Today’s newspaper business is unrecognizable from the one in which I was first employed 60 years ago this year.
The newspaper era I experienced as a reporter is as dead as the New York Times’ reputation for fairness and accuracy, much less publishing a paper containing “All the news that’s fit to print.”
At the rate it’s currently sputtering along there is little doubt the industry will soon go the way of the 1940 four-door flathead six-cylinder DeSoto I drove in my high school days.
Gone are managing editors like the Tampa Tribune’s late Bob Hudson who bellowed at me in a crowded newsroom: “Scott, I never want to see your opinion in another news article. If I do it’ll be the last news article, you’ll ever write for this newspaper.”
I never repeated that mistake. After a stint with a Gannett paper in upstate New York, I left the media and went into corporate communications writing speeches, press releases, brochures, white papers and handling investor and media relations.
In those positions I continued to maintain close contact with reporters and editors and observed as objective reporting was discarded, and the media dissolved into accomplices and propagandists.
With the inconsistent exception of the newsroom at the Wall Street Journal, what’s left of today’s print news outlets are all opinion, front-to-back. What remains of the newspaper industry is on life-support. The media used journalism as a weapon, eventually turning it on themselves in mass suicide.
For nearly ten years national media outlets attempted to defeat and destroy Donald Trump. Today he is stronger than he has ever been while public trust in the media has never been lower.
The media gulped down the Russia conspiracy Kool-Aid like religious zealots as they turned their outlets into hymnals for fanatical evangelistic anti-Trump congregations.
Today’s media don’t try to hide their bias; they flaunt it.
The print media not only outrageously distorts issues by what they cover, but by what they don’t cover.
Where’s the coverage in the Washington Post, AP, NY Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, L.A Times, etc. of the massive Medicare, Social Security, COVID fraud in Minnesota, California, etc.? Their ineptitude or intentional avoidance and exclusion enabled a sharp 23-yearr-old kid, Nick Shirley, with a small camera and microphone to scoop them on one of the most significant stories of the decade. Where is Mr. Shirley’s Pulitzer prize? When is the national media returning its awards for their phony Russian collusion garbage?
Where’s the coverage of the killings and rapes of young women by illegals that were released from jail by sanctuary states and cities? Where’s the coverage of President Trump’s successfully closed border. Where’s the coverage of why fed-up corporations are leaving crime-ridden and high-tax cities, closing their offices and heading to red states? Where is the media coverage of the IRS reports showing $47 billion and hundreds of company headquarters “walking out” of New York, with Florida, Texas, and North Carolina welcoming them?
Where’s the coverage of the lowest crime rates in Washington D.C’s history? It’s dwarfed by network cameras frantically filming algae in the recently renovated Reflecting Pool that has been damaged by vandals. The fact that D.C’s filthy graffiti-covered statues have been cleaned and fountains that haven’t worked in 50 years are flowing again is ignored.
Where’s the coverage of former DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s declassified 1,600 pages of secret community emails, etc. from the first months after the pandemic showing Dr. Anthony Fauci lied.
Today’s media are a disgrace and the term ”journalistic ethics” has become an oxymoron because of them
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Meanwhile Back At The Ranch: The worst media offender hereabouts is the online Observer.
When it was launched a few years ago by former Fernandina Beach Mayor Susan Steger and the late Sueanne Thamm it drifted left but maintained a somewhat balanced content and good writing.
When Ms. Steger turned it over to newcomer Mike Phillips the outlet came completely unglued. The arrival of Mike Lednovich, a former Fernandina Mayor and failed city commission candidate, spelled the end of any semblance of balance or sanity.
He crowned his far-left partisanship while serving a single term on the City Commission by waltzing down Center Street wearing a “Black Lives Matter” sandwich board.
Lednovich’s latest act of buffoonery came when the Observer wannabe reporter penned an absurd piece criticizing recently reelected Fernandina Beach City Commissioner Darron Ayscue for running unopposed. It was like accusing city fireman Ayscue of starting fires so he could extinguish them.
Lednovich’s irrationality and bias have no limits. He obviously does no research, wildly attacking his keyboard like an alcoholic with the DTs feverishly assaulting the cap on a bottle of MD 20/20.
If Lednovich had bothered to do even the least bit of research, he would have discovered that running unopposed is nothing new, in fact it’s common.
There are several reasons, e.g. some of the incumbents like Ayscue, are so popular that nobody will waste time and money to oppose them. And some elected seats are so unattractive and confusing the average citizen has no idea what the occupants do. For example, how many voters know what it requires to do the job of the elected officials of the Amelia Walk Community Development District or the Amelia Concourse Community Development District. Of the 14 offices in the mostly “Community Development Districts”, 12 of them went unopposed.
Of the 11 most recognizable offices up for reelection seven of them were elected unopposed including: a County Judge, three Ocean Highway & Port Authority seats, one Amelia Island Mosquito Control Department seat, and two Nassau County School Board members.
All Lednovich had to do was look up the information posted on the local Supervisor of Elections website.
To break this down even further so even folks like Lednovich can understand it, some 63% of offices were unopposed. Including all “local” offices in the general election cycle on the Supervisory of Elections website (adding in the Community Development Districts) 19 of the 25 offices listed ran unopposed. In a nutshell 76% of all offices up for election in the general cycle, listed on Nassau Counties Supervisor of Elections website, were elected unopposed.
If anyone at the Observer is paying any attention here’s some more data for their empty files: There are two state representatives for the district they reported on that has one State Senator and one State Representative. The State Senator was elected without opposition. Using math even Lednovich might comprehend, that means that 50% of area State offices were elected unopposed.
Is anybody at the Observer embarrassed? Whether it’s laziness, incompetence or ignorance it’s staggeringly pitiful since the Observer labels itself a “news gathering” organization.
With Lednovich as its crack reporter the owner and publisher, Mike Phillips, may want to try out the motto: “Almost as accurate at the Amelia Island News Wrecker.”
The fledgling Nassau Community Press newspapers that cover Yulee, Callahan, Hilliard, etc. got off to a good start and then headed downhill by sending a note to contributing columnists that they were no longer to criticize other news publications and/or opinion writers. Really? Do they ever watch or listen to TV and radio commentators and read the editorial pages of national papers and magazines? It’s commonplace and public domain.
That’s why Ken Timmerman and I pulled our columns. That and the fact that they consistently run the embarrassing, repetitive and amateurish weekly “I hate Donald Trump” tirades by Jerry Turk, who they admitted to us is one of the paper’s financial contributors. Isn’t that like a corporate media relations guy attempting to pay an outlet to run his press releases as news or opinion?
We told the publisher and editor that we did not want to be associated with Turk on the “Opinion” pages.
Since he sends them money why aren’t his weekly screeds labeled “Paid Advertisement?” Ken and I were not paid for our columns, and we did not financially contribute to the paper.
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Well done, Dave, as usual. Calling out media for bias needs to be done constantly. But not all are leftist hellholes: Epoch Times, OANN, Daily Signal, Townhall, Red State, Daily Caller, Newsmax, Washington Times, Just the News and a few others are not afflicted by terminal leftist crap, although they do have some right bias, although they are usually factually accurate.
The latest cartoons are superb in messaging, graphics and artistry.
You said “çrack reporter Mike” but “Mike on crack” would be more accurate.