As Obama's Deputy National Security advisor Ben Rhodes said in 2016, "The average reporter is a 27 year old...who literally knows nothing." If anything, it has only gotten worse in the last 9 years!
Surely there is more to this characteristic of MSM reporters not thinking for themselves than simply age. I agree that people can gain wisdom and competence as they grow in years and experience. Look at Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy Jr. BUT, some people are amazing even when they are young. Look at the incredible Karoline Leavitt for example.
I too am amazed at MSM’s ability to dismiss truth and replace it with nonsense . There was a time in America that a journalist was able to lay the facts out in a logical story and let the reader decide for themselves. Now there is stupidity in Abundance amongst the MSM to see who can ask the dumbest question and avoid the. Truth !
Is it stupidity? Or are we now living in the early stages of a totalitarian world? With a media that predictably conforms?
This piece by George Orwell offers many insights about writing in a totalitarian age. Focused on creative writing. But visiting other types of writing, notably what is called journalism.
"About a year ago I attended a meeting of the P.E.N. Club, the occasion being the tercentenary of Milton’s Areopagitica — a pamphlet, it may be remembered, in defence of freedom of the press."
...
"Out of this concourse of several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose. Significantly, no speaker quoted from the pamphlet which was ostensibly being commemorated. Nor was there any mention of the various books which have been ‘killed’ in England and the United States during the war. In its net effect the meeting was a demonstration in favour of censorship.
There was nothing particularly surprising in this. In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. and the British Council"
...
"Freedom of thought and of the press are usually attacked by arguments which are not worth bothering about. Anyone who has experience of lecturing and debating knows them off backwards. Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. Although other aspects of the question are usually in the foreground, the controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers."
...
"The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would ‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect of the lies which they condone getting out of the newspapers and into the history books.
The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary."
...
"A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened."
...
"Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth."
...
"A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist."
...
" the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all. It may seem that all this time I have been talking about the effects of censorship, not on literature as a whole, but merely on one department of political journalism. "
...
"They assume that a writer is either a mere entertainer or else a venal hack who can switch from one line of propaganda to another as easily as an organ grinder changing tunes."
...
"The journalist is unfree, and is conscious of unfreedom, when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him important news"
...
"Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship."
...
"Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes."
...
"And the destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order."
...
"Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level,"
...
"It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism."
..
"Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own society is still, broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a secret police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves."
...
"it is — as I have tried to show — certain that literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against ‘individualism’ and the ‘ivory tower’, no pious platitudes to the effect that ‘true individuality is only attained through identification with the community’, can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind."
FF - Bonus. Buried in the piece is the following curious sentence:
"Provided that they steer clear of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons."
Many of us researching the tools of the pandemic that restricted liberty, promoted narratives and censored speech discovered the widespread practice of "Nudge" Behavioral Science. Which is The Science(TM) of psychology infused into information control necessary to gain compliance with totalitarianism:
The totalitarians fear the population learning how they are being controlled by psychological manipulation to accept their enslavement. Which explains Orwell's piece described psychology as a dangerous subject. And why we must learn all we can about it. Before it becomes a restricted subject.
John, as a retired journalist I can tell you newsrooms have the usual mix of intelligent people and dummies.
Journalists see information on a topic, any topic, then go looking for more info, talk to people, watch interviews and do some interviewing themselves. Being a reporter is an extremely demanding intellectual task. Synthesizing a story only happens after someone figures out a lead and the main conflict. Story structure exerts pressure, as does length limits and all the rest. It is a demanding, fascinating way to make a living.
The problem here, however, and it's been developing for quite some time, is the loss of obedience to the tenets these people learned in Journalism 101. There was no vetting of sources during the pandemic. That's a prime faux pas of late. They also don't do balanced reporting much anymore, which is also a loss of primary importance because it shows there is no effort to understand a topic from another perspective, which may be that of the reader.
The loss of those two benchmarks of good reporting is catastrophic. But how can you vet your sources when the editors tell you, you can't report all the information you find? We don't really understand yet, the majority of us, the incredible depth and breadth of this co-opting of the news. This is frightening in its thoroughness. THIS is the evidence that the pandemic was planned for years. They planned how to control the news, right down to the Spanish magazines published for local markets.
It's frustrating to see no break in this logjam, but it is only partially due to reporters not getting the story. It's also due to the editors forbidding balanced reporting on controversial topics. It's also a failure to vet sources.
But there is a third cause that just may be the worst of all: solutions journalism. People teaching in universities have to make their mark, publish papers, introduce new practices, etc., to build professional reputations that build careers. Some jerk with a big ego decided that reporters should be considered experts. They are, to an extent, much more expert in a topic they report on than a reader ... but now they're supposed to start with an opinion and go out and prove it factual ... which often cannot happen because the reporters are young and inexperienced in life and not very good at judging what's the conflict. Notice the recent pandemic.
Everyone in the newsroom where I worked knew nothing about coronaviruses and just believed whatever the CDC and FDA told them. Didn't vet sources, didn't practice balanced reporting, and didn't know a damn thing themselves. Solutions journalism lets them think they should spout off their own opinions and then prove them true.
The whole industry has been co-opted, as you know, and it is frightening, especially for someone like me. There are mid-six figures of people employed in this profession. They have all been co-opted through one lever or another and it's high time we sued them for fraud.
That's how we can get them, John, sue them for fraud.
We also have "advocacy" journalism, essentially journalists cheerleading for the "correct" public perception of issues and reality itself, all to benefit their corporate overlord bosses. It works really well on a distracted, electronically hypnotized, mesmerized, propagandized public who desperately want to believe in magic fairy dust rather than hard work and the time it takes to turn the ship of state around, hence the spinning of all the adult fairy tales.
Hey John, as usual your comment was right on: "As a veteran true crime author, I have, for decades, analyzed the conduct of guilty people." Yesterday, the CBC, funded $billions of tax dollars by the Canadian Federal Gov., stopped all press questions of leaders running in the upcoming Canadian federal election held in 8 days. Their ridiculous complaint was "independent press" was allowed to ask the leaders 4 questions, so the entire questioning was shutdown, the leaders had to leave.
During my senior year in college in Lubbock as an engineer student, I was dating my future wife who was a business major, the college of which included the Journalism School at the time. We went to a number of her social functions where students of journalism were prevalent. I remember thinking many times how stupid and gullible these people are, so I would always have a joke or two prepared ahead of time to illustrate my point to my wife to be, many of which simply bounced off the top of their heads with a perfunctory faked laugh from them. An anecdotal story for sure, but supportive of your hypothesis.
This explanation doesn't work for me. Most of these top reporters are very smart.
Do not for a minute think they do not know exactly what their editors will and will not publish. The better they are at the game, the more they get published.
Yes. They may not be top-notch geniuses, but they can be pretty bright (and highly educated). It’s the WAY they use their intelligence that makes the difference. They use their intelligence to CONFORM and to justify the status quo in which they have built their comfortable nests. I wrote a note about conformance here … https://homocomfortus.substack.com/p/we-are-in-a-battle
I've thought for years about the stupidity of so much of our msm, academics, government officials, and other members of our various institutions. My thinking is that the Democrat Party and the thousands of these institutions are controlled by a small group of very wealthy white gentiles and Jews and they want the dumbest people they can find to run them. People who can be bribed and manipulated easily because of 1) the bribes, which are far greater than anything these same said individuals could ever be paid in a normal society and 2) that they can't understand much of what they say and do is actually wrong. The oligarchs control billions of dollars, so they have the cash on hand easily, plus they own thousands of companies and through donations, thousands of NGO, charitable groups, and the like. This why we deal with so much idiocy, incompetence, sloth, and corruption almost everywhere and all the time. And it's just getting worse.
All any of these reporters need to do is to read, "Turtles All The Way Down" (there is a copycat book title with this name. The one I am referring to has a foreword by Mary Holland, JD), also, "Dissolving Illusions" by Suzanne Humphries, MD & Roman Bystrianyk, & "Crooked: Man-Made Disease Explained", by Forrest Maready. Then, maybe, just maybe, these reporters can contribute something meaningful to the conversation. This would be my recommendation.
You've hit the nail on the head. "...they know the liabilities of its full disclosure and widespread recognition are incalculable and would result in total ruin."
Think back to when you were 12 how many autistic kids did you meet?we had learning disabled (sometimes back then labeled MR) and downs. As a teacher I remember when we had to be taught or our conferences were about this subject- it started around 2000 and was amped up there after. The parents of these children are struggling and so are teachers. I was and am wary of vaccines, meds, and honestly docs. If you’re not you aren’t thinking. A good doc is hard to come by. And looking at how much docs make off of jabs the entire USA should be saying no way!
Advance boot licking over critical thinking. Reward accomplished missions. Wire them on a dopamine of false likes. Insure fatuous narcissist personalities which require air time are selected. Let them hob nob with the next level so they always aspire the lift.
As Obama's Deputy National Security advisor Ben Rhodes said in 2016, "The average reporter is a 27 year old...who literally knows nothing." If anything, it has only gotten worse in the last 9 years!
Surely there is more to this characteristic of MSM reporters not thinking for themselves than simply age. I agree that people can gain wisdom and competence as they grow in years and experience. Look at Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy Jr. BUT, some people are amazing even when they are young. Look at the incredible Karoline Leavitt for example.
Young conservative people can be very sharp, young liberal people not so much.
I too am amazed at MSM’s ability to dismiss truth and replace it with nonsense . There was a time in America that a journalist was able to lay the facts out in a logical story and let the reader decide for themselves. Now there is stupidity in Abundance amongst the MSM to see who can ask the dumbest question and avoid the. Truth !
Even if they are smart, those who control what is reported will not allow anything other than the approved narrative to be broadcast.
Is it stupidity? Or are we now living in the early stages of a totalitarian world? With a media that predictably conforms?
This piece by George Orwell offers many insights about writing in a totalitarian age. Focused on creative writing. But visiting other types of writing, notably what is called journalism.
The Prevention of Literature
Polemic, January, 1946
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-prevention-of-literature/
(selected excerpts):
"About a year ago I attended a meeting of the P.E.N. Club, the occasion being the tercentenary of Milton’s Areopagitica — a pamphlet, it may be remembered, in defence of freedom of the press."
...
"Out of this concourse of several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose. Significantly, no speaker quoted from the pamphlet which was ostensibly being commemorated. Nor was there any mention of the various books which have been ‘killed’ in England and the United States during the war. In its net effect the meeting was a demonstration in favour of censorship.
There was nothing particularly surprising in this. In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. and the British Council"
...
"Freedom of thought and of the press are usually attacked by arguments which are not worth bothering about. Anyone who has experience of lecturing and debating knows them off backwards. Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. Although other aspects of the question are usually in the foreground, the controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers."
...
"The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would ‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect of the lies which they condone getting out of the newspapers and into the history books.
The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary."
...
"A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened."
...
"Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth."
...
"A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist."
...
" the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all. It may seem that all this time I have been talking about the effects of censorship, not on literature as a whole, but merely on one department of political journalism. "
...
"They assume that a writer is either a mere entertainer or else a venal hack who can switch from one line of propaganda to another as easily as an organ grinder changing tunes."
...
"The journalist is unfree, and is conscious of unfreedom, when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him important news"
...
"Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship."
...
"Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes."
...
"And the destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order."
...
"Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level,"
...
"It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism."
..
"Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own society is still, broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a secret police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves."
...
"it is — as I have tried to show — certain that literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against ‘individualism’ and the ‘ivory tower’, no pious platitudes to the effect that ‘true individuality is only attained through identification with the community’, can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind."
FF - Bonus. Buried in the piece is the following curious sentence:
"Provided that they steer clear of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons."
Many of us researching the tools of the pandemic that restricted liberty, promoted narratives and censored speech discovered the widespread practice of "Nudge" Behavioral Science. Which is The Science(TM) of psychology infused into information control necessary to gain compliance with totalitarianism:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210519003131/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/14/scientists-admit-totalitarian-use-fear-control-behaviour-covid/
The totalitarians fear the population learning how they are being controlled by psychological manipulation to accept their enslavement. Which explains Orwell's piece described psychology as a dangerous subject. And why we must learn all we can about it. Before it becomes a restricted subject.
Then stop buying their “ news “ in any form , because NOTHING SPEAKS LOUDER THAN MONEY ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE LOSING IT !
"Stupidity in Abundance." Roll the presses, make the signs, embroider the T-shirts. It is happening. The movement is afoot in the land.
Your welcome to use it describes MSM PERFECTLY !
'Reporters' are NOT JOURNALISTS.
And why they are called 'Journalists', is beyond me.
We SHOULD be calling them, 'Talking Heads'.......since they aren't even 'Reporters'.
Better yet.....'Talking Head Propagandists'.
How about “those reading from a script the State Dept provides them” This is also true of the BBC- MI6 provides them the script.
In both cases if one of these mannequins objects they are fired for a new mannequin.
Talking Head Propagandists with Stupidity in Abundance.
There’s a reason people call them "presstitutes".
John, as a retired journalist I can tell you newsrooms have the usual mix of intelligent people and dummies.
Journalists see information on a topic, any topic, then go looking for more info, talk to people, watch interviews and do some interviewing themselves. Being a reporter is an extremely demanding intellectual task. Synthesizing a story only happens after someone figures out a lead and the main conflict. Story structure exerts pressure, as does length limits and all the rest. It is a demanding, fascinating way to make a living.
The problem here, however, and it's been developing for quite some time, is the loss of obedience to the tenets these people learned in Journalism 101. There was no vetting of sources during the pandemic. That's a prime faux pas of late. They also don't do balanced reporting much anymore, which is also a loss of primary importance because it shows there is no effort to understand a topic from another perspective, which may be that of the reader.
The loss of those two benchmarks of good reporting is catastrophic. But how can you vet your sources when the editors tell you, you can't report all the information you find? We don't really understand yet, the majority of us, the incredible depth and breadth of this co-opting of the news. This is frightening in its thoroughness. THIS is the evidence that the pandemic was planned for years. They planned how to control the news, right down to the Spanish magazines published for local markets.
It's frustrating to see no break in this logjam, but it is only partially due to reporters not getting the story. It's also due to the editors forbidding balanced reporting on controversial topics. It's also a failure to vet sources.
But there is a third cause that just may be the worst of all: solutions journalism. People teaching in universities have to make their mark, publish papers, introduce new practices, etc., to build professional reputations that build careers. Some jerk with a big ego decided that reporters should be considered experts. They are, to an extent, much more expert in a topic they report on than a reader ... but now they're supposed to start with an opinion and go out and prove it factual ... which often cannot happen because the reporters are young and inexperienced in life and not very good at judging what's the conflict. Notice the recent pandemic.
Everyone in the newsroom where I worked knew nothing about coronaviruses and just believed whatever the CDC and FDA told them. Didn't vet sources, didn't practice balanced reporting, and didn't know a damn thing themselves. Solutions journalism lets them think they should spout off their own opinions and then prove them true.
The whole industry has been co-opted, as you know, and it is frightening, especially for someone like me. There are mid-six figures of people employed in this profession. They have all been co-opted through one lever or another and it's high time we sued them for fraud.
That's how we can get them, John, sue them for fraud.
Great posting, thank you!
A sad day for journalism is a sad day for democracy.
We also have "advocacy" journalism, essentially journalists cheerleading for the "correct" public perception of issues and reality itself, all to benefit their corporate overlord bosses. It works really well on a distracted, electronically hypnotized, mesmerized, propagandized public who desperately want to believe in magic fairy dust rather than hard work and the time it takes to turn the ship of state around, hence the spinning of all the adult fairy tales.
Hey John, as usual your comment was right on: "As a veteran true crime author, I have, for decades, analyzed the conduct of guilty people." Yesterday, the CBC, funded $billions of tax dollars by the Canadian Federal Gov., stopped all press questions of leaders running in the upcoming Canadian federal election held in 8 days. Their ridiculous complaint was "independent press" was allowed to ask the leaders 4 questions, so the entire questioning was shutdown, the leaders had to leave.
It's highly doubtful those journalists operate freely and independently but are bound by editorial diktat to toe the party line.
During my senior year in college in Lubbock as an engineer student, I was dating my future wife who was a business major, the college of which included the Journalism School at the time. We went to a number of her social functions where students of journalism were prevalent. I remember thinking many times how stupid and gullible these people are, so I would always have a joke or two prepared ahead of time to illustrate my point to my wife to be, many of which simply bounced off the top of their heads with a perfunctory faked laugh from them. An anecdotal story for sure, but supportive of your hypothesis.
This explanation doesn't work for me. Most of these top reporters are very smart.
Do not for a minute think they do not know exactly what their editors will and will not publish. The better they are at the game, the more they get published.
Yes. They may not be top-notch geniuses, but they can be pretty bright (and highly educated). It’s the WAY they use their intelligence that makes the difference. They use their intelligence to CONFORM and to justify the status quo in which they have built their comfortable nests. I wrote a note about conformance here … https://homocomfortus.substack.com/p/we-are-in-a-battle
I've thought for years about the stupidity of so much of our msm, academics, government officials, and other members of our various institutions. My thinking is that the Democrat Party and the thousands of these institutions are controlled by a small group of very wealthy white gentiles and Jews and they want the dumbest people they can find to run them. People who can be bribed and manipulated easily because of 1) the bribes, which are far greater than anything these same said individuals could ever be paid in a normal society and 2) that they can't understand much of what they say and do is actually wrong. The oligarchs control billions of dollars, so they have the cash on hand easily, plus they own thousands of companies and through donations, thousands of NGO, charitable groups, and the like. This why we deal with so much idiocy, incompetence, sloth, and corruption almost everywhere and all the time. And it's just getting worse.
Danny Huckabee
🎯
All any of these reporters need to do is to read, "Turtles All The Way Down" (there is a copycat book title with this name. The one I am referring to has a foreword by Mary Holland, JD), also, "Dissolving Illusions" by Suzanne Humphries, MD & Roman Bystrianyk, & "Crooked: Man-Made Disease Explained", by Forrest Maready. Then, maybe, just maybe, these reporters can contribute something meaningful to the conversation. This would be my recommendation.
You've hit the nail on the head. "...they know the liabilities of its full disclosure and widespread recognition are incalculable and would result in total ruin."
What's the MSM? Haven't listened to anything they say since the 1990's. I think they are the same retards programming A/i.
I have a bumper sticker on my car that says "Is that what your TV told you to think? @"
The "@" is a hypnotic swirl.
Why people can’t see how evil AI is, is beyond me.
Think back to when you were 12 how many autistic kids did you meet?we had learning disabled (sometimes back then labeled MR) and downs. As a teacher I remember when we had to be taught or our conferences were about this subject- it started around 2000 and was amped up there after. The parents of these children are struggling and so are teachers. I was and am wary of vaccines, meds, and honestly docs. If you’re not you aren’t thinking. A good doc is hard to come by. And looking at how much docs make off of jabs the entire USA should be saying no way!
Advance boot licking over critical thinking. Reward accomplished missions. Wire them on a dopamine of false likes. Insure fatuous narcissist personalities which require air time are selected. Let them hob nob with the next level so they always aspire the lift.
The answer depends on whether or not water is wet.