Legendary newspaperman Wilbur F. Storey famously said, “It is a newspaper’s duty to print the news and raise hell”. The left-media are conspicuously failing in their duty. The left-media don’t do “facts” any more: as leftist rag The Saturday Paper puts it, they do “narrative journalism”. In a more honest time, that was called for what it is: spin.
So, when Sky News’ Laura Jaye had the temerity to report just the facts, the social-media left turned on her like a pack of rabid dogs.
Sky News political journalist Laura Jayes has hit back at online critics, who attacked her reporting that the young man who allegedly stabbed people in Sydney shouted “Allahu akbar!”.
Because that is indisputably what he did say. It is an undeniable fact.
Now, an analysis piece might rightfully point out that, as someone on a well-documented spiral into lunacy, the murderer might well not be a textbook Muslim terrorist. But Jayes wasn’t writing analysis or opinion, she was reporting news as it happened. Just the facts.
Jayes told The Australian that she “100 per cent” stands by her reporting on Twitter of the attack as it unfolded yesterday in Sydney’s CBD, and that she was just doing her job as a journalist…“The thing that comes first is informing the public, not political correctness in hindsight,” Jayes said.
Thankfully, Jayes’ bosses are standing firm against the online cry-bullies.
Chris Willis, executive editor at Sky News, stood by Jayes’s reporting. “She did her job, she was reporting facts, she got it right and she was reporting a developing story,” he said. “Incidentally, she also was the first one to report something was happening because she had her sister affected by this, who was actually telling her about it so she got it right.”
But the left doesn’t care about facts or being right. For them, everything is “narrative”, and hurty-feelings trump facts (not to mention the feelings of people actually, physically hurt by a terrorist’s knife).
Ashley Sutherland, a student at the University of Melbourne, criticised Jayes on Twitter of Islamophobia, and Hanan Dover said it was typical of Sky News and “stupid journalism”.
Saman Shad said Jayes’s reporting was “unhelpful”, to which Jayes said, “the whole incident was ‘unhelpful’, especially for the poor woman who was stabbed”.
So, telling the truth is “stupid journalism” and “unhelpful”. This is the absolute state of the left in 2019.
But, as Willis says, Twitter is not the real world, and should frankly be ignored by real journalists. In the real world outside the tiny leftist clique of Twitter, people who have the facts will make up their own minds.
“The public isn’t stupid, they can discern what is terror and what is not.”
theaustralian.com.au/business/media/sky-reporter-laura-jayes-defends-herself-over-islamophobia-claims