George Stephanopoulos’s “interview” with James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart on this morning’s Good Morning America summed up everything that is wrong with institutional American journalism. No doubt it is even now speeding its way over to the Newseum for permanent enshrinement in the Hall of Shame.

First, the very fact that a partisan hack like Stephanopoulos is actually employed by ABC News is a disgrace in itself. In the old days of “real journalism,” PR men and political operatives found no welcome in a newsroom: they were considered far too tainted by their flackery to ever be credible as independent reporters or newsgatherers.  And yet here is “Steffi,” one of the architects of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and star of The War Room, segueing smoothly from blind loyalty to his impeached boss, to the author of a more-in-“sorrow”-than-in-anger tell-all, semi-mea-culpa memoir (for which he was paid $2.75 million), All Too Human: A Political Education, to prime spots in the ABC pantheon.

Is that all it takes — a quick, highly remunerative sheep-dip memoir, accompanied by a few bogus crocodile tears — to transform an apparatchik into a newsman?

But this is our culture today: cheap second-hand celebrity, such as Stephanopoulos’s, has come to replace accomplishment, and its kissing-cousin, access, has been substituted for integrity. You just know that if ABC couldn’t get Bill Clinton then Steffi was the next best thing, the same way CNN hired James Carville and Paul Begala, although with not quite the same breathtaking audacity of dope. (more…)

Once upon a time, the New York Times was a credible source of information, and many educators demanded that their students use it for this purpose. I recall my senior year in a parochial high school being instructed how to fold the newspaper along the seams so as to read it without having to spread it out wide. That was a very long time ago. Now that once-esteemed broadsheet is agenda-driven, rather than journalistically driven, and one of the many sources to take with a large grain of salt.

Under the stewardship of Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger, the Old Gray Lady is now known for printing all the news that fits his liberal Baby Boomer agenda, even in the most innocuous sections. The gardening column will somehow toss global warming into the article and let’s forget any objectivity in its science reporting. Needless to say, the Obama administration has this paper solidly in its pocket.

So I’ve learned to decipher Times articles for any legitimate documented facts instead of innuendo and this was particularly essential when the Times, for reasons know only to itself, decided to tarnish the Pope during this Easter season. The paper tried to imply that while the Pope was cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in Germany, he did not take steps to defrock a serial predator priest in Wisconsin. (more…)