Journalism is Dead—Long Live the Media!

CNN’s Jake Tapper finally had to remind his television audience that, contra to the Joe Biden rollout campaign video and the progressive gospel, Donald Trump did not excuse white nationalists and Klansmen during the 2017 Charlottesville violence.

Victor Davis Hanson

"There still exists a physical media in the sense of airing current events. But it is not journalism as we once understood the disinterested reporting of the news. Journalism is now dead. The media lives on.

"Reporters today believe that their coverage serves higher agendas of social justice, identity politics, “equality” and diversity. To the degree a news account is expanded or ignored, praised or blasted, depends on its supposed utility to the effort to fundamentally transform the country into something unlike its founding.

"At the recent third president-less White House Correspondents’ Dinner, passive-aggressive journalists whined that they were victims, standing on the barricades against the all-powerful, all-evil—and all absent—Donald Trump. If the attempt was to return professionalism to the evening and eschew the pathological celebrity obsessions of the past, the result was only more confirmation of the self-referential and narcissistic culture of the Washington press corps.

"Why should we believe reporters suddenly worried about ethics, and free inquiry and speech?

"No journalist who pontificates now about the supposedly First Amendment-violating Trump ever mentions that Barack Obama had Fox News’s James Rosen (and his relatives) monitored, surveilled the communications records of Associated Press reporters, spoke with the press far less often than did Trump, and often fixated on Fox News.

"Journalists themselves had no problem with colleagues colluding with the Clinton campaign as evidenced in the Wikileaks Podesta trove. There was never much introspection about why the elite press and media corps—loudly progressive and feminist—was decimated by Me Too Movement allegations of long-standing sexual harassment and assault." . . .