By Harry Storm
What a shallow, trite and unsubstantial “profession” journalism – the career path I chose — turned out to be. Look how quickly and abjectly – and yet how proudly – it has jettisoned in all but name all the principles upon which is was supposed to be based: accuracy, being fair and balanced, being dispassionate and striving for objectivity, and behind all that, informing the public,
None of the above motivates the media today on political, social and cultural issues. Those principles have vanished like a puff of smoke in a strong wind. And with the disappearance – abdication, more like – of those principles, the Fourth Estate, the institution charged with informing the public by investigating, uncovering and exposing the truth, transformed –seemingly overnight – into a foot soldier in the culture wars, defending the cultural orthodoxy of the moment, during which other key civilizational principles such as freedom of speech became subordinate to identitarian politics at best or considered irrelevant or “bonkers”— to quote one well-known ginger-haired self-styled pundit — at worst.
This hasn’t really happened to other professionals: not to doctors, not to lawyers, not to engineers. Oh sure, their HR departments and their governmental and professional regulations are infested with woke. This is of course not only true, it’s a disaster of epic proportions civilizationally,
But, that being said, lawyers continue to lawyer, engineers continue to engineer. Those professionals at least try to still do their jobs. Lawyers may be affected indirectly or even personally by the nonsense coming from HR, but they’re still trying to win cases for their clients. Physicians may find DEI efforts where they practice annoying but they still see and treat patients.
But what do journalists do? Certainly not journalism, not if that term means anything more than being a foot soldier in a supercult. No, only in journalism have the institutions – and, sad to say, many of the people working in them and managing them – entirely deviated from their primary – actually their only – professional mission: informing the public, dispassionate reporting, investigating suspicious claims by government and others, or, to use a current example, trying to determine the origins of a virus responsible for killing millions of people worldwide.
To be sure, people calling themselves journalists still sit at their keyboards and put sentences together. But instead of adhering to the principles of journalism outlined above, media outlets and most of the “journalists” who work at them now desire to support and serve a political, cultural and social project all aimed at a top-down change in our society the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion and the subsequent Christian takeover of the Roman Empire.
In my view, so much of the civilizational storm we’re navigating today is is the result of this ruinous state of journalism. Whether it’s the suppression of information over the origins of COVID and the efficacy of masks and vaccines, the extent of police killings of unarmed blacks, the harms done to gender dysphoric children via so-called “affirmative care,”or the wildly excessive claims of climate activists, it is the disappearance of fact-based reporting and investigative journalism that question orthodoxies that is the common thread that allowed these ideas to proliferate virtually unchallenged.
Had journalists been doing their actual jobs, none of these issues would be any as near widespread as they are today. Instead, the media willingly surrendered without a fight, making it easy for other sectors to be infected with the same cultural virus.
The transformation of the media from investigator to cheerleader is what connects the dots and what made it so easy for arcane academic ideas like critical race theory, social justice and the looming climate catastrophe to spread to other institutions – government, corporate, tech, NGOs, not-for-profit, and the world of arts — so quickly and convincingly. Look around: there’s been virtually no investigative reporting done except into the threat posed right-wing extremism, even as the much bigger civilizational threat to our freedoms comes from a more entrenched and insidious place.
The bottom line is this: Despite all the technological changes over the past few decades, the best way to stop misinformation of any kind is a media that doggedly searches for the truth no matter what. Unfortunately, because of journalism’s current dysfunctional state, there are no checks on the absurd ideas emanating from academia or the misinformation being handed to us from on high.
I believe – or at least I would like to believe — that those working in the media today – I think it’s a misnomer to continue to call them journalists – will be looked back on with the same contempt as their partisan and sensationalist forebears in the yellow and sensational press of the 19th century. And they will deserve it.
