Journalism, R. I. P. … By definition, progressives cannot be guilty of bias.

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VDH:

For a variety of historical and cultural reasons, most of those who work in the media are progressives. They believe that government must undertake to fix an array of social maladies, such as income inequality, perceived racial and gender disparities, and the general dangerous superstitions, bad habits, and cultural baggage of those of less education than reporters, investigative journalists, and Internet and television commentators.

Yet sometimes simply reporting on society’s perceived ills does not offer quite a rich enough landscape in which to save humanity. And sometimes reality offers examples that confound the progressive ideology.

Therefore, journalists often fabricate stories and justify their cons as necessary means to achieve their higher aims. The falsifications range from the absurd to the existential, as we’ve seen with the editing of 911 tapes and photoshopping of pictures of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case. The syndrome includes the organizing of a private and secretive liberal political guild like JournoList and the slaps on the wrist dealt to progressivemythographers and plagiarists such as Fareed Zakaria and Maureen Dowd.

The media spent far more time recently obsessed with the shooting death of a gorilla who seemed to threaten a toddler than it did the Memorial Day–weekend shootings of 64 in inner-city Chicago — despite the fact that Barack Obama had been a community organizer in Chicago, and one might think his résumé would bring attention to what has become regular weekend mass slaughter.

The one story offered a therapeutic opportunity to lament the system’s needless execution of a gentle expression of nature; the other story led to an elemental dead-end in the attempt to explain why young African Americans in the most liberal cities of the most liberal states habitually shoot one another at rates exceeding the violence in war zones of Afghanistan — and to the complete nonchalance of most media outlets.

In most cases, in initial accounts of crimes, the media omit detailed descriptions of those suspected of rape, assault, and murder, given that they feel full disclosure might perpetuate harmful stereotypes of disproportionate crime rates among young minority males. But there is one notable exception. At colleges, public-relations offices issue the most systematic and detailed ethnic and racial alerts about suspected campus assailants in flash e-mails to students and faculty — without much worry about whether these initial descriptions later prove accurate. Campus authorities have apparently decided that the safety of their students and their university’s reputation for security trump political correctness — in a way that is not true for the general public.

Recently, at an anti-Trump rally in San Diego, a Telemundo cameraman instructed protesters how to hold the Mexican flag to get the preferred video angle. On the other end of the journalistic spectrum, the iconic Katie Couric just released a documentary, Under the Gun, that was edited in an intellectually dishonest fashion to make it appear that clueless gun owners were stumped by a penetrating question from the narcissistic Couric — the documentary version of the disgraced Dan Rather’s fake-but-accurate National Guard memos, which were mythologized by Hollywood into the joke of a movie titled “Truth.” Couric now joins Rather, Brian Williams, Candy Crowley, and Jayson Blair in the pantheon of fallen fabulists and political operatives.

In the aftermath of Ben Rhodes’s disclosures about misleading the country on the Iranian deal, the State Department just admitted that someone (whom it mysteriously could not identify) had edited out of its taped archives an admission from a spokeswoman that the State Department had misled the press over the negotiations. That airbrushing was reminiscent of the White House’s recent Trotskyized video that cut out visiting French president FrançoisHollande’s reference to “Islamist terrorism.” Is there a White House Ministry of Truth that each day searches government videos to edit out anything that does not fit the narrative that the United States is under no threat from radical Islam?

Media outlets regularly castigate such right-wing villains as Scooter Libby, Dinesh D’Souza, and Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, and hope that they will be subjected to trumped-up criminal charges and perhaps even jailed — even as those outlets excuse or ignore the criminal behavior of Lois Lerner or Hillary and Bill Clinton on the unspoken premise that the former harm progressive causes, and therefore their civil rights are expendable, while the latter are socially and culturally progressive, and thus their ideology must trump their miscreant behavior.

Take the worst examples of Donald Trump’s most recent embarrassing behavior. His Trump University, like many other such transient for-profit institutions, allegedly played fast and loose with the truth in search of lucre. And the media are certainly right to fixate on all those who may have been misled by and suffered from Trump’s selfish profiteering. But the media fail at their own standards of vetting presidential candidates about profiting off higher education when they have largely ignored the far bigger con of Hillary Clinton price-gouging cash-strapped public universities like UCLA for $300,000 for 30 minutes of chatting — a per-minute rate of profit no doubt greater than Trump’s personal returns. Even worse is the con of “Honorary Chancellor” Bill Clinton garnering a reported $16 million between 2010 and 2015 from the for-profit Laureate International Universities, whose U.S. campuses have been plagued by financial controversies. During that period, Bill Clinton was perhaps the highest-salaried university “president” or “chancellor” in the world (and likely in the history of higher education) — and perhaps the only disbarred college chancellor in America. But to the media, all that is a non-story.

It was quite unacceptable for Donald Trump to attack a federal judge for releasing documents relating to lawsuits against Trump University. Trump attacked the judge both personally and on the basis that his Mexican-American heritage supposedly ensured his bias against the illegal-immigration lightning rod Trump. Trump should back off. No legal system can long endure when parties to a suit brazenly attack the integrity of the court and defame a sitting judge.

But by the same token the media ignored another aspect of the controversy. It is also unacceptable for a United States District Court judge to remain a member of La Raza Lawyers of San Diego, as Gonzalo Curiel has done. For all that group’s protestation about the origins, meaning, and recent philological history of the name La Raza, the term really means “the race.” It echoes a separatist and racially chauvinistic agenda dating from the 1960s, and a longer racist and anti-Semitic pedigree dating back to Francisco Franco’s fascist Spain and Benito Mussolini’s Axis Italy.

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The whole idea that journalism should be an arm of the government really got its start with Lenin.
Whenever Lenin put an inner party member out he insisted the news media airbrush out all photos showing that person from when he was in with the in-crowd.
The media complied willingly.
Even enthusiastically.
Pravda in the USSR, Press TV in Iran today, and so many of the alphabet networks in the USA have had no problem scrubbing the truth.
Just today, Jack Cashill is announcing a new book about the scrubbing of the news in 1996 about the downing of TWA 800.
He starts out:

On the pleasant summer evening of July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 left JFK Airport in New York bound for Paris. Twelve minutes after takeoff, about ten miles south of the popular south shore of Long Island, at least two surface-to-air missiles blew the 747 out of the sky, killing all 230 people on board.

I write the above with 100 percent confidence. I owe that confidence to the efforts of a small corps of committed individuals — eyewitnesses, independent researchers, whistleblowers from within the investigation, and family members who have turned their grief into action. In attempting to get at the truth, at least three of these people were arrested, several others were thrown off the TWA 800 investigation, and every one of them was ridiculed.

What follows is an expose of how the media played to the government’s tune because Bill Clinton didn’t want a bad narrative during an election season.

Interestingly enough Mr. Cashill does not totally blame the media for their compliance.
He says:

The fact that TWA 800 went down during the reelection campaign of a popular Democrat contributed mightily to the ensuing psychosis. This was less a media conspiracy than a collective pathology, as unwitting as it was unhealthy. So locked were the media into their delusions [That is was all the fault of a spontaneous fuel tank explosion.] they quickly came to mock those who did not share them.

Gee. And the media still loves the narratives over the facts…..
In Benghazi it was all the fault of a spontaneous demonstration.

Mr. Cashill’s work through FOIA has been slow, but amazing.
Perhaps one day we will have the truth about Benghazi…..where was Obama, Hillary when the Ambassador was calling frantically?

@Nanny G:

Whenever Lenin put an inner party member out he insisted the news media airbrush out all photos showing that person from when he was in with the in-crowd.

Erasing history is Standard Operating Procedure of socialist regimes. That tells you all you need to know about today’s MSM and political left.