Aleister Crowley, an English ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist, and mountaineer of the late 1800s is credited with saying, “To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter." Today’s journalism education is like a stroll through the black lagoon reading communist Pravda.
Earlier, Jim McCoy and I wrote about how journalists make up the content of many of their stories to fit their leftist ideology, not the actual event or situation. Since then, things have only deteriorated, except for the saving grace of a select few papers, where, as Boz Scaggs once sang, you can still get the dirty lowdown. Most of today’s newspaper journalists, dominated now by Millennials and Gen Zers, have been schooled by the heavy indoctrination hand of woke journalism professors at universities around the United States and later by their editors.
As Victor Davis Hanson has concluded, today’s higher education and journalism schools are a prime case in point, “…today’s universities and colleges bear little if any resemblance to postwar education… But it is gone now. Instead, imagine a place where the certification of educational excellence, the B.A. degree, is no guarantee that a graduate can speak, write, or communicate coherently or think inductively. Imagine a place that requires applicants to submit high-school diplomas, grade-point averages, and standardized tests, but rejects any requirement that its own graduates upon completion of college do the same by passing a basic uniform competency test.”
Bruce Thornton has provided a clarion call that “we also know that too many Republicans will fall for the Dems’ rhetorical bait-and-switch. We shouldn’t let them get away with it this time, for we’re facing a hard fight ahead to minimize the damage that the ‘woke’ Democrats will try to inflict on our Constitution. It’s time to fight, not ‘heal’.” The mainstream media, especially newspaper journalists, are the new fountainhead of leftist efforts because of their pervasive control of information to the American public.
An illustrative example comes from the once heralded, now hopelessly woke Wall Street Journal, which I have subscribed to since 1982. Make no mistake, its editorial page is true red conservatism, save for the occasional deep blue op-eds. But the rest of the newspaper has become so deep blue in what and how it reports news that I can in good conscience only skim or ignore their daily news presentation.
Take for example the front page lead story, “Unemployment Benefits Become Target Amid Hiring Difficulty,” in last Saturday’s issue that reports how 407,000 Americans were being denied state benefits for failing to search for work with a “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” bent (apologies to the late, great Warren Zevon). This point of view was dominant despite the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and businesses nationwide pleading with the Biden administration to stop paying people not to work. The story went on to problematize red state Republican governors like Ron DeSantis (Florida), Greg Gianforte (Montana) and Henry McMaster (South Carolina) who are enacting policies that require residents receiving unemployment compensation to document they are actually looking for work. Then a felicitous quote is given from President Biden, “Today’s report just underscores, in my view, how vital the actions we’re taking are: checks to people who are hurting, support for small businesses, for childcare and school reopening, support to help families put food on the table…our efforts are starting to work, but the climb is steep, and we still have a long way to go.” Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who presided anemically over the Great Recession as CEO of the Federal Reserve during President Obama’s eight-year term, was also quoted, “I don’t think the addition to unemployment compensation is really the factor that’s making a difference…” As Sam Adolphsen said in these pages, “Yellen oversaw one of the slowest economic recoveries in American history as chair of the Federal Reserve for the Obama administration. During her tenure, economic growth averaged less than 2.1 percent between 2010 and 2013, which amounts to half the 4.2 percent average growth rate following similar recessions.”
Nowhere was there even a lukewarm journalistic challenge to these progressive laws of the west—never is heard a discouraging word and the blue skies are not cloudy all day! Yet for four maddening years the Wall Street Journal’s intrepid journalists painted everything President Trump accomplished as evil or not of his doing and they were the first to characterize the January 6, 2021 conservative march on the Capitol as done by a violent mob of insurrectionists, despite many of the myths of violence having now been dispelled, leaving in broad daylight the deadly and destructive riots across America during the summer of 2020, which most journalists pitched as “peaceful demonstrations for social justice.”
Sadly, the same is happening to most major newspapers across our fair but fearful Republic where leftist editors encourage, if not direct, their reporters to be woke in their interpretation of news. These reporters graduated from woke journalism schools where all they received for their four years of education was social justice and critical race training theory. Facts obviously no longer matter.
This situation led journalism student Josiah Lippincott to compose an article in American Greatness chiding the L.A. Times for producing a front-page story with the headline, “Michigan’s Outbreak Worries Scientists. Will Conservative Outposts Keep Pandemic Rolling?” Lippincott argues that the bald-faced implication of the story is that that both the sleepy, conservative Michigan town where he lives, Hillsdale, Michigan, and Hillsdale College which he attends as a journalism major, are biohazards apparently because they aren’t still following Anthony Fauci ‘s lockdown-everything orders.
America would be better off without the national panoply of woke newspapers that feed us lies on a daily basis. Many people in our Republic cut the cord to cable television when online service became available. It is painfully clear that we desperately need to cut the cord from most daily newsprint and do our part to relieve America of fake news.