I could not let another day go by without celebrating the great Victor Davis Hanson, and his soft-spoken declaration of the death of American journalism.
Sadly, the thing on the slab at the morgue is still moving. Call it the zombie journalism apocalypse. Or as Hanson said in his headline at American Greatness, “Journalism is Dead — Long Live The Media.”
I’ve written about much the same thing over the last 15 years, and collected it in my new book, “The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake?” The points of comparison are many, but what jumped out at me is Hanson’s indictment of what I call “celebrity journalism”:
“… over the last twenty years, marquee journalists saw themselves as wannabe celebrities who were to make news, not to report it, to massage stories in such a fashion to serve their social justice agendas, and to virtue signal their superior morality, as many revolved in and out of government.”
This phenomenon is not new, but it can perhaps be best summed up in CNN’s Jim Acosta. One of the last essays in “The Media Matrix” is entitled “Jim Acosta and the Hubris of Celebrity Journalism,” originally published at Real Clear Politics. In it, I compared the buffoonery of Acosta and his fellow celebrity journalists to other pretentious snobs that don’t get the free pass of the First Amendment to hide behind. “It’s almost as though these celebrity journalists consider themselves the Sun Kings of democracy and that everything else, including presidents and paupers, revolves around them.”
Hanson, a historian by trade, delivers a laundry list of offenses by the hypocritical press which is well worth reading. As he notes:
Reporters today believe that their coverage serves higher agendas of social justice, identity politics, “equality,” and diversity. To the degree a news account is expanded or ignored, praised or blasted, depends on its supposed utility to the effort to fundamentally transform the country into something unlike its founding.
His conclusion is a damning bon mots that puts a stake through the heart of zombie journalism in just 10 words:
“They espouse opinions on nearly everything while knowing almost nothing.”
Thank you, Mr. Hanson. That says it all.
My new book is “The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake,” which offers many examples of the press being the enemy of the truth. To support my work, please consider buying “The Media Matrix” or my “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy, which documents the downward spiral of the USA before Trump arrived on the scene. The books are available at Amazon in paperback or Kindle editions. Go here for a free sample: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/sitb/B07PDQBJM4
