New Hampshire: The Real Facts

Have you had enough of the evening news, local newspaper editors and reporters?

Has the condescending lecture of the network anchor gotten old? Are you sick and tired of "reporters" who couldn't tell the story straight if their lives depended on it?

I am.

I am about fed up with a news industry that fundamentally fails to do its job, and which every day strays further and further from its purpose. I'm tired of partisan lectures and propaganda dressed up like the news. I have had about all I can take of the self-important blowhards who seem to think their role is to rudely mock and shout down the people who we elect to office.

I'm just tired of their crap.

If there's one group of people I trust less and have more contempt for than politicians, it is reporters. We are a nation awash is news products which contain virtually nothing of subsance or worth. We have channels full of 24-hour crap, and hardly a reporter anywhere who can actually tell it to us straight.

The media has called itself to some position of importance and significance in our society, taking upon itself an air or power and superiority that is almost comical. They have almost made themselves a special class of people whose every notion or whim is "right" and any contrary view is "wrong." They are collectively the most arrogant and self-important group of people in our society today.

And yet they are terrible at their job.

They are so wrapped up in recirculating their own speculation that they seldom truly report. They are so bound up in the cliches of their trade that they become useless.

Here's an example. For two months the various news organizations, around the clock, talked about the potential Republican vice presidential candidates. Over and over reporters said that Mitt Romney was the most likely, with the Minnesota governor or some executive thrown in as well. There was a conventional wisdom and these blowhards repeated it and amplified it over and over and over. And yet it was completely baseless. Mitt Romney had never even met privately with John McCain. There had never even been an interview.

It seems like real reporting would have found that out.

Just as real reporting would have discovered -- while commentators opined on a Democrat "Dream Team" -- that Barack Obama had neither met with nor vetted Hillary Clinton.

The news business is very good at baseless commentary, but essentially incompetent at real reporting.

Ideally, the news business is nothing more than a pipe. Its job is to gather and transmit information. Like the water pipe that leads from the main to your kitchen sink. You turn on the tap and you should get, unadulterated, cool, clear water. You don't want to taste the pipe. You just want water.

The news should be like that. It should be free of the bias and opinion of the reporter, it should just be information. We all have a brain of our own, we don't need things interpreted for us, we don't need them spun. Just give us the information and we'll go from there.

Instead, virtually every newscast or significant newspaper story smells of the rotting carcass of agenda and bias. So-called experts and analysists are nothing more than shills selling snake oil. Paul Begala and Donna Brazile are not analysts, they are Democrat propagandists on the evening news. Karl Rove is their Republican counterpart. No one gives an honest opinion or legitimate insight. They merely spin and confuse, putting predictable political slants on everything they say.

And that is not journalism or anything like it.

We are not informed by the news, we are shaped by it. At least they hope we are. It's as if they think we are a herd of mindless sheep looking to their televised selves for the guidance we cannot provide for ourselves.

There is a palpable antagonistic air to so much of the media, whether in the news magazines or on the evening news or the weekend talk shows. It is clear they neither like nor trust the American people.

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the Republican and Democratic national conventions. At each, reporters outnumbered delegates and officials more than 3-to-1. The vast majority of these media people were doing nothing but regurgitating what others had said, over and over and over. In almost every situation, the priorities and topics of the reporters were very different from those of the delegates. For all the news media, for all the coverage, all you got by watching TV at night was the opinions of the anchors and reporters, you don't learn a thing, truly, about the convention or the delegates.

Nothing is more emblematic of that than the frequent sight during convention coverage of various talking heads in the TV networks' skybox studios prattling on while in the distant, out-of-focus background some legitimate newsmaker was giving a speech. It's as if the media feels that its people and what they have to say is more important than the people who truly are the news and what they have to say.

So how do we take it down? How do we knock over this self-appointed royalty?

I have no idea.

But I do know that, in this day of technology, we don't need reporters as much as we used to. Speeches, press releases, official reports -- we can see them all directly ourselves via the Internet. If we have the time to do some reading ourselves, we don't need the news media.

More news programming with less true content, reporters with plenty of self-esteem and not a bit of competence, clear political agendas on the part of some reporters and networks. That's where it stands today. The media isn't the solution, the media has become the problem.

Charlie Gibson made that pretty clear the other night as he tried to trip up Sarah Palin.

How do we stop them?

Pretty simple. Just turn them off. Let them talk into dead air.

Like the stuff between their ears.

- by Bob Lonsberry

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