When the Australian Federal Police raided the homes and workplaces of several journalists, trying to track the source of leaked, classified information, the mainstream media wailed and screamed till their little faces turned blue about a supposed new regime of fascistic censorship. Yet it was made very clear to me, as a student journalist, that using leaked government information placed journalists in just such a legal grey area. In fact, Australian journalists have been jailed in decades previous over using anonymous sources.
All in all, it was an unedifying, self-serving display from a dying legacy media.
Especially when journalists don’t have to look very far to find very real dictatorial oppression of journalism.
Very recently a Chinese citizen-journalist was sentenced to four years in jail. Her crime: reporting on the coronavirus outbreak that began in her city of Wuhan[…]
As Westerners, it’s easy to read news like this and let sympathy give way to apathy: these events took place in another country, we reason, under a foreign regime, in a land faraway.
It’s also very hypocritical to whinge and whine about government going about the normal business of trying to stop the leak of classified information – at the same time as journalists themselves are being every bit as brutally censorious as Beijing’s bully-boys.
If you think I’m exaggerating, you must have missed the stories I’m about to tell you.
To be sure, journalists are not being criminalised in the West—yet. But in the year just ended, reputations were trashed, bombshell stories were buried, and careers were snuffed out as newsrooms—with the eager support of big tech—abandoned truth for ideology and suffered no dissent.
Former Rolling Stone editor Matt Tabibi – as liberal an icon as can be imagined – talks about the suffocating oppressiveness of the left-media.
‘It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts… who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.
The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation[…]’
Taibbi catalogues a long list of prominent journos gagged or expelled by the legacy media in 2020.
Then there is James Bennet, a New York Times editor sacked for allowing an op-ed by a Republican senator, calling for the National Guard to be deployed to stop the hundreds of violent leftist rioters burning American cities (the same National Guard deployed by the Biden administration to safeguard an inauguration no one even bothered watching on YouTube).
Another NYT editor, Bari Weiss, also resigned, citing a toxic, often openly anti-Semitic culture at the daily newspaper of arguably America’s most Jewish city. She was, she says, bullied and called a “Nazi” and “racist”.
Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald…the list goes on.
Greenwald, a Pulitzer winning investigative journalist, quit after The Intercept censored his article detailing the web of corruption around Joe and Hunter Biden.
‘The brute censorship this week of my article about the Hunter Biden materials and Joe Biden’s conduct regarding Ukraine and China, as well my critique of the media’s… deeply unholy union with Silicon Valley and the ‘intelligence community’… eroded the last justification I could cling to for staying.’
(I agree entirely with Greenwald on the suppression of the Joe Biden story. In fact, I believe this to be just one chapter in the greatest scandal in American history).
These trends did not just affect journalism in 2020, but were part of a tectonic shift felt in the world of letters more broadly.
J K Rowling, Lionel Shriver, Germaine Greer – the left-bullies seem to have a particular relish for pouring hate on women authors.
Rowling joined 160 journalists and academics (almost all of whom were left-wing) in signing A Letter on Justice and Open Debate published in Harper’s Magazine. The open letter painted a dire picture of the developments of 2020:
‘Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study…’
The Good Sauce
Foolishly optimistic, the signatories called for a return to “exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish [ideas] away”.
Tell ‘em they’re dreamin’.
The new Woke Totalitarians are in power: and totalitarians do not give up power just by asking nicely.
The only real solution is to let the mainstream media die by its own hand and turn instead to independent media. Subscribe to news you really can trust.
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