In December a Federal District Judge, Marco Hernandez, ruled against blogger Crystal Cox who was being sued for defamation by attorney Kevin Padrick, whom Cox accused of corruption on her blog. The ruling declared that as a blogger, Cox was not a journalist and cannot claim the protections afforded to mainstream reporters and news. I happen to agree with his decision, but the case raises the question about what actually defines a journalist. Considering what the mainstream media represents today, the line between genuine reportage and political advocacy has been completely blurred.

In the past, many famous and well-respected journalists had no formal training but honed their craft on the job, in many cases beginning their careers as copy boys/copy girls. Walter Cronkite, once cited as the most trusted man in America, was a college dropout who had a series of newspaper jobs reporting news and sports. Eric Sevareid, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley started their careers as broadcast journalists but never had journalism degrees. Dan Rather did receive a degree in journalism, and we can see how well that turned out once he decided to switch to advocacy journalism instead of the traditional who, what, when, where and how protocol of traditional journalism.

Advocacy journalism intentionally and transparently adopts a non-objective viewpoint for either a political or social agenda and has morphed today into nothing less than media bias and propaganda. Today the mainstream media is predominantly composed of liberal democrats, and this bias has been quite evident since the 2008 presidential race. There is also a marked difference between opinion and reportage journalism.

I have a hard time claiming to be a member of the fourth estate, although I have been writing for newspapers since 1998 as an op-ed columnist. During that time, however, I have covered news events and press conferences and submitted non-opinion articles. I never attended Journalism College, nor have I even taken one writing course. I had to drop out of college to support my mother who had had a stroke. Mark Steyn, who is a brilliant writer, never attended college at all but can write reams around many inhabiting the elitist realm of the New York Times. (more…)

Calm, cool, collected, and just slightly irascible, Eric Sevareid was the uncle who cuffed your ear instead of giving you a nickel. That was because he’d earned his bona fides the hard way: as one of Edward R. Murrow’s boys, Sevareid was in the thick of it during World War, from the fall of France, to the Battle of Britain, to the Pacific theater, where he once parachuted from a crashing airplane, then helped rescue the survivors. Reporters, and Americans, were made of sterner stuff back then.

As a kid, the Norwegian-American from North Dakota once paddled a canoe 2,250 miles from Minneapolis to the Hudson Bay; after the war he served as CBS’s bureau chief in Washington, took on Sen. McCarthy and had his own youthful leftist past investigated by the FBI. He spent the last part of his career providing two-minute commentaries about world affairs on the CBS Evening News. (more…)

Part saint, part hack, all fifties guy. Don Draper, call your office.

The mythical figure of the war correspondent has a special place in the history of American journalism. The images are indelibly etched in memory: Edward R. Murrow broadcasting live while Nazi planes showered London with bombs; Ernie Pyle telling the personal stories of life in the trenches and ultimately paying for those stories with his life; and in today’s war with the jihadists, Michael Yon’s amazing reports from Afghanistan. This kind of fearless reporting made for journalist-heroes: courageous men and women that all Americans could admire.

Contrast Murrow, Pyle, et al with the cowards populating today’s mainstream media outlets. Everyone in the media today – whether new or old – is a war correspondent, in fact if not in name. The war is here, around the globe and most of all within our borders, courtesy of bullies and thugs who have spent the better part of thirteen centuries killing non-believers and trying to force a backward, hateful ideology cloaked in the robes of religion upon the world. Yet, though this war includes not only body counts, but ultimately threatens the existence of the free press itself, the mainstream media meekly cowers as the foundations of free speech and a free society are worn away by Islamic gangsters. (more…)

There are rumblings that journalism schools, as we have known them, are on the decline in America.  It’s assumed that this is tied to the decline in job opportunities in newsrooms and magazines as those industries die an agonizingly slow and painful death.

In some corners the decline of the J-schools is being lamented almost as if it is the death of truth, itself.  In other corners it’s applauded as a welcome change from the elitist persona journalists have taken on. Why do they even like to be called “Journalists” anyway?  Doesn’t “Reporter” sound cooler, tougher?

Unlike the practice of law, medicine or teaching, journalism requires no license, no certificate and no college degree.  Just like the actors who spend years getting their Master’s Degree in Theatre Arts and come to Hollywood to secure that great bartending job, J-school graduates enter the job market with enormous debt and high expectations.  If they do get an entry-level position, I suspect they learn more about the actual business of journalism in their first month on the job than they did in their four years at college. (more…)