Raising the alarm over journalism, CBS looks like occupied territory: Orange County Register

In her 2021 book “Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy,” journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon argued that arrogance and addiction to political fads have destroyed Americans’ faith in the media. communication There’s reason to think he’s right. Former National Public Radio editor Uri Berliner described NPR’s “tacit consensus about the stories we should follow and how they should be framed” in an essay revealing that NPR’s newsroom was made up only of Democrats . Berliner was quickly disciplined by his First Amendment-devout bosses for writing the essay. Former New York Times reporters Bari Weiss, Nellie Bowles and Adam Rubenstein have each described Times editors who demanded a Hafez al-Assad-like reverence for certain political truths on the left and did not tolerate much deviation .

A 2022 Knight/Gallup poll found that only 26% of Americans view the media favorably; 53% see it unfavorably. A Gallup poll conducted last year found that 29 percent of Americans trusted the media “not much.” Another 39% do not trust it at all.

Recently, CBS, the network of journalistic icons Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, has made fun of itself, dragging its profession down with it, reprimanding one of its reporters for having the courage to calmly, civilly, ask for a couple of gentle questions about the new book he was promoting as part of his national publicity tour. The culprit was “CBS Mornings” co-anchor Tony Dokoupil, and the poor victim was award-winning author and literary rock star Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Coates has won praise for writing about racism in America and has made no bones about his anger in this country, an anger that, passionate and vivid, has sometimes expressed itself in controversial ways. The September 11, 2001, al-Qaida attack, which killed some 3,000 innocent people of all races, origins and socioeconomic classes, left him torn between agnosticism and satisfaction. “Everyone knew someone who was missing,” he wrote of the demolished Twin Towers. “But looking at the ruins of America, my heart was cold. In the days that followed I saw the ridiculous display of flags, the masculinity of the firemen, the exaggerated slogans. Damn it all. They were not human to me.”

It seems that the innocents killed on 9/11 were not the only non-humans for Coates, because the 1,200 innocents slaughtered by Hamas on 7 October are among those Coates failed to put the proverbial figure on. This is undoubtedly the message of Coates’ new book, “The Message”, in which he devotes a special section to the well-known refrain “Israel-as-white-supremacist-colonialist-imperialist-expansionist-genocide-Satans”. recited by the far left with a robotic feel.