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…)

You might think because of the First Amendment that the press will always be free. Think again.

There are those at work today who would like the government to nationalize the news media much like they did the banks and auto industry. They base their ideas on the oft referred to “crisis in journalism” happening with the demise of many great newspapers, the closing of many national magazines, and the decrease of advertising revenue to support the same.

A few politicians and many socialistic leaning activists in places of power in Washington DC are suggesting the government subsidize journalism with tax credits and cash grants because the “capitalist media” has failed. They want to enslave journalists to the state so they can maintain a free press. That’s kind of like cutting down the trees to save the forest; doesn’t make any sense.

Take a look at what the government has done with the banks and the auto industry after giving them some bailout money. They now tell the banks who to make loans to and how to structure the wages of their CEOs. After handing a few billion dollars to the auto industry, a couple of faceless government appointed bureaucrats arbitrarily shut down certain automobile dealerships – many of which were well managed and profitable. Now they are dictating union wages and what kind of cars the auto companies are to build. It’s a simple principle: The government controls whatever it subsidizes.

If you don’t like what The New York Times prints or what you hear on the nightly news or what is broadcast on talk radio – imagine how much you’ll enjoy the Big Government News Service giving you all the news THEY decide that’s fit to print.

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I keep thinking/hoping, eventually journalists are going to wake up.

I’ve spent 30 years in the business, always cynical about its mission (the business is supposed to attract cynics,) and waiting and wondering if good sense and logic will finally win out over the obvious politics.

A ray of hope.

Veteran journalists (many now retired) are starting to speak out about what they are seeing with todays “journalists.”

“If you watch an Obama news conference, and watched a Bush news conference previous to that, where correspondents sit in their seats with their hands folded on their laps, [it's] as if they are in the room with a monarch and they have to wait to be recognized by the president,” says Sid Davis, the former NBC Washington bureau chief who covered nine presidents. “It looks like they are watching a funeral service at [Washington funeral firm] Joseph Gawler’s and it shouldn’t be that way.”

Gawler draws no distinction between Obama and Bush as far as news conferences go, but we’ll leave that one alone for now. At least Bush held news conferences. JFK held one every 16.4 days, and I’m talking about the wide open, “anything goes” news conferences where any question can be asked, not the quickies where 2 people are hand-picked for their ability to fire fluff balls. “Excuse me, you, in the back, from Better Homes and Leftist Gardens.”

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The blogosphere is all abuzz over yesterday’s comments from Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, in which he opined about the annoyance of today’s cable news television programming.  Apparently cable news gets in the way of his desire for American citizens to do nothing but worship our government, rather than challenge it.

We need new catalysts for quality news and entertainment programming.  I hunger for quality news.  I’m tired of the right and the left.  There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to FOX and to MSNBC: Out. Off. End. Goodbye. It would be a big favor to political discourse; our ability to do our work here in Congress, and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and more importantly, in their future.

Many are making this solely about the issue of the Fairness Doctrine or of Net Neutrality.  And to some extent, this is true.  But there really is a much larger picture at play here – a transition period to government-run media.

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For the last few weeks, I’ve been finalizing some intensive research and was in the process of writing up a multi-part post that was to be published after the mid-term elections.  One of the installments in the series will focus on the left’s push for a public takeover of the media – touching upon everything from the historical aspect of traditional media’s financial collapse, to the left’s “Media Reform” project and “New Public Media” plan, to the complete portfolio of George Soros’ media investments.

However, in light of the most recent onslaught of attacks against Andrew Breitbart and the Big sites, I thought it might be prudent to extract a few different elements from this future series and publish an early post today.  Because given the concerted efforts to use a variety of media and advocacy outlets to manufacture falsehoods in an attempt to intimidate and silence the voice of conservatives, I thought it important for others to see how –and why – some of these media outlets are connected.  Because it extends well beyond Media Matters, NPR, and Huffington Post.

While the debate continues to rage over the prospect of defunding National Public Radio (NPR) of its federal taxpayer dollars in the wake of Juan Williams’ firing, the left is busy tending to its strategy.  They’ve once again taken to opining about their Utopian notion of a national public media system, hoisting it as the antidote to partisan viewpoint peddling.  And by partisan viewpoints, they mean those that aren’t *their* viewpoints.

The left’s fantasies were further spotlighted by several recent developments in the media industry, only weeks and days apart from one another.

• On October 2, NPR announces $1 million grant from the Knight Foundation
• On October 7, Center for Public Integrity, an often cited source for liberal journalists, announces a $1.7 million grant from the Knight Foundation.  CPI has also received millions in funding from George Soros’ Open Society Institute, including another recent grant of $100,000.
• On October 17, NPR announces a $1.8 million grant from George Soros’ Open Society Institute
• On October 18, the Huffington Post announces the merger of its non-profit journalism arm into the Center For Public Integrity, with an additional $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation for the merger.
• On October 20, Media Matters announces a $1 million grant from George Soros’ Open Society Institute
• On October 26, Google announces a $2 million grant to the Knight Foundation for media innovation

In the midst of this funding blitz, the left quickly summoned its boycotts and attempts at silencing voices against the right: (more…)

Guess what, the little cabal of journalists is being broken up.

This is frightening news to most of those in the activist old media, but for somebody like myself who has worked in that media for 30 years, I welcome the breath of fresh air that it brings.

Leftists love the word, “progressive” unless the progress hurts them (for the record, I cringe whenever somebody on the right uses the word “progressive” to describe the left because there is nothing progressive about their policies.)

You’d have to be blind (which many in the activist old media are) to not see this coming and to not see the far-reaching effect that this will have on the business, but agenda is more important than ratings.

It really hurts the fragile ego of somebody with a half dozen Emmys on their desk to get their butt kicked on a story by some blogger laying in bed in his/her pajamas. Ask Dan Rather. (more…)

Read Part One here.

Another reason for the spotty media coverage of the war along our southern border is manpower.  Local media simply doesn’t have the resources to investigate and  cover all of the stories in their area — even when they are aware of them.

The reliably liberal Mainstream Media has more resources, but is hamstrung by ideology.  Amnesty proponents have spokesmen ready to downplay any news story that hurts their cause and the national media makes ample use of those spokesmen.  The battles along the border don’t fit the MSM narrative.

Money and fear are the cartels’ big weapons–and they use them both.  Journalists are a favorite target of the Mexican cartels.  According to Reuters, they’ve already succeeded in silencing journalists along much of the Mexican side.

Hitmen from the Gulf cartel based over the border from Texas are paying reporters around $500 a month and showering them with liquor and prostitutes to intimidate and silence colleagues at radio stations and newspapers in towns near the Laredo-Brownsville area, journalists and editors say.

“Our newsrooms have been infiltrated by these reporters, they monitor what we write, they know where we live. With this system, the narcos have direct control over us,” said a local newspaper editor who declined to be named for safety.

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Worth revisiting this classic from Iowahawk’s Media Violence Project:

Journalists love whistleblowers. Just not when the whistle is blown on them.

Journalists love transparency.  As long as they’re not the ones being exposed.

No steadfast journalism rule is unbendable when it comes to justifying and protecting the racket that is modern journalism, specifically, political journalism in the United States today. The ends justify the means for the Democrat Media Complex. They lie when they claim to be objective. They lie when they claim to be unbiased, because these so called “truth seekers” are guilty of engaging in open political warfare. And when the whistle is blown, they simply double down. “Journolist” — like Media Matters, but more insidious, if that’s possible — is an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, technology and “the masses” uncovered the conspiracy:

Talk radio and the Internet have allowed outsiders the ability to challenge a multiple generational shift from journalism being about the story, to journalism being crafted toward a partisan end. From Newsweek killing the Lewinsky story to the Swift Boat veterans (until the undermedia pressure got too big) to the Dan Rather implosion to the open attempt to keep the Al Gore masseuse story under wraps to the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter debacle to the Van Jones admission of missing the story to the networks ignoring the ACORN video footage to the media playing up trumped up charges of racism in the Tea Party — while ignoring exculpatory evidence — to the mother of all media-as-political weaponry: the non-vetting of candidate Obama, the mainstream media has shown that it is in an ideological death spiral. And the ground is right here.

American journalism died a long time ago; today Tucker Carlson got around to running the obituary. What The Daily Caller has unearthed proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that most media organizations are either complicit by participation in the treachery that is Journolist, or are guilty of sitting back and watching Alinsky warfare being waged against all that challenged the progressive orthodoxy. The scandal predictably involves journalists posing as professors posing as experts. But dressed down they are nothing but street thugs. They deserve the deepest levels of public consternation. We must demand that they do. (more…)

A New Jersey court decision has determined that a writer in Washington State named Shellee Hale is not protected by New Jersey’s shield law protecting journalists from being forced to reveal their sources because… wait for it… the court says she’s not a journalist but merely a blogger.

Some folks are saying the ruling is the death of online journalism and an effort to cement journalistic power with the sick and dying mainstream media. As a former newshound and right-of-center web reporter/editor, I’m not so sure I would ring the alarm bells just yet.

Let’s look at a few salient things involving the Hale case. Based on the available information, Hale found herself in hot water with a New Jersey software company for an entry she wrote in the comment section of a blog regarding the company, which subsequently sued her for defamation. During the course of the trial, the company also wanted to know the source of the information in Hale’s comment, which she refused to disclose.

Set aside for a moment the refusal, the blogging, her past writing for other media outlets and so forth and take a look at something that seems largely overlooked in this. According to the coverage of this event that I’ve been able to find, Hale wasn’t reporting on anything at the time of her ill-fated musings. She was posting a comment about a subject on a blog. I couldn’t even find anything indicating this was part of a research effort for a news story. It looks like she just put up something in a comment section and that was that. (more…)

With a whiff of nostalgia, I can imagine the old time journalist with the smell of coffee and cigarettes wafting through the click and clang of the typewriter.   Fifty years ago, a “journalist” had the ring of a dispassionate, creative, honest, fair, and trusted detective/storyteller.  Fifty years ago, if you graduated from an accredited journalism school, you were presumed “unbiased.”  Much as the physician takes an oath that she will “first, do no harm,” the “journalist” title meant that you were first, unbiased and balanced. Neutrality in the story was as necessary as it was assumed.

Sometime between half a century ago and today, something went very, very wrong.

We can speculate on what the “something” was, but we may never know for sure.  Much like the wind blows, there is no discernible source, but still we know it blows. Journalism became slanted to the left to the degree that the right had almost no voice by the mid-1980s.   Almost no voice, until Rush Limbaugh came on the scene.  Almost 30 years later, the tables have turned.  The problem for these journalists is that they have functioned robotically and cavalierly for so long, that they are not aware of the reality around them.  Things have changed. Drastically. (more…)

You know who you are. From the New York Times a year ago:

Republicans have long accused mainstream journalists of being on the payroll of President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, a common refrain of favoritism, especially from those on the losing end of an election.

But this year the accusation has a new twist: In some notable cases it has become true, with several prominent journalists now on the payrolls of Obama and Democratic congressional leaders.

An unusual number of journalists from prominent, mainstream organizations started new government jobs in January, providing new kindling to the debate over whether Obama is receiving unusually favorable treatment in the news media.

The number is now up to fourteen.

This will end well, sure it will. After all, when you sell out your journalistic integrity to a cause, what could possibly go wrong? (more…)