Atlanta police officer on Friday after he fell asleep in his car.”
The article proceeded with comments about policing that holds all black people in fear. It falsely said the officers “insisted on a breathalyzer test” when they plainly did not.
Taking the test “is completely up to you,” one of the officers actually had said. “Yes, I will,” Brooks replied emphatically.
Replete with the standard admonitions against police practices, the UK Guardian article neglected to find anyone to comment that scuffling with the police, stealing one of their Tasers, running away then firing it back toward them could be dangerous.
Numerous other “news” accounts also described the Taser-carrying Brooks as being “unarmed.”
The possibility of excessive police force in the shooting certainly merited examination. But the UK Guardian’s initial inflammatory imagery of an unarmed, sleeping black man being shot in the back showed the necessity to examine journalistic practices that flames-fanning media propagandists apparently feel unaccountable for.
Change Agents
The Wanderer asked some of its sources to comment on ideologically militant newsrooms.
Virginia’s Mary Ann Kreitzer, who runs the Les Femmes — The Truth blog: “Many people today are not critical thinkers. They get their opinions from the talking heads that all echo each other. The brainwashed liberals just repeat the politically correct views they’re fed every night by CNN and MSNBC.
“If you repeat a lie often enough people will believe it, especially if they’ve been formed by liberal teachers from the playpen,” Kreitzer said. “Facts don’t matter to them. Feelings are everything. The propaganda machines in the mainstream media and social media all censor the information given to the public.
“Unless people have the will to search for the truth, they will simply repeat the lies,” she said. “Dumbing down the education system and hiring liberals to form the minds of the populace have been very successful. Journalism is dead. ‘Reporters’ now see themselves as change agents. We’re seeing the results.”
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard: “We are in the midst of a full-blown culture war that most of the country would prefer to be left out of, but the radicals on the left are intent on forcing everyone to choose a side. Most of the media is already largely on their side, but the increasingly militant left will not settle for ‘largely’ when it comes to choosing sides.
“That’s why you are seeing publications collapse and capitulate,” Querard added. “It also means fewer remaining journalists and a lot more #FakeNews because they serve an ideological master, as opposed to the truth.”
National conservative commentator Quin Hillyer: “The college radicals now are taking over major newsrooms, shutting down dissent and trampling respectful debate. Worse, the publishers and/or editors are surrendering to these cultural Marxists. This is a horrible development for the public square, and for the civic realm writ large.”
Veteran Los Angeles and San Francisco television and radio reporter and talk host Barbara Simpson: “The goal of a free and independent press in this country is about to become a thing of the past — if, in fact, that hasn’t already happened. When newsroom staff can pressure managers to kill stories and/or headlines and when editors quit because of internal political pressure in the newsroom, I believe that is the end.
“The public has already lost confidence in the accuracy of news reporting — in print and on TV — because they see the disparity between what is happening in our country and how it is portrayed in the media. Politics has become the measure of ‘news reporting,’ and if reality doesn’t match the politics, politics wins,” Simpson said.
“The visceral hate of President Trump permeates virtually all media — news and talk — and as a result, the disruptions, looting, riots, and anti-police activities are presented as a noble cause for people who claim, and complain, that they’ve been held down by this country,” she said.
“Never mind the Civil War, never mind the hundreds of pieces of legislation and millions of dollars spent to enable racial equality over the years,” Simpson said. “None of that counts, and any who disagrees is to be destroyed — politically, professionally and personally.”
Anarchist Nihilism
Rob Haney, a retired chairman of the Phoenix-based Maricopa County Republican Committee: “I believe that ideologically militant newsrooms are merely a continuing manifestation that the social norms of the U.S. and the world have been tragically altered. Those norms had been based upon the ten Judeo-Christian basic principles.”
The nineteenth-century French political scientist “Alexis de Tocqueville asserted, after touring the U.S. in 1831, that the success of America stems from the fundamental religious principles that circumscribe Americans’ daily lives and permeated the public square,” Haney said. “The attacks on the Judeo-Christian people and principles throughout the world have been clearly evident during the past century.
“Satanic Communist ideologues have infiltrated all of our institutions and nearly destroyed our societal norms,” he said. “The anarchist nihilism of Antifa and Black Lives Matter organizations throughout the country have obtained their objectives through riots, property damage, and threats of bodily harm.
“Our local, state, and federal organizations have now become like family crime syndicates,” Haney said. “Even the U.S. Supreme Court has obviously been co-opted. The implications are ominous and I fear that we are in for a very rough time. Pray that the Lord finds more just people in the United States than He did in Sodom and Gomorrah.”
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