Andrew Breitbart has already welcomed you all to Big Journalism. Now I’d like to add my voice to his.

As you can see from our logo, Big Journalism will be a throwback in spirit to the freewheeling moxie of the glory days of American newspapers, long before a “school of journalism” was a gleam in some college provost’s eye, and before reporters got hired more for their telegenic qualities than their writing, reporting or critical-thinking skills.

So let me be blunt:  we’re not here to compete for Pulitzer Prizes, to sit on committees, to scratch each other’s backs on the weekend television wagfests or to conform to some arbitrary code of ethics cooked up in the days when the mainstream media was the only game in town, and had already begun to cozy up to the government and the establishment, thus abandoning its constitutional mission of keeping a finger on the pulse of America, and an eye on the crooks:

a each dawn I die cagney raft PDVD_002

Listen, I spent 25 years working in the MSM, beginning at the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, where a young pianist fresh out of the Eastman School of Music was turned into a pretty good police reporter in three months flat.  I made friendships there that have lasted a lifetime, worked with colleagues who went on to become important editors at outfits like Knight-Ridder, the AP and USA Today, as well as national sports columnists and star magazine writers.  I moved on to the San Francisco Examiner where, even as the paper’s classical music critic, I had a front-row seat for some of the biggest stories in recent American history, including the Peoples Temple disaster and the murders of George Moscone and Harvey Milk.  And then I moved to Time Magazine in New York City, where I spent 16 years writing about music and reporting from locations all over the world, particularly Berlin, Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union.  It was a great life, and I don’t regret a minute of it.

But something changed.  Around the time of the Iran-Contra affair, politics entered the newsroom.  Maybe it was Oliver North and his chest full of fruit salad.  Maybe it was Arthur Liman, grilling the witness.  Maybe it was Brendan Sullivan, shouting, “I’m not a potted plant!”  Still reeling from Ronald Reagan’s historic, 49-1 wipeout of Walter Mondale, reporters started rooting against the administration, and not just the op-ed columnists.  The ideal of American journalism – objectivity – began to be assaulted, at first obliquely and then openly.  Deconstructionism, the curse of the modern university, set in:  how can you really be objective?  Don’t we all bring our prejudices to bear on what we see and hear?  Isn’t it really impossible to know the truth?  Why bother?

And so American journalism began to look, sound and read more like European journalism, frankly partisan and often untrustworthy, even in its presentation of what we used to laughingly call “facts.”  By the time the Clinton Administration had succeeded the hapless rump parliament of G.H.W. Bush, the battle was joined and impeachment only served to drive another nail into the coffin of any Code of Ethics.

The election of 2000, and Bush Derangement Syndrome, was the end, and since then the MSM – having essentially self-selected itself into a giant Harvard fraternity, as conservatives like me left to do other things – has been at war, not only with its own readership, but with the country.  To watch the self-congratulatory logrolling of Morning Joe (which could be a good show, but isn’t) on MSNBC at dawn, and the roaring sneer-fest that is the station’s programming-bloc over four hours in the evening, a parade of Mr. Ed, Sputtering Chris, the Former Sportscaster, and the lovely and talented Rachel Maddow, is to see the real face of the leftist media, and what it thinks of you.

laughing

So welcome to the other side.  I am extremely proud to be joined in this venture not only by my colleagues here at breitbart.com but by the more than sixty writers and reporters who thus far have volunteered – volunteered! – to enter the fray.  As you can already see from Mark Klugmann’s trenchant analysis of the Honduran crisis, “E.V. Bone’s” first-of-many eviscerations of The New York Times, “Bo Obama’s” dog’s-eye view of the Oval Office, channeled by the brilliant Robert Ferrigno, with the great Patterico still to come, it’s our intention to present you with the best-written group blog in the blogosphere.  We’ll attack when necessary, make you laugh when possible, and try our best to keep you informed about the truth behind the day’s events, and the things they’re not telling you about.

Our contributors include not only veteran journalists and top columnists, but also best-selling novelists (and not just one or two, as you’ll see), top Hollywood screenwriters, prominent attorneys, and leaders in such disparate fields as the poetry of ancient Persia and the Sacred Writings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  (Today, by the way, is not only the first birthday of our sister site, Big Hollywood, it’s also the birthday of that great truth-seeker, Sherlock Holmes.) We range in age from 20 to 70, and we live all over the country.  Nor are we limited to the United States: already, we have correspondents in Britain, in Australia, in Dubai and two in Central America, with many more on the way.

The revolt against the MSM empire is well and truly begun – and we are Spartacus.

ActDouglasSpartacus

To a novelist and screenwriter like myself, who thought I had put journalism behind me more than a decade ago, the new media offers not only a global reach but also a thrilling new way of telling stories.  No longer need we simply assert and ask you to trust us: now, we can use pictures, links, and video clips to carry the argument forward and make our case.  Or at least get you to think about it in a way perhaps you never did before.  Because we believe the search for the truth is not some figment of Derrida’s imagination.  We believe that the truth, while elusive, is knowable, or at the very least worth trying to know.

We stand foursquare with the Founders.  We believe in the First Amendment, not just for we, but also for thee.  We believe the phrase, “Congress shall make no law…” could not possibly be clearer.  We despise “political correctness” and everything it represents.  We will not be told, “you can’t say that,” because to accept that stricture means we cannot think it, either.  We believe that freedom of inquiry, freedom of opinion and freedom of expression are the fundamental liberties upon which this country was founded.  And we will fight to defend them.

We are one with the poet, John Milton, who wrote in his great essay on press freedom, the Areopagitica: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race…” Truth is always to be put to the test, or else it becomes dogma.  And the battle never ends:

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed.  It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the world.  And perhaps this is the doom which Adam fell into, of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil.

In other words – if I may be so bold as to translate Milton – it is the spirit of free inquiry that makes us fully human.

In the days, weeks and months to come, you’ll meet more of our contributors, and we hope you will consider joining them.  If you’re a writer looking for a platform, an MSM insider looking to blow the whistle or spill some beans, an expert in a field who knows that every time she reads something about her profession in the paper, the story is wrong – if you’re one of these people, then please contact us through the site and join us.

The fight begins today.