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…)

From Columbia University’s Journalism School’s website, a statement of their purpose for training journalists:

…finding out the truth of complicated situations, usually under a time constraint, and communicating it in a clear, engaging fashion to the public.

Similar rhetoric from NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute:

Serious journalism begins with an ideal of public service, a commitment to truth, accuracy and fairness, and a belief that democracy can work if people know what is happening in their world.

Sounds wonderful… but think twice about attending these schools, at least as a lucrative career choice.

I’d argue that a journalism degree is not necessary to be a member of today’s American mainstream media; all you seem to need is a willingness to chug lefty Kool Aid faster than Frank the Tank pounds beer bongs full of crappy, American adjunct lager. This means an obsession with class, race, gender, and a progressive world view. Legitimate issues?  Of course they are, and ones I’m often interested in as fields of study, but when the issues become tied with political aspirations long after the state has done everything possible to address them, an incessant focus on past injustices becomes not only counter productive but also transparently political… mere grabs for the keys to the government in order to effect social change. (more…)

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

So said Benito Mussolini, the leader of the closest governmental form of fascism in human history.

The media narrative relating the tea party movement to fascistic pining, based in the divisive rhetoric of the political left, emphasizes the institutional malpractice committed by establishment media on a daily basis.  It is as if J-School requires one to ignore history and the most basic of researching skills.  Nowhere can the enfeeblement of a culture through the corruption of entitlement be better seen than within our modern establishment media.  Why bother to understand the subject (or better yet,  examine objectively) when the paychecks will come anyway?

Case in point, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chris Hedges, who laments the collapse of political discourse within our nation, while contributing to the very thing he laments.  Truthfully, the article is nothing more than a communist diatribe against Wall Street and globalization (which is rather amusing considering the global goals of the communist left).  But what really bears mention regarding this article is the intellectual dishonesty apparent immediately through the use of false imagery:

This image drives Hedges’ narrative of the “mass of increasingly bitter people whose alienation, desperation and rage fuel emotionally driven and incoherent political agendas,” otherwise known as the tea party movement.

How do I know this image has nothing to do with the tea party movement?  I witnessed this “plant” first-hand, and Sharp Elbows (famous for slaying the beast, Phil Hare) of the St. Louis Tea Party Coalition shot the video in which we ran this infiltrator out of our rally.

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Recently Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley from 1996 to 2008 and prolific journalist/author, mourned “the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet’s most magnificent landforms,” the Himalayan glaciers.  In an LA Times opinion piece surveying what no longer works in the U.S., Schell cited areas like the environment, education, and transportation, and found American hopelessness, especially compared to contemporary China.

Schell’s “studying of melting glaciers” was likely related to a much-hyped warning from the World Wildlife Fund, which was revealed to be a sham, based on an anecdotal report.  But Schell’s warnings, along with his list of American failings, suggest a general ideological bias.

A recent challenge has been identifying the bias of the mainstream media.  Oddly enough, exposing ideological bias has long been a favored project in communication studies, usually practiced by leftists.  One method, much used by recent multicultural leftists, has held that consciousness and meaning are contingent social constructs.  Following such post-modernists as Lyotard, these folks regard discourse  as a composite of  linguistic, social, and cultural formulations.  One need only examine these to reveal the consciousness or mentality of an author or work. (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…)

For those in the mainstream media committed to report the false and libelous narrative of “Watergate Jr.,” “wiretapping” and “bugging,” I predict much egg on your J-school grad faces. In your rush to judgment to convict James O’Keefe and his companions, you vengeful political partisans of press forgot to ponder: “Was Mr. O’Keefe up to one of his patented and obvious clown nose-on hidden camera tricks, trying to make his subjects look foolish?” Blog commenters seem to be quicker on the uptake than six-figured Washington-based pundits these days. And I predict there will be tape to vindicate these four pranksters, too.