Interesting. Some journalists still have a professional conscience:
The traditional media is playing a very, very dangerous game. With its readers, with the Constitution, and with its own fate.
The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.
But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer”, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist.
You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I’m cut. I am a fourth generation newspaperman. As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kansas during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian). My hard-living – and when I knew her, scary – grandmother was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times. And my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer. I’ve spent thirty years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to magazine editor. And my oldest son, following in the family business, so to speak, earned his first national by-line before he earned his drivers license.
So, when I say I’m deeply ashamed right now to be called a “journalist”, you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.
Friends of mine, generally liberal, roll their eyes when I complain about media bias favoring the Left. They think it’s not all that bad, or that it even leans Right (!), or that "Fox does it, too!" Getting their news solely from the New York Times or The Atlantic or CNN, their view is literally blinkered to see only what the mandarins of the Ivory Tower of the Mainstream Media want them to see. They themselves are trapped in the media’s left-liberal monoculture* and can’t see how badly they’re being served, as Michael Malone points out in his article.
*(By monoculture, I mean a media culture that is intolerant of conservative or even moderate viewpoints from its members, except for a few tokens. Bernard Goldberg detailed this in his memoir, Bias, and several studies have shown the left-liberal leanings of the major media.)
Ezekiel 12:1-2 says the following:
Again a message came to me from the Lord: “Son of man, you live among rebels who have eyes but refuse to see. They have ears but refuse to hear. For they are a rebellious people.
(Emphasis added.)
The author is talking about a "rebellious people," but I think the verse also applies who don’t want to see the truth because it upsets their comfortable view, or cannot see it for being trapped in a frame of reference and thus cannot imagine anything different.
But more and more are coming to distrust the media as their bias becomes more and more blatant. The public’s eyes are being opened as they cannot deny what’s before their face, whether it’s a Michael Malone bemoaning the fall of his own profession or a Chris Matthews admitting to a thrill going up his leg when he hears Obama speak.
And no, I’m not writing as a Republican angry with the media, though I’ve often felt annoyance and even anger with the media’s bias toward Barack Obama, the near-refusal to investigate his past, the smearing of John McCain, the savaging of Sarah Palin, and the public pillorying of a lower middle-class plumber who dared to ask their Anointed One an inconvenient question.
No, it’s sadness I feel, sadness as someone who grew up admiring great journalists and their writings. I truly believe in the important role of honest, unafraid journalism in a healthy republic, and it worries me to see the mainstream media whoring itself into irrelevance.
I feel embarrassed for honest journalists like Michael Malone. We need many, many more such as he.
Posted by Phineas Fahrquar 
Read them on the 
Buy 
Buy 
