When Journalism was a Thing

Brovard.

An open letter to journalists, particularly those in North America

You are working in a dead profession that you all had a part in killing. The time for denial is over. Journalism has been dead for a very long time. Deal with it.

The list of your sins is too long to place in a single volume of a book, but you have much to answer for.

For starters, you openly lie to each and every news consumer with your every story by cribbing from press releases and parroting whatever tidbit you hear from public relations hacks, and pretend it is original research.

That is your first lie and everything else begins from there. You have done no research on how to better do your jobs. You have the nerve to run to focus groups and market researchers to tell you what the public is thinking, and how to better pander to them with your deceptions.

You have caused wars. People have died and been falsely imprisoned thanks to your ignorant propaganda. You have spread lies that have forever altered and ruined lives, and no, there is not a single story you can cite that can make up for the countless deaths that you are responsible for. The lives you purported to save cannot nullify a single one your irresponsible ways have caused.

You have spread hate. You have spread prejudice. You have spread fear. You have spread absolute panic. You have spread lies. You have turned ordinary people into targets to be reviled for life. You have constructed false pecking orders, rewarding psychopaths and narcissists who have contributed nothing to society, causing untold damage. You have confused running a Bedlam with being journalists, rigging coverage with loaded language, distorted videography, and selective reportage.

You have no moral high ground to take, and you have proven to be unteachable.

You have incited the populace to treat their fellow human being as monsters. You have perpetuated countless stereotypes, an ironic twist as it was the journalist Walter Lippmann who coined the term.

You have plagiarized and stolen ideas. You have smeared the reputations of countless lost souls as you cheered on grifters, swindlers, liars, rapists, psychopaths, and murderers who appealed to you. You have let lies go unchallenged as you stalked and hunted anyone who does not think just like you, and then pretended as if your xenophobic tendencies did not exist. You have fabricated stories or allowed others to do it for you.

You have become shrill, irrational, paranoid, and deluded monomaniacs as you threw your countless childish temper tantrums in public. You have pretended to go through war zones, even as your own video footage gives your choreographed games away. You are not fooling those with a working mind. Grow up.

You have sexually harassed employees and generously employed a casting couch as you drank too much and snorted even more on the job — and then went out and condemned those who play in the same gutter as you.

You have ignored stories that mattered because they involved the poor, the foreign, the disabled, and the uncharismatic time and again. You have ignored genuine rape victims as you fawned over the liars. You have cost the economy billions of dollars as you extolled the brilliance of con men such as Kenneth Lay, Tyler Cassity, and Bernie Ebbers. You have bankrupted hard-working people. You have cost those people jobs, their homes, their dignity, and peace of mind forever because the notion of actual work and research repulsed you. You have been clueless, racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic, all while trying to pretend you extol something that resembles progressive values. Stop believing your own hype. It is as fake as your concern for humanity.

Because your newsrooms have been stubbornly white and male. The way you spin your yarns have always been and continues to be misogynistic patriarchal in structure. You have set up false divides as you demanded that civilians be bombed in the name of morality, but of the real tyranny in the world, you have seen it, but kept unrepentantly quiet.

Your logic is nonexistent. You liberally appeal to authority, stoop to personal attacks as you commit strawman fallacies, and the confirmation bias. You have made fun of the mentally ill and bullied people you deemed unhip, poor, and homely. You fill up your pages and newscasts with celebrity garbage and troll social media instead of getting off your backsides to do actual work.

Your sophistry is childish, yet treacherous. You look down on others as you boast, gloat, and puff your way up the ladder.

You have destroyed the industry with arrogance, deceit, and immaturity, and now expect a single soul other than your mothers to actually believe a word you say.

There will always be the lost and the fearful who think they need to hear lies and insults to hide from reality and truth — the two most important goals to reach for any journalist, yet both are routinely ignored in lieu of fluff.

The last handful of journalists who still do their jobs cannot keep a dead profession going. Media concentration is out of control, and do not look to Canadians for a clue as their own journalists have become paupers holding their tin cans, asking their government whether they have a dime — and had they done their jobs and paid attention, they would already know the answer is their government is as broke as they are.

You have become mudslingers covered in the stench of your own laziness. There will be those forever ruined and traumatized thanks to your games.

And now you have been reduced to the vile and uninspired bullying of the President of the United States because he played you and you never saw it coming. He was the love of your shallow life, and if it weren’t for your decades’ long drooling over him, he would not have made it further than any of you ever will.

When he was aligned with the Left and the Democrats, none of his practices or beliefs bothered you or got you to expose his ways — he is a product of your side of the fence, but now you scream and writhe in agony. When he was one of yours, you cheered him on. Do not think for one second that you can fool all of the people all of the time.

And now you are praying that your own country implodes to prove he should not have been president, and your petty and sick games are causing instability, and millions of people will suffer because you cannot face how ugly and disgusting you have become as a profession. That is sick and pathological. Stop sabotaging the very people you vowed to protect by liberating truth from lies. The last president praised you as his regime flattered you, and many of you got plum patronage appointments as a result all the while press freedoms were being actively eroded by that same regime, and now you know there is no cushy landing for any of you under the current regime. You are not as cunning as you fancy yourselves to be.

Where were you when young people were being recruited by terrorists in their own schools?

Where were you when countless women were being beaten and tortured in their own homes?

Where were you when pedophiles were getting positions of power and luring in their prey for decades uninterrupted?

Where were you when the poor were destroyed and denied their basic human rights?

Where were you when people and institutions who promised to right wrongs, merely gave themselves paper crowns as they took the money for themselves?

Where were you when the robber barons of the modern age were actively hoarding money as they destroyed industries, privacy, and personal freedoms?

You were too busy ignoring them as you drooled over Kardashian backsides because you have been kissing any backside that comes from money, and obliviously parroting what those manipulative people told you to think.

It does not matter if you fancy yourself as a liberal or a conservative, you all do the same rotten thing, day in and day out.

You are not the smartest or most cunning people around. You are not shrewd. You are not impressive. You never were and you never will be. Your conniving and calculated lies have become too transparent to swallow. There is no denying it. There is no justifying it. There is no deflecting attention away from your gross incompetence by attacking those who see what you have done and remember every single transgression.

For those of us who seen first-hand what you have done, we will neither forget, nor keep silent.

You did not like when the President told you that you were all fake news for one reason: because the truth hurts. He knows that truth because he made a very enviable and viable career knowing who you all really were all along.

So, to each and every one of you:

Shame on you. Shame on you for your lies, manipulations, prejudices, and vendettas. You can continue to justify your rot, but you cannot turn it into anything else.

It is rot and it is a reflection on your broken soul.

My heart aches for every person who you willfully killed or destroyed by pen or by microphone just so you could pretend you had a scoop and a story for a cocktail party or memoir. None of you are worthy or trustworthy enough to change your ways because you will always try to justify every horrible thing you ever did as you mulishly misuse your destructive and antagonistic narrative templates that always cast you as some sort of hero no one could possibly survive without, regardless how villainous you have repeatedly proven yourselves to be.

Your lofty degree or position cannot nullify your iniquities. Your posh New York City address cannot hide the fact you are bigoted thieves, followers, enablers, and vultures with a limited understanding of the world or your fellow human being, and must resort to reading a script to know what to think.

You cannot keep banking on everyone being afraid of you, or fretting they won’t get fawning coverage, or worse, being the victim of a relentless character assassination. Some of us do not care what the desperate and cowardly think because it is the sum total of your actions that have caused the world one crisis too many. Some people can stand alone as they stand up to you, and can see reality and truth despite your spiral into a void of your own making. You may be groping in that dark, but not everyone has fallen into that abyss.

Like a philandering spouse who brings home disease, lies, excuses, and disrepute on those who believed those vows, you have squandered your goodwill. You cannot deny what you have done. You cannot sweet talk those harmed by your disloyalty to truth into giving you another chance.

You can no longer make threats that the world cannot leave and survive without you.

Because there is one truth you cannot face: that the world survived just fine without journalism for centuries before, and it — and democracy — will continue to progress even better without your meddling and presumptuous attempts at social engineering. No one is obligated to indulge in your grandiose fantasies, now or ever again. Enough is enough.

May whatever discipline that takes your place keep your lazy and malicious arrogance out of their ideology, and never look back because a bad media creates a bad world.

And that bad world has put up with your self-absorbed inhumanity long enough.

Alexandra Kitty

Preface

As a journalist who wrote about the business of journalism, its ethics, and its groupthink, what I saw perpetually disturbed me. There was a certain cocky obliviousness that was slowly killing the profession, and my work and research at the time proved it: ownership of newspapers was no longer stable or was in many hands, and editors and publishers, who once reigned for years in the same coveted spot, were now lucky to survive a couple of years in the position.

I saw it all first-hand. I saw the ideological stagnation. I saw the disdain and contempt for the common folk who were the news consumers. I saw the cluelessness of how to retain audiences, let alone expand the base. Writing hard news stories for youth was shunned. I saw the structural sickness all around me, and by 2005, I had my first book published, Don’t Believe It!: How lies become news.

The book was more than just a guide on how to spot dishonest and deceptive news stories: it was about how and why those problems ended up in the news in the first place. I felt as if I were a doctor who was diagnosing a critically ill patient, but there was a cure and a rigorous treatment available; so long as the patient understood there was a sickness, and took steps to get better. The patient, however, insisted that there was nothing wrong, and was the model of perfect health.

Sadly, the patient did not see the depth of seriousness of the precarious condition, and in November 2016, passed away.

And now I am writing about my profession once again; this time feeling as if I am a coroner. It is a very unsettling notion, yet the standard of quality since my last foray into writing about the news media at length is shocking.

There was a single man who felled the press: a US businessman by the name of Donald J. Trump. I had not intended to mention this improbable press slayer in this book; though, circumstances compel me to include the one person who took on an entire profession — and won. The press, not just in the US, but globally, are still in shock that the US reporters’ collective best efforts proved to be no match for a man with no political experience — but since the 1970s, was a master without peer in controlling the press.

If the news media has taken a hysterical and childishly petty disdain for him, it is merely a case of a one-sided love affair that soured. Once upon a time, Trump shamelessly and vigorously courted the press, and they, in turn, shamelessly and vigorously threw themselves at him, writing stories about him that had no business being covered, because there was no story there at all. They heaped on the accolades on The Donald and they were his greatest fans.

The relationship turned over time, and when Trump discovered that Twitter — which "was like owning The New York Times with no overhead", as he reportedly likened it — could help him completely bypass the media, he promptly dumped them. The scorned and the jilted were furious at the slight, vowing to malign him and openly support his rival for the US presidency. Hillary Rodham Clinton had previously been the object of the press’s cruel coverage, as she had many insufferable faults, an oblivious hubris that sabotaged her at every turn, and no bubbly personality to charm them; however, suddenly, Clinton was the belle of the press’s peculiar and twisted farce of a ball, and efforts to bury their one-time love, Trump, were in overdrive. But they could do nothing to stop him.

They had a very good track record at derailing careers in US politics: stopping one-time candidate Gary Hart from vying for office with a single photograph, which hinted he was not all that into marital monogamy. Richard Nixon’s position as president was no match for two young reporters, either.

But with Trump — a man who they knew all too well — they were powerless against him, and their narrative that they were always the righteous protagonist winners turned out to be mere spiteful fantasy.

They did not see Trump’s rise or that it meant their fall was just around the corner, but he was not the architect of their irrelevance in modern society: it was journalists themselves who made their profession one to distrust and ignore.

Even as a twenty-something journalist, I saw the cataclysm coming. I saw it, and did what I could to snap the profession out of its slumber, but journalists long-ago forgot how to see their surroundings, and hence, could not see their own downfall approaching.

This book chronicles the demise of journalism: not only how and why it came to be, but also what its replacement needs to do in order not to fall into the same vortex that destroyed a once seemingly invincible profession. Society not only needs data to progress and grow, but it also needs proper context. Throwing a barrage of random facts is not enough — we need to be able to make sense of those facts by trained minds, and this is the precise reason journalism has always been a crucial calling.

We must find ways to gather facts, and carefully interpret truth and reality as they are, not as we wish them to be. Journalism is not the medium. It is the art and science of finding and verifying information before disseminating it to the public.

It can be done. It must be done, but it cannot happen until we open ourselves to the truth and reality we now face. Journalists are unwilling to face it, but citizens must not follow their lead of being in denial, and hoping a few cosmetic changes and abandonment of ideals will do it for them.

One important note to reading this book: I have taken many case studies to illustrate my points, but this is not a comprehensive encyclopedia of every journalistic sin ever committed, nor was it ever intended to be one. If a particular strain of virus is not chronicled here in print, it does not mean I have not taken it into my equations. I have selected certain stories and issues that most realistically reflect the key factors that contributed to the fall of journalism, and tried to keep it as current as possible. If I were to take such an epic undertaking, there would be hundreds of volumes, and there is no need to belabor a point.

And now, let us begin at the end.

Part One

A Requiem for a Noble Profession

Chapter One

What was journalism?

It was a special edition of the syndicated version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and it was Hometown Heroes week: the contestants were the three US soldiers who stopped a terrorist on a bus in France and their $100,000 question was: Which of the following groups did not make Time magazine’s Person of the Year: 1984: Republicans, 1975: Women, 2002: Whistleblowers, or 1960: Scientists?

The group used interesting logic to get to the right answer: it could not be the Republicans, as a news magazine would not take an ideological side. They are to remain neutral; hence no political party could expect such a lofty honor.

In an era where overtly partisan news operations such as the Fox News Channel have replaced fact with opinion, the function of the press has morphed from information-gatherers and disseminators to cheerleaders and enablers. These days, media outlets can openly applaud political parties without feeling fraudulent and unprofessional. It is a different world, but one that came at a price: the press had large audiences, most of whom did not have a college education, but despite the fact that there are now a record number of university-educated citizens with graduates and even doctorates, journalism consumption is at an all-time low. Newspapers, once the heart and soul of a community, have been shuttered, television and radio ratings are in decline, and even Internet news sites are suffering financial losses and are cutting staff as their audiences are losing interest in their listicles.

The anarchy has had its consequences, and the first is that journalism has lost its place. In the 2016 US presidential election, the press took sides, deciding that the Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton was the shoo-in over her Republican rival Donald John Trump. She had all the positive press, as the media decided she was the logical and more rational choice. There once was a time when the press would have stayed out of such matters, yet they banked on their perceived power to guide the electorate to Clinton.

It was a peculiar decree, given that Clinton wasn’t always blessed with positive media coverage. In fact, she had received negative press coverage for decades, from the moment her husband Bill Clinton ran for US president, to her stint as Secretary of State. Her press before Trump ran for president was consistently negative and often personal. While Trump repeatedly complained that the election was rigged, Hillary Clinton claimed that a vast right-wing conspiracy was trying to destroy her husband, when his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was exposed.

When she first ran to be on the Democratic presidential ticket in 2008, she was seen as inferior to the highly endearing, sociable, and charismatic Barack Obama, who eventually won the nomination and two terms in the White House. She failed to inspire then, and even at her second go, she still played second fiddle to rival Bernie Sanders, who electrified younger crowds and she narrowly eked out a victory.

She was hardly ever a media darling, but when Trump blew into the campaign, suddenly Clinton’s image fortunes radically changed. Trump had publicly toyed with running for president once before, in the late 1980s, but as a Democratic candidate, yet his past as a more liberal-thinker had been buried and his press also changed, and as a result of which he faced uniformed media scrutiny.

But on Election Day, all the journalistic decrees were ignored and Trump won. The press was shut out and of all the media players from print to the Internet, only Matt Drudge had a pulse on the mood of Americans.

How did journalism fall from being king-maker, gatekeeper, agenda-setter, and fate-sealer, to becoming irrelevant?

Some in the profession, such as Ian Gill, theorize the news producers should be publicly funded with tax dollars, but that theory misses the point: if journalism was truly useful and connected to audiences, they would buy it voluntarily, and not be forced to fund it against their will, even if it does not provide any use to them.

That line of thinking completely ignores the fact that if journalism were doing its job, there would be no need for charity, as people would willingly tune in or read the product.

Worse, and more disgraceful to the profession, is that journalists are those who are supposed to know the mindsets, problems, and realities of the world they observe and cover for a living: if they have no pulse on the public they report on and report to, then they have no business being in the profession. It means what they are presenting is inaccurate or untruthful. It is tantamount to being a fraud.

If there is one profession that cannot use ignorance of the zeitgeist or ortgeist as an excuse, it is the profession that chronicles the times and places that are made up of people from every walk of life. Journalists are part fact-gatherers, part storytellers: to do either with competency, one must be aware of truth, reality, and the perception of both in the general public. To be a journalist is to be a historian, psychologist, anthropologist, criminologist, economist, and psychologist.

In other words, a journalist is the eye of reason amid the chaos, anarchy, unrest, destruction, and zealousness. They are to provide facts and evidence so people can make the right, productive, rational, and sensible choices according to their own wants, needs, beliefs, and circumstances. It is not a pulpit to preach or tell people how to think or what to do. If something is not working properly, it is the journalists who are to let people know. It is not about passing judgment or talking down to audiences.

Yet journalism has been misused to belittle groups, push agendas, misrepresent people, and gossip with propaganda and manipulation. Audiences could see it and began to tune out.

If the traditional press had taken a turn downward, online journalism did not pick up the slack or improve the product. The tone was always smug, sanctimonious, and snarky, but it also has a distinctly partisan bent: Left or Right, balance is nowhere in the equations, yet print had also been openly partisan during the Penny Press era. That is, until technology improved and wire services made it more financially beneficial to replace the rhetoric with objective reportage; hence, journalistic liberation began.

When online journalism emerged, however, it took decided steps back to a partisan spin. Technology made it simple to get audiences searching for validation and reassurance that their biases were truth. It seemed foolproof, yet despite the seemingly popularity of sites such as BuzzFeed and Politico, their power is not all that it seems, as they are tethered and their audiences restricted.

Nowhere has journalism’s — and social media’s — diminishing clout shown to be fact than the otherwise improbable Trumpian Rise to president. The media had been unrelenting in highlighting and stating that Republican candidate Donald J. Trump was too crude and unqualified to be in the Oval Office, while the Democrat contender Hillary Clinton was hyper-qualified. Trump did not fit the pattern of a president; ergo, he would lose. He was the inept and boorish villain to Clinton’s faultless and sensible heroine, and every major media outlet projected a Clinton win by a comfortable margin.

So certain were journalists that Clinton would be victorious that they made their predictions public with authority. Both traditional and online journalists and commentators used bold authority to make their decrees.

Californian Professor Philip Seib certainly did so on July 30, 2016 in the Huffington Post, when he erroneously postulated that Hillary Clinton would win. He held this view because voters, male and female from both political stripes, would be compelled to vote for the first female president, even if they did not like her, and that Trump could not get his voters compelled to go out and mark their ballots.

He was hardly the only one who did not grasp the reality around him. Cliston Brown, writing in the New York Observer (a property owned by Trump’s son-in-law, interestingly enough), made the same prediction on November 7, 2016, proffering that an unprecedented Latino turnout would propel her to the White House. While Trump was closing the gap, it meant very little, as other elections of the past showed similar narrowing of support, only to see the candidate to lose, assuming that all factors of past elections were the same as this one.

The Canadian and UK press were also in complete lockstep with their US counterparts, as The Guardian’s Martin Kettle did in his October 27, 2016 piece, assuming the pre-election polls were representative and had no confirmation bias. Taking Trump’s campaigning in states such as North Carolina and Utah as a sign that he would defend [his] own territories rather than attack in Clinton’s missed the point that there may have been another reason to shore up strongholds. This is because Clinton had lost states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, where it was assumed voters there would stay loyal. There were assumed safe states, where Clinton had not visited for months during her campaign, and the results were catastrophic for her bid for president.

It was also catastrophic for the press as their role of barometer. Almost none in the press saw the obvious discontent brewing in the election: it was class warfare with the well-heeled, university-educated big-city citizens supporting Clinton, while the financially-struggling blue-collar Americans backed Trump (referred by the degrading euphemism populist), with many of those voters stating their feelings of discontent. The problem was that journalists ignored their voices and dismissed them as racist, sexist, and unimportant.

If reporters were scientists, they would have conducted a bad study. Their sample size was skewed and not representative of the group they were studying. It is not just the limousine liberals and their champagne socialist children who knew how to get to a voting station and mark their choice on a ballet. The willful ignorance did not just cost Clinton a victory, it showed that the press had lost its clout and competence.

There were signs screaming that Clinton was not going to grab that brass ring: there was no sign that the Democrats were going to gain the majority in The House or The Senate, hinting that the notion that the country was moving in a liberal direction was highly unlikely. It was also unlikely that the argument that it was Hillary’s turn to be president was going to sway enough voters to give in to anyone’s sense of entitlement, particularly to those voters who were in fear of becoming homeless and destitute because they believed an anemic economy would keep them jobless. Those voters were repulsed by celebrity gossip and entertainment news TMZ, a site that chronicled celebrities such as Miley Cyrus telling them how to vote as they sipped champagne, and bragged about their mansions and designer shoes, as those stars had their more literate assistants write their Tweets for them. The dispossessed had a way to protest by ballot. While journalists fawned over those celebrities and gave them all the free advertising they could, they could not see that the pendulum was swinging the other way, ready to hit them — and Cyrus like a wrecking ball. A haughty and clueless Clinton decreed that those who supported her rival were a basket of deplorables, and the equally arrogant and ignorant press forgot to turn on their critical thinking skills and took it as permission not to do their jobs. Only after the election did many in the press concede that it wasn’t rednecks with a fear of lattes and Pilates who voted for Trump.

The press was also guilty of forgetting the golden rule of US politics: whoever looks like they would be the most fun at a cocktail party wins The White House.

While Clinton suffered an epic defeat, it was the news media that lost their final battle, and with the covertly elegant victory of Donald Trump, they lost the war.

After all, those in the business of chronicling reality’s big picture never saw the tsunami of desperate rage coming at them. They did not just lose credibility — the one thing no journalist can afford to lose — but also face.

It wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, the press could create or destroy people, governments, companies, and entire countries. CEOs resigned in shame. Actress Barbara Payton was once one of Hollywood’s comeliest and highest paid actresses, but after bad publicity, her career had been so badly derailed, she literally became a prostitute who worked the streets, dying at age 39. Ohio Congressman James Traficant lost power and ended up serving a prison sentence. Richard Nixon was the president forced to resign after two young journalists exposed Watergate. There was no limit to how far and lasting a journalist’s narrative could permanently influence the history books.

The press dictated how people were to think and people had once happily complied. One of the most stunning examples of the herd mentality was the naming a group of popular young actors Brat Pack in the 1980s. David Blum wrote a cover story for New York magazine on June 10, 1985 that pigeonholed and confined a group of twenty-something thespians, as he brought them to task for not graduating from college, but having the audacity to admire publicly, and be influenced by actors who did.

Blum cruelly skewered these actors, despite the fact they were still successful in their careers without it. The author of the piece looked down on his subjects, and his own prejudices had serious long-term consequences for their careers, infantilizing them needlessly. The entire career was made-up labels, and smug assessments and predictions that mostly did not come true, but there was a time when such amateur tactics were taken seriously in the public domain. While the structure of journalism hasn’t changed, the impact has been diminished.

Despite its constant presence, the influence of the press is now negligible. It is a shocking fall from grace that is hard to imagine for those who saw titans fall when the press turned on them, exposing their dirtiest sins.

Watergate marked just how powerful journalism could be: two young Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein took down a president with their methodical and solid reportage. Now, hundreds of reporters could not see the cagier Trump best Clinton as they reported about the election non-stop; nor did their decrees convince unhappy voters that Clinton was the only option on the ballot.

For a profession that makes its way into people’s homes, its methods and ways are poorly defined. Journalism was always murky with its terms such as objectivity, balance, and fairness, let alone what made a person a journalist. Despite its one-time power, it was a profession of the shadows. We can cheer or mourn its demise, yet what we are cheering or mourning eludes many. So what was journalism?

Journalism was more than a profession: it was an ideal. It was the idea to inform society of the world around them, because knowledge is power. It is liberating and essential. You cannot find the right solutions on instinct alone. You cannot find the right solution if you have lies. Journalism was the simple solution: have those who dig by asking questions to bring light in the darkness. It has survived numerous forms over the ages and has managed to survive in its various forms, each with its own set of unique variables:

• Print was the First Medium, and of all the media, it has the most liberties to allow more facts in stories.

• Radio was the Second Medium, and it humanized stories as it is still about voices and sound, and can be heard anywhere without distraction, even if it cannot provide facts the same way print can.

• Television was the Third Medium of vision, putting a face on a story. Print has pictures, but television’s moving pictures puts people in news consumers’ living rooms. It is highly personalized, but at the expense of details.

• The Internet is the Fourth Medium, the one that blended the other three together as it broke the stranglehold of the gatekeepers. Now, anyone could broadcast to a world-wide audience. The news cycle became shorter, and articles became tainted with trivial news of pseudo-celebrities, press releases, and partisan vitriol, as there were no checks and balances to weed out lies and hoaxes.

Yet none of these media have been able to change radically the fortunes of journalism. Not one has altered the game. Not one sees the depth of seriousness of their fall, and the current strain of journalism has veered to an extremist form of partisan reportage: it has become demonizing propaganda where the object is to feign morality while making the most disturbing and unfounded of comments. It is completely devoid of facts, but filled with vitriol of the worst sort.

For example, former Politico scribe Julia Ioffe (who had written three articles for Columbia Journalism Review as well, among other publications) had written a vile and obscene tweet regarding the relationship between President Trump and his eldest daughter Ivanka in December 2016. The disturbing jab had negated any pretense of Ioffe being a genuine journalist, and while Politico had distanced themselves from her remarks and severed their ties with her, The Atlantic chose to have the bitter tantrum-thrower on their roster instead. Once upon a time, journalists had enough dignity, talent, and sensibility to ever stoop to playing in the gutter. Now, national outlets employ those who are incapable of reflecting rationally without resorting to childish propagandistic smears as they have become oppressively intolerant in any worldview that deviates from their own.

Ioffe is hardly the only journalist who could not comprehend that a vicious worldview was not a desirable trait for someone in the news business: Daily Mail columnist and LBC broadcaster Katie Hopkins had also lost all perspective in a May 2017 tweet after the Manchester terrorist attack by suggesting the answer to the violence was a final solution. The backlash of her use of a Nazi phrase resulted in her losing both of her positions. Neither Ioffe nor Hopkins could see reality as their narratives stood in the way, making their utility as news producers highly questionable.

Even the media’s post-mortems of the 2016 Election were completely oblivious to reality. It is difficult to imagine a single profession with such a lack of self-awareness as they march lockstep while they destroy their own industry. As journalist icon Walter Lippmann had written in 1913, Where all think alike, no one thinks very much, yet journalists have not taken those words to heart, and opt to mere parrot one another as they refuse to think critically or think for themselves, mimicking the majority of test subjects in psychologist Solomon Asch’s famous experiment. It is as if they have no idea what they are supposed to do as journalists and hope repeating someone else’s words will hide their ineptitude, yet it is their own unthinking words that expose them.

For example, New York magazine’s Jonathon Chait’s May 11, 2017 piece entitled "Donald Trump Tries to Explain Economics to The Economist. Hilarity Ensues". was a typical propagandist diatribe worthy of a Saul Alinsky rule for radical — save that President Trump’s lowest earnings far exceeded that of the wealthiest Economist’s journalist’s paycheck — and perhaps being able to explain economics is less important than proving one can apply it in the real world.

For another, the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan did not exactly see the light in her November 9, 2016, media column about why the news media failed to see a Trump victory. She discussed how no reporter seemed to believe it in their bones and that journalistic conventional wisdom pegged Clinton to win. She discussed how their erroneous predictions would force reporters to eat crow, for perhaps years, and the worst was that the media helped to give Trump his chance.

The press did not help Trump at all, not even inadvertently: they were ignored and voters did not vote out of spite. Sullivan fails to grasp just how irrelevant the media has become. It is white noise. But in the drive to rationalize willful blindness, Sullivan tried to put a positive spin on journalistic snobbery, assuming that, while journalists used the mask of cynicism and pretended to be hard-bitten, but they could also be idealistic, even naïve. Sullivan stated that journalists were desperate to think that the US was too decent and civil to vote for someone so crude, spiteful, and intemperate, and that she couldn’t fault her fellow journalists for their beliefs.

Journalists weren’t being naïve — they were being gullible, conniving, arrogant, uninformed, lazy, and sloppy. They still did not hear the millions of voters who openly stated they were not voting as silly hero-worshipping fans: they voted for a candidate who made their biggest problem — their economic quagmire — his top priority. It was a pragmatic choice, with limited and uninspiring candidates. If Sullivan did not have the bravery or sense to fault journalists for their limited thinking, millions of news consumers do.

Fortune magazine was also thick when it came to the true value of the media’s power, claiming that the news media were forced to lend Trump legitimacy to stay financially viable and that journalistic ideas about objectivity compelled them to give him a platform, regardless of the ridiculousness of his claims. Reporters were hapless and blameless victims forced to entertain Trump, even if to disprove his claims, further trapping them in the quagmire known as ‘false equivalence’.

There are several problems with this part of sophistry: journalists are not babes in the woods or mindless victims. There is no shortage of things going on in the world at any given