Thursday, May 19, 2005

Media Decline Continues, Blind To Its Own Bias

Well the hits keep on coming with MSM. The President of the Newspaper Guild, Linda Foley, dropped this gem last week during a panel discussion at the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis:

"Journalists are not just being targeted verbally or politically. They are also being targeted for real in places like Iraq. And what outrages me as a representative of journalists is that there's not more outrage about the number and the brutality, and the cavalier nature of the U.S. military toward the killing of journalists in Iraq. I think it's just a scandal."

"It's not just U.S. journalists either, by the way. They target and kill journalists from other countries, particularly Arab countries, at news services like Al Jazeera, for example. They actually target them and blow up their studios, with impunity. This is all part of the culture that it is OK to blame the individual journalists, and it just takes the heat off of these media conglomerates that are part of the problem."

Guild Chief Under Fire for Comments About Attacks on Journalists in Iraq

How hilarious that she made this comment at a conference on media reform. And then she tries to wiggle out of it, ironically with the same fake but true argument that has become the norm:

Foley told E&P Thursday that her words were taken out of context by critics and said her original intent was to discuss how journalists are often scapegoated for their coverage. "This was almost an aside," she said. "But it is true that hundreds of journalists are killed around the world, and many have been killed in Iraq."

Out of context! Those statements are very clear. I am sick of hearing slanderous, yes slanderous, statements out of the media, only to be followed by excuses and denials. And then we are left watching the remaining members of the main stream media, one after another, weigh in to defend their own. I have come to the conclusion that journalism is dead in America, at least among the major news outlets.

Our news today starts from the assumption that everything the military says is a lie. They feed on each other and lend credence to each others tabloid news. I have always scorned the British media for their tabloid ways. However, at least they are honest about where they stand. The US media needs to just come clean and admit what they are. Leftist tabloid hacks.

Lets recap; Jayson Blair, Eason Jordan, Dan Rather, Newsweek and now Linda Foley. This list only scratches the surface. I had more but I flushed my list down the can.

A search of the Newspaper Guild’s website shows this little nugget listed under the group’s mission statement:

Raise the standards of journalism and ethics of the industry;

Mission Statement of The Newspaper Guild-CWA

Let’s just stop pretending. It is insulting and embarrassing.

In Sports:
Nats 3, Brewers 2
Livan Hernandez wins 6th straight.