One of the websites I try to regularly check in on is Harry’s Place. Out of all the left/centre left aligned outlets out there this one is for me the most reasonable in outlook. The writers there have always been willing to ask the awkward questions that need to be asked. It’s not a site that I find myself wholly in agreement with but then I don’t think I’ve found any politics related outlet that I find I can one hundred per cent agree with, ‘Treebeard’s Rule’ applies here as in ‘I’m not on anybody’s ‘side’ because nobody is particularly on my side’.

As I said the posts on Harry’s Place are consistently good and they are good in well written even when I don’t particularly agree with the premise or the viewpoint of the piece, but I had to share with you all a particularly excellent post about the death of journalism by Harry Storm. It’s an excellent lament for what journalism once was which included the search for truth, accuracy, an attempt to be reasonably objective and being relatively balanced.

Whilst I accept that these ideals were often not met by the journalists in the past such ideals were at least something to strive for or measure yourself against as a journalist. That’s not the case now. Those who call themselves journalists are not seekers of truth, nor people for whom objectivity is worth striving for and not those who see balance in reporting as something they should be concerned with. Instead they are political activists, but not in the sense of a Paul Foot, or a Jimmy Cameron who stood up respectively for those they believed were wrongly accused of crimes or who highlighted the possible mistreatment of those imprisoned by South Korean forces for being ‘unreliable’ during the Korean War, but promoters of Establishment narratives. Today’s journalists, not all of them but too many, are, as Mr Storm says, involved in a top down propaganda project rather than speaking up for those at the bottom of society.

Mr Storm said:

To be sure, people calling themselves journalists still sit at their keyboards and put sentences together. But instead of adhering to the principles of journalism outlined above, media outlets and most of the “journalists” who work at them now desire to support and serve a political, cultural and social project all aimed at a top-down change in our society the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion and the subsequent Christian takeover of the Roman Empire.

In my view, so much of the civilizational storm we’re navigating today is is the result of this ruinous state of journalism. Whether it’s the suppression of information over the origins of COVID and the efficacy of masks and vaccines, the extent of police killings of unarmed blacks, the harms done to gender dysphoric children via so-called “affirmative care,”or the wildly excessive claims of climate activists, it is the disappearance of fact-based reporting and investigative journalism that question orthodoxies that is the common thread that allowed these ideas to proliferate virtually unchallenged.

I really agree with Mr Storm on some of these points. The MSM doesn’t seem to differ in view or make up from the Establishment. Familiarity with the Establishment by journalists appears to have bred contempt for the idea of searching for the truth.

Mr Storm is right in saying that many of the problems in our informational landscape and in particular in the news environment is down to the disappearance of fact based reporting. Would we have had the ruinous policies of lockdown or the violent mobs that emerged after the death of George Floyd or children’s bodies mutilated and ruined by the vast legion of ‘Gender Mengele’s’

or their minds warped by the latter day end of the world climate cult if journalists had asked the right questions and been more concerned with truth than narrative? We might have had better societal outcomes over the last decade or so if journalists had still had enough balls to ask the awkward questions of the Establishment.

Mr Storm continued:

Had journalists been doing their actual jobs, none of these issues would be any as near widespread as they are today. Instead, the media willingly surrendered without a fight, making it easy for other sectors to be infected with the same cultural virus.

The transformation of the media from investigator to cheerleader is what connects the dots and what made it so easy for arcane academic ideas like critical race theory, social justice and the looming climate catastrophe to spread to other institutions – government, corporate, tech, NGOs, not-for-profit, and the world of arts — so quickly and convincingly. Look around: there’s been virtually no investigative reporting done except into the threat posed right-wing extremism, even as the much bigger civilizational threat to our freedoms comes from a more entrenched and insidious place.

Those who are called journalists but don’t really behave like them bought into Establishment opinion and narrative without questioning them. Mr Storm is correct, journalists should have fought to stay as investigators, even if it made them temporarily unpopular rather than become cheerleaders for some distinctly iffy ideologies and policies. I pray one day I’ll see the day when journalism is great again.

Please read the entirety of Mr Storm’s piece. It’s excellent and well worth your time.