In the aftermath of President Brick Tamland’s horrible debate performance, Leftists and the media (is there an echo in here?) have been stuck between a rock and a hard place. At least Bill Clinton isn’t involved or else it would be between a rock and a hard-on. Anyway, media types find themselves on the horns of a dilemma: continue to carry water for the Left, or actually do some reporting to confirm what we’ve been seeing for, oh, the past several years.
The latest victim, if you can call him that, of this dilemma is George Stephanopoulos, former White House Communications Director under the aforementioned Commander in Briefs and current lapdog…I mean journalist for ABC News. His crime? Answering a question about whether President Tamland could serve another four years. This got Georgie Boy in some hot water with his bosses, who demanded he clarify what he said and apologize for…and I’m not making this up…jeopardizing his and the network’s objectivity.
I’ll let you stop laughing before I continue.
Anyway, the Left is now concerned with appearing objective after spending decades not giving one tenth of one shit about it. Say, might that be because they’re covering up the fact they’ve been slobbering over President Tamland’s every move until he screwed the pound, let alone the pooch? Naaaaaaaaah!
So, let’s take a deep dive into objectivity and why the Left sucks at it.
objectivity
What the Left thinks it means – balanced reporting of the facts without emotion, which means not feeding the narrative of the Right
What it really means – balanced reporting of the facts without consideration of ideology
Back when I was young and stupid, I wanted to get into the journalism field. Not for the money because, well, there isn’t any in journalism, but because I wanted to be someone who could uncover the hidden truth. And as I went along in my studies, I grew more and more enamored with the romanticized ideal of what a reporter should be.
Then, I got to graduate school and heard an editor from a local paper say it was impossible for reporters to be objective. To say it blew my mind at the time would be an understatement. After years of having objectivity pounded into my young brain, here was someone in the journalism field telling me it was all bullshit (a position this person held years after the initial proclamation).
It was also around this time that a certain popular Democrat President started to wow people in the press, which made it easier to get them to slob on Slick Willie’s knob.
And I hope to all that’s holy it was only figuratively.
Granted, the press wasn’t completely objective in the 1980s. They made subtle (and not-so-subtle) jabs at Ronald Reagan during his tenure. Ironic, given how the press is covering President Tamland, but that’s a blog post for another time. Once the media threw up its collective hands and said “objectivity is impossible,” the blending of political ideologies and hard news was complete.
And journalism went in the shitter.
Then, with the advent of “reporters” like Taylor Lorenz, the shitter is the highest modern journalism can aspire to be.
Fortunately for the media, people let them slide because they still retained at least some credibility from being seen as legitimate news sources. No matter how much they shit on Republicans, conservatives, or anyone who isn’t them, people tended to give the press the benefit of the doubt. Anyone who disagreed with the idea these DNC stenographers were calling balls and strikes was written off as a partisan crank. Even when the alleged crank was an insider.
And guess who came along to fuck it all up. Donald Fucking Trump.
Trump made it possible for people to rip on the lack of objectivity in the media, not to mention the out-and-out partisan lying. From that point on, the Left couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone who was calling out their bullshit. Oh, and pissing off PETA.
The problem the media face right now can be traced back to when they decided objectivity was impossible. By choosing sides, they started eroding the veneer of honesty previous generations built, but at least they got to hang out at all the cool kids’ parties. Because that’s far more important than not being lapdogs to people you agree with politically.
By the way Leftists and media folks (there’s that echo again), that was a joke. Much like Taylor Lorenz’s reporting only intentionally funny.
What isn’t so funny is the implications of how media silence or out and out denial of President Tamland’s deteriorating mental condition. The larger scale implications are easy enough to pick out and bad enough as it is (a cardboard cutout of the President would be better suited mentally to be President), but from a journalistic standpoint, it’s pretty bad. If these journalists who are supposed to be reporting the news knew about this and stayed silent, their credibility should be fucked more than a porno star. This is a legitimate news story, but apparently our intellectual betters thought it might worry us too much to think our President has the mental capacity of a turnip, so they kept it to themselves.
At least, that’s the explanation that would make more sense than their sudden realization President Tamland is on the intellectual downside of a hill on the world’s tallest roller coaster and plummeting rapidly. Their feigned surprise only worsens the issue, an issue that would never have happened if they had been…objective.
The thing is objectivity isn’t as impossible as the Left and the media (I must be writing this from the bottom of the Grand Canyon) make it out to be. Yes, we all have biases and perspectives we bring into any situation, but objectivity doesn’t require you to not have them. It requires us to overcome them to provide as many sides of an event as possible. Of course, Leftists have made this impossible in recent years by taking the attitude no one outside of their intellectual gangbang has a valid point of view, so all they hear is what everyone else in their bubble hears: Leftist squawking points. That’s all well and good if you’re at a political rally, but it’s shitty when you’re in the news business.
The sad part is I’m not sure the media are ready to have a conversation about the place objectivity has in modern journalism because newsrooms have become mini political rallies of a sort. There are still a handful of reporters out there calling balls and strikes, but they’re few and far between compared to the multitude of dimwitted half-baked bloggers or social media “influencers” who call themselves reporters. The fact ABC News made George Stephanopoulos retract his statement (made while he was off the clock, by the way) shows how far down this rabbit hole we’ve gone. What ABC News did under the guise of maintaining objectivity is bullshit incarnate. If they were really concerned about objectivity, they would have been out front with the President Tamland story before everyone else, given it a fair treatment, and let the chips fall where they may. You know, like journalists used to do?
But something tells me ABC News was more concerned about getting invited to dinner parties and keeping access to the President than in telling the truth.
