Big media, funded by Big Government, love to hurl insults at me. Usually, they apply the label “right-wing” to anything I do, as in “right-wing blogger” – like that’s an insult. They ramp up the insult, especially after I show them up for the poodles to Big Government they’ve become and expose their favourites to the blow torch of reality. Andrea Vance is the latest, using the term “muckraking” in her column yesterday.
She and others in the media also love using the word “blogger” as an insult. Never mind that a High Court judge found me to be a journalist; they just like using blogger as an inferior descriptor with which to insult me. Andrea Vance forgets her own background as a “journalist” with the now-defunct tabloid News of The World, and forgets that the same year she bagged a Canon Media Award, I also bagged a Canon Media Award for exposing the ratbaggery of Len Brown.
Big Media ramps up the insults especially after I embarrass them badly for not covering relevant stories. The latest round of attacks came after our exclusive outing of publicity-seeking scientist Siouxsie Wiles as a rank hypocrite. It was a story that 1News refused outright to publish, saying that it wasn’t in the public interest. Given that almost all other media covered the story (after The BFD broke it), it was surely public interest that a media darling who lectures other people to follow the rules was making up her own rules to suit herself.
When Big Media name and shame rule breakers it is news and public interest but when I shine some sunlight on it – it is “muckraking“…go figure.
But is being called a muckraker an insult? It turns out, no. A muckraker, by definition, is a person who searches for and tries to expose real or alleged corruption, scandal, or other wrongdoing, especially in politics. Wikipedia defines a muckraker as follows:
In contemporary American usage, the term can refer to journalists or others who “dig deep for the facts” or, when used pejoratively, those who seek to cause scandal. The term is a reference to a character in John Bunyan’s classic Pilgrim’s Progress, “the Man with the Muck-rake”, who rejected salvation to focus on filth. It became popular after President Theodore Roosevelt referred to the character in a 1906 speech; Roosevelt acknowledged that “the men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to the well being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck.”
Wikipedia
And here is a little history lesson for Andrea Vance, since she seems to lack any understanding of what muckraking is:
The late great Warren Berryman proudly called himself a muckraker, saying what he (and NBR) did was to rake through the muck of the high and mighty to find the stuff they wanted buried and hidden.
This is completely different to muck/mud slinging, which to a tee describes Andrea Vance’s ad hominem attacks.
So by definition muckraking is indeed what I do, and I’m proud of it.
Big Media in conjunction with simpering socialist Nicky Hager and his criminal mates tried to silence me in 2014. They wallowed in a crime that today would see them professing how unethical it is to publish stolen materials. They were then and remain today utter hypocrites, contorting their so-called ethics to run hit pieces on people and organisations they don’t like. And they have the temerity to call it, rather loftily, journalism.
The reality is that Big Media have sold their soul to Big Government for grants, subsidies and rivers of gold from state-funded advertising. Little wonder then, that they react so negatively when scooped time and time again on big stories, and then try to turn the story into one about the journalist or the outlet which scooped them.
So I’m a proud muckraker. I write for a media organisation that has a bigger daily readership than most of the rags these high and mighty journalists preach from. I write for my audience, not the government mandarins who control the purse strings of Big Media.
I wasn’t stopped in 2014. I paused to recover after my stroke in 2018, and now three years later, am well on the road to recovery. I achieved more in three years of enforced sick leave than Andrea Vance will ever achieve in a lifetime of very, very average scribbling. I’m back and I’m here to stay, muckraking and all.
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