The Hubris of Some Humans!

Hubris: exaggerated pride or self-confidence

In his article in the Huffington Post, Steven Brant laments that the problem we face as a nation is that we’re “governed by two parties literally incapable of seeing the world the same way.”

He criticizes media that reports “the arguments going on about the way the world is” and he recommends “the only way American can return to being governed by a political establishment that . . . “is for journalism to become journalism again.”

“Our two parties definitely don't act as if they [live on the same planet]; and - until there is an independent arbitrator of who is on the REAL planet and who is on the IMAGINARY planet - they will continue to fight over whose planet is real.”

Mr. Brant’s solution . . . for a REAL journalist (like Walter Cronkite) to tell us who is RIGHT and who is WRONG. Let me guess which party he thinks is right? Perhaps the one most journalists admit they belong to? The Democrat Party.

He laments “the poor quality news product we're currently getting (and which companies like The New York Times want to start charging us for).

Mr. Brant . . . the reason most people think the Times is poor quality is precisely BECAUSE it uses the brand of journalism you espouse . . . they DO tell us what we SHOULD think. We disagree . . . vehemently at times.

From Psychologytoday.com
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Journalists sometimes say conservatives and political independents don’t go into journalism because they’re more interested in money. . . . . This ignores journalism’s own issues with greed and corruption—most despicably with Walter Duranty, who covered the Soviet Union for the New York Times and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a series of stories that uncritically backed Stalinist propaganda, denied the Ukrainian famine, and defended Stalin's infamous trials. Duranty lived lavishly in Stalin’s good graces. (Meanwhile, the Times has never returned the Pulitzer.) More recently, the New York Times’ fraudulent reporter Jayson Blair received a mid-six figure advance for his memoirs—even the most egregious reporters can make big bucks and become media darlings.”

As far as investigating the dark side of the Major Issues, there’s a critically important concept that students of journalism are rarely taught. It’s easy to find any number of targets to write about in capitalist societies with an open press. But totalitarian governments are journalistic black holes. Journalists can tickle their self-righteous neurocircuitry every day (and many do), by exposing easy-to-find faults in democratic societies. But beyond their event horizon is the bigger story that often remains untold as it occurs—the horrific deaths of millions in totalitarian regimes like the former Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea and, yes, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. That’s why, when Robert Conquest was asked whether he wanted to retitle his updated The Great Terror, about the Soviet purges, his answer was: Yes, how about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?

If you’re a journalist, want to help people and want to tell the truth, what truth are you going to tell? Why, the truth you THINK helps people, of course! Technically, that’s the truth . . . but it’s very different than the truth.

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Mr. Brant wrote an essay about how little Journalism “is doing to fulfill its civic education role in American society today, a role which the Founding Fathers thought was so important that they enshrined the right to a free press in the Bill of Rights.”

But of course, he means HIS version of the free press . . . not YOURS . . . and HIS version of the “the truth”

Buyer beware.

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Photo is from a child victim of the Holodomor. Don’t know what the Holodomor was? It’s was a side-effect of implementing a command economy (the opposite of a free market economy). It killed millions of people in the Ukraine, by starvation. See also China’s “Great Leap Forward.”