According to Gallup, “The news media is the least trusted group among 10 U.S. civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process.” That’s something I didn’t even think was possible – being less trusted than that hive of dishonesty which we call Congress. According to Gallop’s polling, the profession that trades on credibility has managed to flush its reputation down the toilet via decades of support for perverts and phonies. You can decide for yourself which category each of the Democrats they’ve covered for fall into.
With almost 70 percent of the U.S. population no longer trusting the propaganda news, it has reached a category 5 crisis for them. How’s the MSM going to tell everyone what to think, if nobody’s listening anymore? Something’s got to change, and time is critical. There’s another election coming up in only 2 years – which will certainly require some expert journalistic guidance.
Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, jumped into action by … striking a pose. For the first time in 36 years, the Post declined to endorse the Democrat candidate for President, whom we all know it really wanted to win. Bezos explained his reasoning in an editorial:
We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased.
Did you get that? The paper that trafficked in the Russian collusion hoax doesn’t have an accuracy problem. It has a perception problem.
There’s no need to fire any dishonest reporters or make the editors take a remedial course in journalistic ethics. The Post will just pretend to be unbiased, with one decision in one election cycle, and then go back to business as usual – carrying water for their party benefactors.
Margaret Simons of The Guardian has a slightly different take on the problem. Her Saturday column began by posing a good question:
How are people to decide how to cast a vote if they don’t access independent, reliable information?
Well put. Good decisions require good information. Otherwise, it’s just “garbage in and garbage out.” But then without a hint of self-awareness, Simons hit her readers with this howler:
With the US election upon us, we may be about to find out. … Because, more than ever before, the people who decide the election will be those who are least engaged with professional news media – the kind of researched, fact-checked content that you are likely to find in the New York Times or, for that matter, the Guardian.
She thinks Americans are destined to screw things up, because they’re not paying attentions to what the “professional journalists” are saying.
Not even once in her article does Simons consider that her customers might have noticed how the researching and fact checking has been going at the “professional news media” outlets. Those would be the same “professionals” that
- Impugned George W. Bush’s military service – with forged documents,
- Reported that Donald Trump was Vladamir Putin’s puppet – based on documents the Clinton campaign created,
- Insisted that the George Floyd riots were mostly peaceful – as buildings burned, businesses were looted, and citizens were murdered,
- Claimed that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation – even as the DoJ was using it as trial evidence,
- Spread the hoax that Donald Trump called white supremacists “good people” – by taking what he said out of context,
- Insisted that Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” – until his debate performance opened the trench coat and showed us something we didn’t want to see,
- Reported that Donald Trump expressed a desire to execute Liz Cheney – when he said no such thing, and
- Assured Americans that the Kamala Harris campaign is all about joy – as she screamed about the electorate being infested with Nazis.
I could go on, but you get the idea – even if Margaret Simons doesn’t. As far as she’s concerned, the problem isn’t that journalists have substituted activism for reporting. It’s that their customers have stopped reading the propaganda. Shame on us.
But there’s something that Bezos and Simons don’t seem to understand: journalism is a transactional business. The consumer/journalist relationship is a customer/supplier relationship – with customers demanding value. The product of “professional journalists” (information) stopped having value when it was no longer credible.
The traditional news media decided to ignore the needs of their customers when it decided to sell narratives to the people who were shopping for reliable information. In a free market, when a supplier fails to meet the needs of a customer, another supplier will inevitably fill the void. Simons can complain about Americans shopping elsewhere for information, but she and her fellow “professional journalists” created the market for the alternative media outlets when they abandoned their integrity.
The “professional journalists” of the 21st century have become the new snake-oil salesmen. A century ago, hucksters would ride into town peddling foul-tasting potions, guaranteed to cure everything from warts to consumption. But they understood that their product had no real value, and their business model called for them to get out of town before their customers realized they were drinking castor oil laced with chili peppers. They had no expectation of a long-term customer/supplier relationship.
Well, customers of the traditional news outlets have figured out that they’ve been sold snake-oil. But rather than “getting out of Dodge” before the tar and feathers arrive, the “professional journalists” have decided to scream at the mob, insisting that the rubes don’t understand the healing powers of castor oil laced with chili peppers.
Will their posing as unbiased, and whining that their customers are ignorant save the “professional journalists”? Or are they about to get run out of town on a rail? Gallop suggests the latter.
Author Bio: John Green is a retired engineer and political refugee from Minnesota, now residing in Idaho. He spent his career designing complex defense systems, developing high performance organizations, and doing corporate strategic planning. He is a contributor to American Thinker, The American Spectator, and the American Free News Network. He can be reached at greenjeg@gmail.com.
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us Help keep us ad-free by donating here.
Substack: American Free News Network Substack
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA
2 thoughts on “The MSM Takes Corrective Action – By Posing and Whining”