It’s no wonder. When you consider this yesterday from the ‘liberal’ New York Times:
The group’s lack of cohesion and its apparent wish to pantomime progressivism rather than practice it knowledgably is unsettling in the face of the challenges so many of its generation face — finding work, repaying student loans, figuring out ways to finish college when money has run out. But what were the chances that its members were going to receive the attention they so richly deserve carrying signs like “Even if the World Were to End Tomorrow I’d Still Plant a Tree Today”?
One day, a trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Adam Sarzen, a decade or so older than many of the protesters, came to Zuccotti Park seemingly just to shake his head. “Look at these kids, sitting here with their Apple computers,” he said. “Apple, one of the biggest monopolies in the world. It trades at $400 a share. Do they even know that?”
What followed was a timely tweet, re-tweeted by establishment journalist Roger Ebert, a man who is most certainly not establishment:
“A NYTimes piece as dripping with descriptive condescension and presumption as this about the wealthy would end a career.”
I think the recent past of the right-wing reaction to Jack Layton’s passing and the coverage of it that followed should be instructive enough that journalists have lost the scent of decency and the common good. But when even ‘progressive’ voices in the media circled wagons around Blatchord, Kay, Coren, Levant et al., all bets were off. The media is one big circle jerk playing us as if we were the jerks. If you permit me, I’ll quote myself here:
“Right vs. left no longer matters, when it comes to Canadian journalism – it is journalists vs. the rest of us.”
While the media plays its game of protecting its own – I call it the James Carville and Mary Matalin model – what journalists write pulls us in one direction then the next, shifting the balance of power and the affecting the perception of the public towards the world.
We go into this understanding that journalists have certain biases; we just never expected it would be all bias, all corporate messaging, all politic gerrymandering. It’s not the news that matter any more, it’s the survival and the prospering of its fraternity.
While a Susan Delacourt and a Mark Bonokoski share cocktail wienies in the VIP areas of social functions, alternatively scrarfing down bon bons and farting through silk, we are left holding the bag. An empty bag at that.
(Notice how I cleverly did not mention Rupert Murdoch, Fox News or the hacking scandal. I don’t have to.)
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| Judith Miller and the New York Times: beginning of a legacy |
