The liberal press rebelled against reality – and lost

The New York Times featured another article about the slowing down of the liberal print media. Their featured corpse was The Denver Post, and the headline read: “Denver Post Rebels Against Its Hedge-Fund Ownership.” On the cover of the The Denver Post’s latest Sunday edition, the headline photo features a crowd of the Colorado staff, most of whom are hollowed away in silhouettes. The shadowy gaps are supposed to elicit pity from the readers about the recent, drastic cuts to the newspaper. Joining the photo, articles from the staffers themselves denounced the massive cuts. Instead of pleading for their jobs, however, the writers were demanding that the paper’s hedge fund owners either fight to keep the paper alive, or sell the paper to someone who wants to keep it alive.

(Article by Arthur Schaper republished from TownHall.com)

It is difficult to read that and not laugh. These journalists think of themselves as the avant-garde of some new political resistance. Since when do the workers in any profession get to unilaterally demand the employer/owner’s decisions and dictates? Have they forgotten that newspapers are a product and a service, both which must respond to public taste and the marketplace?

They haven’t necessarily forgotten it—they just choose not to believe it. Like much of the reporting from the liberal press over the last sixty years, today’s corporate journalists—if they can be called that still, with all the propagandizing and editorialized narrative-baiting—are still committed to a vision of how the world should work rather than how it actually works.

Famed conservative comic and pundit Evan Sayet discussed this self-delusion in a signature speech about modern liberals’ thought process (yes, they have one in a very limited sense). He went to greater length about the liberal media in another speech well worth the watch.

For the last three generations, college students have learned that the most important value is acceptance, or what Sayet called “indiscriminateness”. To overcome the evils of the world, one must stop recognizing any standard of good and evil. To point out differences between good and bad is tantamount to conflict-inducing bigotry. Surprisingly enough, this pernicious ideology entered Western thought starting with the hopelessly Romantic, anti-intellectual Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His radical ideas were dismissed in his day, since people had to rely on common sense just to get by. However, the incredible wealth and prosperity of the Western World post-World War II has enabled college students to consider and pursue Rousseau’s backward views without immediate hurt.

College journalism majors have been taught that advocacy, not objectivity, is the mainstay of their profession. These journalism students are specifically taught that they need to report on the sorrows of the downtrodden, represent the world as a fundamentally unfair place defined by poverty, disease, death; and that injustice cannot be vanquished but by rejecting traditional standards of morality.

Read more at: TownHall.com