"Progressive Journalism" => Cultural Appropriation of (Phony Facade of) Journalism

Progressive Journalists Are Outraged At The NRA For Pointing Out Leftist Violence
Two days before an assassination attempt on Republicans, the NRA posted a video on Facebook warning of leftist violence. Progressive journalists are now pretending political violence is the NRA's fault.

The fact of the matter is that it wasn’t the NRA that tried to murder a bunch of its political opponents. It wasn’t the NRA that published the location and security details of its foes. It wasn’t the NRA that surveilled a park and confirmed that everyone in it had the “wrong” politics before unloading on them. No, that was done by a progressive Democrat activist. All the NRA did was point out leftist violence and note that Americans have a God-given right, affirmed by the U.S. Constitution, to defend themselves and their loved ones from that very violence.

To Golfarb and Applebaum and McKesson, the NRA’s crime wasn’t committing or fomenting violence. The NRA’s crime was refusing to let leftist violence go unnoticed.

Will Journalists Learn?

CBS commentary indicates a possible cognitive flash, without any significant visceral connections:

Commentary: The unbearable smugness of the press

"The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.

This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’s be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.

So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.

And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.

It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?

We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.

You’d think that Trump’s victory – the one we all discounted too far in advance – would lead to a certain newfound humility in the political press. But of course that’s not how it works. To us, speaking broadly, our diagnosis was still basically correct. The demons were just stronger than we realized.

This is all a “whitelash,” you see. Trump voters are racist and sexist, so there must be more racists and sexists than we realized. Tuesday night’s outcome was not a logic-driven rejection of a deeply flawed candidate named Clinton; no, it was a primal scream against fairness, equality, and progress. Let the new tantrums commence!

That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line. It’s similar to how media Twitter works, a system where people who dissent from the proper framing of a story are attacked by mobs of smugly incredulous pundits. Journalists exist primarily in a world where people can get shouted down and disappear, which informs our attitudes toward all disagreement.

Journalists increasingly don’t even believe in the possibility of reasoned disagreement, and as such ascribe cynical motives to those who think about things a different way. We see this in the ongoing veneration of “facts,” the ones peddled by explainer websites and data journalists who believe themselves to be curiously post-ideological.

That the explainers and data journalists so frequently get things hilariously wrong never invites the soul-searching you’d think it would. Instead, it all just somehow leads us to more smugness, more meanness, more certainty from the reporters and pundits. Faced with defeat, we retreat further into our bubble, assumptions left unchecked. No, it’s the voters who are wrong.

As a direct result, we get it wrong with greater frequency. Out on the road, we forget to ask the right questions. We can’t even imagine the right question. We go into assignments too certain that what we find will serve to justify our biases. The public’s estimation of the press declines even further -- fewer than one-in-three Americans trust the press, per Gallup -- which starts the cycle anew. "

Pulitzer Prize: Who Investigates the Journalists?

THE THIN BLUE LINE

Monday was the annual day of self-congratulation for traditional journalists – the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize winners. 2016’s awards (and finalists) recognized a parade of journalists whose work was overtly hostile to law enforcement.

Pulitzer Prize Medal

The award for national reporting went to the Washington Post for (to quote the Pulitzer committee) “its revelatory initiative in creating and using a national database to illustrate how often and why the police shoot to kill and who the victims are most likely to be.”

The award for “explanatory reporting” went to ProPublica for a “startling examination and exposé of law enforcement’s enduring failures to investigate reports of rape properly and to comprehend the traumatic effects on its victims”.

The award for editorial writing went to Sun Newspapers in Charlotte, Florida “for fierce, indignant editorials that demanded truth and change after the deadly assault of an inmate by corrections officers.”

One of two finalists in editorial writing was the Baltimore Sun “for editorials that demanded accountability in the aftermath of the death of Freddie Gray”. The Sun was also a finalist for breaking news reporting on the Freddie Gray story, “for fast moving coverage of the rioting.”

The Post & Courier in South Carolina was a finalist “for its tenacious effort in obtaining video of a police officer shooting an unarmed Walter Scott …”

A finalist in local reporting was the Miami Herald “for the impressive reporting … on a local drug sting that cost tens of millions of dollars but yielded no significant arrests”.

What Monday’s awards reinforce is the premium that the journalistic establishment places on activist journalism that sides reflexively with prison inmates, victims of police shootings and the like (i.e. in many cases criminals), and that seeks to undermine law enforcement. In the view of the Pulitzer Committee, and the newspaper editors clamoring for awards, cops and prison guards are not hard working, underpaid custodians of law and order. Rather they are corrupt, racist objects for “investigations” and exposes. And a way for journalists to win awards, engage in self-congratulation and, inevitably, enjoy remuneration.
[Emphasis Added]

What?? Nothing for Rolling Stone's reporting on the horrific rape of Jackie at UVA?

Headline of the Day

"JOURNALISM: HuffPo to State Trump Is ‘Racist’ After Every Article; Also a ‘serial liar’ and ‘rampant xenophobe.’ Imagine if they applied this approach to Hillary. But, of course, they never will."
Ed Driscoll at Instapundit

The fear of Trump is in their throats...