Royko, Mencken, to Stewart, Journalism to Cronyism

Articles: What Mike Royko Knew that Jon Stewart and the Mainstream Media Don't:



A good article that documents just a little of the incestuous relationship between today's media and the ruling political class. In the days of Mike Royko, H.L.Mencken and Mark Twain, journalism was a hardscrabble profession made up of people from the lower class with little education -- learned by apprenticeship and hard knocks.



Still, they had to remember not to fraternize with the inmates! Royko's advice to young journalists;  “if you get too close, then you're going to feel uncomfortable when you have to stick it to them.”



Indeed -- imagine if how "uncomfortable" it would be for someone like George Stephanopoulos, who was a spokesman for the Clintons and continued to contribute tens of thousands of dollars to them after he was supposedly a "journalist"!



The BIG problem here is that the "mainstream" media is effectively an arm of the government -- NPR  is the only one that directly receives payments, but NBC, CBS, ABC, NYTs, HuffPo, etc follow the same piper -- back in the '00s we were treated to the fact of that with the "Journ -O- List" story being released showing a couple hundred reporters, columnists and other media coordinating activity to take down Republicans.



Fox news plays this game on the other side to varying degrees -- and the left is completely unhinged in their hatred for Fox. Their view -- and increasingly the Democrat Party view, is that it ought to be ILLEGAL for anyone but the left to do "collaboration" -- shades of the USSR and "Pravda" (Russian for "Truth").



While our nation is not a "Democracy" (yet), it has democratic input -- which requires an informed populace, which requires an INDEPENDENT and ADVERSARIAL press.



What we have now is Fox News and talk radio generally siding with Republicans, while all other news outlets are mouthpieces for the dominant left view of Democrats, education, government agencies, unions, and amazingly, WALL STREET (their only allegiance is to money, and the Democrats give them more of it!).



Possibly liveable if the general populace was aware of the situation, but since most still see the general media as "unbiased", a very negative state of affairs.




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