Through the wonder of mass layoffs, even journalists are having to admit that the news industry is collapsing. I used to work for a newspaper back in the '90s. It doesn't exist anymore. I'd be surprised if it did. We did a post recently on how the government is going to subsidize small newspapers because they're so important. Government-run press … great idea.
Even the Newseum closed down. What a tragedy.
POLITICO Magazine has a piece on how the collapse of the news industry is "taking its soul down with it."
What soul?
You motherfuckers don't have "a soul"
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) May 7, 2024
and the last three weeks of ignoring Jewish students being blocked on college campuses proves it. What fucking balls is this. pic.twitter.com/wcilH9Dzl7
A Jewish student this week tried to walk his college campus to class and masked occupiers shined strobe lights in his eyes and threatened to literally knock his teeth out.
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) May 7, 2024
Our media ignored it but still lectures us about tiki torches 6 years later. Thats your "soul" @jackshafer https://t.co/aP69ZLkSLb
How did we learn about that incident? Through social media. Which is all disinformation because it hasn't been vetted by "real" journalists.
Jack Shafer writes:
Wounded and limping, doubting its own future, American journalism seems to be losing a quality that carried it through a century and a half of trials: its swagger.
Swagger is the conformity-killing practice of journalism, often done in defiance of authority and custom, to tell a true story in its completeness, no matter whom it might offend. It causes some people to subscribe and others to cancel their subscriptions, and gives journalists the necessary courage and direction to do their best work. Swagger was once journalism’s calling card, but in recent decades it’s been sidelined. …
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But the loss is about more than just head count. The psychological approach journalists bring to their jobs has shifted. At one time, big city newspaper editors typified by the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee strode their properties like colossuses, barking orders and winning deference from all corners. Today’s newspaper editor comes clothed in the drab and accommodating aura of a bureaucrat, often indistinguishable from the publishers for whom they work. These top editors, who once ruled their staffs with tyrannical confidence, now flinch and cringe at the prospect of newsroom uprisings like the ones we’ve seen at NBC News, the New York Times, CNN and elsewhere. You could call these uprisings markers of swagger, but you’d be wrong. True swagger is found in works of journalism, not protests over hirings or the publication of a controversial piece.
Protests, like when the drones at the New York Times complained so much that an op-ed by Tom Cotton made them "less safe" that the editor lost his job. Works of journalism, like the Washington Post reporting on Cotton repeating a debunked lab-leak theory about COVID-19's origin.
A 25-year NPR veteran just resigned after being suspended for writing a piece about political bias at NPR. Speaking of NPR, they, along with most of the mainstream media, tried to censor the New York Post's story on Hunter Biden's laptop. Why? Because it would have hurt Joe Biden at the polls, period.
Journalists shouldn't swagger. They should walk around crouched in shame. They should learn to code.
Journalists are strange people. Both Whoopi Goldberg and Nicolle Wallace have said that if he's re-elected, Donald Trump is going to "disappear" all of the journalists. They have a stake in the 2024 election because if Trump wins, he'll ban all media (except The Gorilla Channel).
Oh, look, Shafer brings up Trump:
But thanks, in part, to a fall in status, as well as ever-irrational attacks from politicians like Donald Trump, today’s journalists routinely experience ridicule and harassment at public events like rallies and demonstrations. They’re not precisely pariahs in the new environment, but they’re no longer considered heroes in many places. Journalists don’t deserve any special pity, it should be noted. Police officers, teachers and even doctors often suffer more from the slings and arrows of the mob. But for journalists, the fall has been spectacular and seems never-ending.
Journalists don't deserve any special pity, and they should stop demanding it. Just report the news. It's that simple.
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