Friday, October 4, 2013

The Whole Point Is to Be Adversarial

Trey Smith

Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.

It doesn't take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist".

He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.
~ from Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the "Pathetic" American Media by Lisa O'Carroll ~
Hersh has it soo right. The mainstream media has become so lazy and pathetic that we should scrap the whole enterprise and start over. The whole point of journalism is to be adversarial to government dictates. Governments lie and so you never take what a government official says at face value. You assume that the statement is false until you can prove that its true...or not.

The mainstream media has committed the same sin as too much of organized labor. The higher ups have gotten so use to schmoozing with government leaders that they don't want to piss them off and lose their access to the DC in crowd. And what is the best way to avoid pissing them off? Serving as their lapdogs!



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