The past few years “Fake News” real and imagined has become so prevalent that almost every news item is treated with distinct suspicion. Various polls show about 60-70% of the public considers the media highly biased or particularly untrustworthy. Some reports like much of the Russia hoax reporting are downright false, but most of the problem is intense bias where so called journalists simply present the facts in misleading context. To illustrate: if President Trump walked across the Potomac River, the mainstream media headlines would be “Trump can’t swim.”
It’s no secret network news and print media have been in decline for years. The legacy networks are bleeding viewers and large city newspaper circulation is collapsing. Even the newspaper titans on the east and west coasts are struggling. The extraordinary erosion of the mainstream media is partly because of the explosion of internet information sources, but that proliferation was a backlash to the monolithic liberal domination of the mainstream media.
Average Americans are turning away from the mainstream media in droves because they have realized snobby coastal media elites are just running propaganda mills to advance their partisan agendas. So recent comments by New York Times Executive Editor, Dean Baquet, are amusing and stunning. Baquet laments “The greatest crisis in American journalism is the death of local news.” He then predicts “most local newspapers in America are going to die in the next five years.”
Baquet’s observations are so absurd and wrong, one must wonder does he think his audience is stupid or could he be an unaware moron? Like most liberals, he most likely considers regular folks unsophisticated rubes. His overarching thesis is completely backwards. It is national and international news that has gone off the rails. Local news is the only media you can trust.
Hopelessly mired in partisanship and political correctness, journalism in the capitals and big cities is dying a slow agonizing death. The national media is so incompetent and corrupt they would not know the truth if it crashed an airliner into their high-rise glass offices. National reporting is so muddled it is virtually impossible to find a cogent objective account of national issues. But you can find out what your city, county, school board, or state is doing with relative accuracy and transparency.
Local radio, newspapers, and TV are part of the communities they serve, so they diligently seek the truth because they live among us. The national media however has left the atmosphere; they have transcended the nation thinking they must save us from our Biblical morals and traditional values.
Baquet double downs on his ignorance with “Because we’re going to wake up one day and there are going to be entire states with no journalism or with little tiny pockets of journalism.” While big city newspapers are imploding, the reality is rural and small town newspapers are surviving and some even thriving. Print media certainly has challenges in a digital world, but most are adapting with both broadsheet and online presence.
Baquet is certain there is no threat to mega papers like his, but he exposes his extreme arrogance when he says “One of my jobs is to protect the view that, if you like us or not, we try to be fair and we try to get it right and we’re not influenced by political perspective.” Are you kidding? The New York Times is fair? Tries to get it right? Not influenced by politics? Outside the Times’ offices who believes this? Again, does he think us daft or is he simply dim-witted?
Mainstream media moguls are so impressed with themselves they fail to realize the stench in their reporting is from the rotting corpse of journalism. They delude themselves that the incredibly biased garbage they spew is democracy saving news; when in fact their abandonment of objectivity and truth gravely threatens self-government. When the people cannot find reliable information, they lose faith in all institutions.
The national press is failing the American people, but take heart. Your local media is still working for you and they are responsive to their audiences. The ivory towers of journalism may fall, but their replacements are already in your communities. Our republic is much stronger than some self-absorbed elite media twits.
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32
