What happened to the days when the news was about; well, the news. There was a time when journalists believed in integrity and knew that their credibility with the viewing or reading audience depended on it.
That has changed dramatically in recent years. While we are critical of the state-run “news” organizations of the former Soviet Union or Communist China, our own U.S. news outlets have morphed into the same types of enterprises, reporting based on ideology that has nothing to do with factual “news.”
Lopsided Reporting
My unscientific monitoring and notations of the stories on the front page of Yahoo news shows that of the last 300 stories about President Trump, all 300 were negative. That’s not news. If it were news, then in the name of balance and accuracy; half the stories would be negative and half positive. That would happen in the absence of an agenda. But, there is an agenda.
On my local Fox affiliate’s newscasts, of the last 100 stories about the President, 99 have been negative and the one about the missile launch on Syria was the only one given positive press. With the reduction in the unemployment numbers, the economic agreements with China that benefit American workers, the successful trip to the Middle East and Europe and steps taken to get other NATO countries to pay their fair share, you would expect some factual news to be included among the negative stories.
A recent study out of Harvard proved that the impression of unfair reporting isn’t just anecdotal but a fact. Nearly all reporting by the major news outlets is negative about the President and most of it is fake news; usually based on unnamed sources and speculation. Again, this is not news. This is conjecture and hyperbole and ideological opinion masquerading as news.
Keep Repeating Fake News
Those who anticipate that everything they hear in a newscast must be true have become like brainwashed zombies. This is something we were critical of regarding state-run news agencies; but in America? This is where we are at today. A nation with a free press and freedom of speech, but where ideological propaganda has replaced news. We have become a third-world banana republic where certain forces dictate what the messaging is and what we are supposed to think.
In the meantime, the President and his administration are making great strides to keep campaign promises and to increase jobs and reduce taxes. Certainly, these things are worthy of celebrating in evening newscasts, in newspaper stories and on the cover of magazines. If the last administration accomplished these things, they would be covered in a celebratory way. They often were for doing much less.
But, the people who write the news, produce the news, who run the news organizations and control the Internet all happened to like that president as much as they dislike the current one. For that reason, we no longer have real news, just a concoction of fake news viewpoints designed to destroy a hard-working president.
