The state of New York should “make assaulting the press a felony,” tweeted its leftist Governor Andrew Cuomo days ago. “Journalists must be protected from the threat of physical harm” while doing their jobs.
This looked like yet another shameless pander by the ambitious politician for support from a news media that almost entirely already shares his radical ideology. Gov. Cuomo’s remarks came during a week when he called for ending the death penalty but paradoxically approved a measure to let doctors kill any baby that somehow survives an abortion attempt and is born alive.
But Cuomo was pursuing an even more sinister progressive scheme by making assaults on journalists a felony. It would make journalists a privileged, protected class.
Journalists are supposed to be “watchdogs” against politician corruption and wrongdoing (not the “lapdogs of the left” that most reporters have become) – but Cuomo’s proposal would give politicians like himself the power to define who is, and is not, a journalist.
Leftist comrades in the press will get special protection. Conservatives will not be given journalist status, and their reporting will be dismissed by the left as “fake news.” This privileged status can become a choke chain that leftist politicians use to restrict any reporting critical of them.
We should ask now how Cuomo defines a “real” journalist deserving of this elitist protection. He has already said it would be given to “working journalists,” thereby giving more status to those doing journalism for money – like prostitutes and mercenary soldiers – than to amateurs who investigate and report out of amour, love of their craft.
Experts say that part of the decline in journalism comes precisely from reporters giving their audience the 90-percent-anti-Trump biased trash that is now the norm. As longtime New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson suggests in her new book “Merchants of Truth,” even the Times tilted its reporting to attract more money from liberal subscribers and advertisers. Too many reporters and pundits have literally become prostitutes, mercenary “working journalists” without honor or honesty.
Early in the history of American journalism (from the French word for “today,” as in a restaurant’s soup du jour), bias was straightforward; newspaper names such as the Springfield Republican or St. Louis Globe-Democrat displayed their partisanship proudly. But then publications claimed to do “objective” reporting, then “interpretative” reporting, then “advocacy” journalism, and today “woke” radical ideological fake news propaganda that demonizes and attempts to stifle the other side.
In recent days we witnessed the leftist mainstream media demonize innocent high school students from Kentucky, and the internet website BuzzFeed claim that anonymous sources say President Donald Trump suborned perjury. Even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office called this story inaccurate, the leftist media kept reporting the hearsay story while adding the preface “If this is true …”
What should be reported is that BuzzFeed received a $200 million investment in August 2015 and another $200 million in October 2016 from NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News and MSNBC (Marxist Socialist NBC). Why has the national news media not told you of this connection between a disreputable BuzzFeed and ideologically leftist NBC?
We live in an age where any grandmother with a smartphone or laptop can report breaking stories worldwide. The courts have recognized that internet bloggers can be journalists. The power of the press no longer belongs exclusively to media barons who “buy ink by the barrel.” Governor Cuomo’s tawdry scheme can no longer deny journalist status to conservative voices.
Leftist journalists such as former CBS anchor Scott Pelley and NBC political director Chuck Todd destroyed their own fading credibility when they refused to interview global warming skeptics, one of which has been the former chief atmospheric scientist at MIT.
Thanks to alternative media, too many Americans now know that United Nations officials admit that the real agenda of the global warming cause is to transfer $100 trillion to global government, and that some of the top climate alarmist “scientists” have been caught boasting in secret emails to each other about falsifying data in order to “hide the decline” in world temperature.
If Pelley and Todd were ethical journalists, they would acknowledge that government is itself a greedy, self-serving special interest in the global climate issue, even more than the oil and coal companies are. Government scientists who have tampered with climate data should be publicly discredited, fired and have their data discarded as untrustworthy. By slanting their climate coverage to the left, Pelley and Todd have destroyed their own credentials as journalists.