This Time It's Personal

A long, long time ago on a planet that now seems far away, I took a few journalism classes at Denver’s Metro State College. The highlight of my journalism career was publishing, word-for-word, an interview my friend Kern and I did with Lauren Watson, who was at that time the head of the local Black Panther Party. The interview came out in two or three (I forget) installments in the school newspaper. The school kicked and tried to block it, and the ACLU shut that shit down in about two minutes.

It stands out to me that the key, then, to being a journalist was “reporting,” that is to say, stating 1. facts, under the condition that 2. those facts had an identifiable (although not necessarily identified) source. In other words, we were taught that a central requirement of good reporting was telling the truth, and being able to prove it. Opinion was for others, and when stated, was to be clearly identified as such. Like when Lauren Watson called Denver’s Safety Manager a “son-of-a-bitch.” His opinion.

Well, time has passed. I won’t say that the rules of good journalism have changed, but clearly the guardrails seem to be missing.

These days, a good story would be for a group of dedicated neuroscientists to listen to several hours of speeches by our Presidential contenders, and express an collective, unbiased, educated opinion of each of the candidate’s cognitive circumstances. A poor journalistic choice would be to rehash the lay opinion of whomever-the-fuck, over and over, concentrating almost exclusively on one of those ELDERLY contenders and ignoring the other. Like this:

I am enraged by this graph. There is no excuse for this. Trump is running around getting convicted of felonies and probably committing new ones, while Biden is sitting around in his underwear drooling – no he’s fucking not. The far right has been beating this drum with a paucity of actual evidence. Biden’s doing a better job of running this country than many of his recent predecessors. His administration is certainly turning in a vastly better performance that the last guy in that office.

In the meantime, Trump gets all the favorable press, despite – DESPITE – being nearly incapable of forming coherent sentences. Have you listened to any of his rallies? No, of course not. They’re violent, petty, vengeful, and nearly unintelligible.

So Biden has a bad debate night, comes off looking like he’s having a touch of the Alzheimer’s, and the corporate media is on it like a fly in cow-pie.

Maybe Biden is drifting into dementia. It happens. Ronnie Reagan is exhibit A. But Biden’s cognitive decline is not a fact, and not self-evident from his presence on stage, or from his ongoing activities. His debate performance RAISES questions, it doesn’t answer them. As does much of Trump’s speech and manner, who seems to be more consistently irrational (my opinion, yes). 

The mainstream media – for reasons we may never know, but mostly (I believe) in a desperate effort to prove that they aren’t biased towards the left (e.g., literate, educated, sophisticated people who still read) – are bending over backwards to sell our country down the river to an organized crime cabal.

Enjoy your goddamned Independence Day. I hope you have another one.