Saturday, April 11, 2020

Reporters are not just biased, but incompetent

 Coronavirus press conference social distancing
Article by Robert Arvay in "The American Thinker":

The following exchange speaks volumes:

REPORTER: "Checking on oil again today —"

PRESIDENT TRUMP: "Where is it today? Give me the price."

REPORTER: "I am not sure, to be honest."

PRESIDENT TRUMP: "How can you ask a question when you don't know the price?"

REPORTER: "I will look it up —"

PRESIDENT TRUMP: "Let me just go to somebody else."

And he did, wasting no further time on the credentialed ignoramus posing as a reporter.

It's bad enough that reporters are biased.  Some commentators accuse them of being the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party.  I disagree.  The Democrats are the political arm of the so-called mainstream media.

What is worse than being merely biased is being, in addition, stupid and incompetent.  These traits have long been on display to the public, but not enough attention has been paid.  The president has been calling them out, and the voters are noticing.

What major news network would send a sports reporter to interview a football coach if that reporter did not know the difference between football and hockey?  Yet that same kind of absurdity causes left-wing media to send reporters to cover medical issues when those reporters can barely spell "epidemiology," much less define it.  They report on military matters when they cannot tell the difference between a military tank and an armored personnel carrier (I have seen captioned news photographs that got it wrong).  They condemn the president's economic policies when they clearly have no idea how a free-market economy works.  Instead, they mindlessly accuse it of oppressing the poor.

I am reminded of a reporter, years ago, who complained that the military was not releasing sensitive data to reporters.  The so-called journalist complained that, during World War 2, the military was much more trusting of the press.  The response was a slam dunk: in World War 2, the press was on our side.

It should surprise no one that the press is not only biased, but also ignorant of the basic facts on which it pretends to report.  Colleges and universities, including schools of journalism, are not so much institutions of learning as they are institutions of indoctrination.  Reporters do not seek to follow the facts to a conclusion; they start with the conclusion and then twist the facts to justify it.

This is no accident.  It is by design.  Colleges are run not by educators, but by leftist ideologues.

For the first time in decades, we have a president who does not sit still for political attacks disguised as journalism.  He understands what the presidents named Bush did not — that playing nice with one's enemies does not make the enemies nice.  Rather, it encourages them to intensify their attacks.

Gradually, the general public is beginning to become more skeptical of reporters.  That is actually a bad thing, but the fault lies not with the public; it lies with a press corps that has seriously betrayed the trust we once placed in it.

My prediction is that the leftist press corps will finally begin to become more honest, but only when it is forced to acknowledge the one news story it most dreads to report:

PRESIDENT TRUMP WINS RE-ELECTION
REPUBLICANS KEEP SENATE, REGAIN HOUSE