Imagine a journalistic source that became very financially profitable very quickly, by blending news and opinion, and aiming both its tone and its coverage towards a very specific niche of the American public that was long despised by the mainstream media when it wasn’t outright ignored entirely.
Of course, you knew who I was talking about all along right?
Rolling Stone magazine. Who did you think I was talking about?
Oh right. And at the Daily Caller, Mark Judge has a great take on why Rolling Stone blows a gasket whenever it covers Fox News:
Still, [the] paranoia of [Rolling Stone's Tom Dickinson] about Fox is so extreme that it has elicited mild criticism on the left. Jack Shafer, Slate’s liberal press critic, shrugged off Dickinson’s piece. He notes that Hillary Clinton was feeding opposition research about John Edwards and Barack Obama to Fox. He also points out that Fox’s audience is still relatively small — not microscopic, like MSNBC’s audience, but smaller than the old networks’ audiences. Then Shafer offers this sentence: “I’ve never understood why Fox News’ shenanigans rattle liberals so.”
OK, Jack, since you have no curiosity about that, let me give it a shot. If you read the histories of journalists over the past 40 years or so, certain patterns emerge. Most of them — like the folks at Slate — are liberal and got into the business to “change the world.” Further, most of them are losers who did not play sports and could not get dates in high school and college. When Fox came along, with its chutzpah in allowing conservatives an actual voice, its bombshell anchors, its joyful ridicule of the self-righteous left, its outright sense of fun — well, this was just too much. Liberal journalists — now there’s a redundancy — didn’t just see their empire collapsing. They saw the cheerleaders who ignored them. They saw the conservative jock they hated and his country-club parents. They saw these people, these ogres, moving into their turf. And they went absolutely batshit.
And they continue to do so. Liberals can’t just ignore Fox; they find it too fascinating. They are like the kids in high school who absolutely despise the pretty, popular girl, then spend hours on the phone every night talking about her. At the core of it is jealousy, as well as the rage, paranoia and resentment that Tom Dickinson attributes to Fox. I mean, journalists were going to help the left change the world. And you can’t do that by giving dissenters a voice.
But that’s the problem with wanting to change the world — sometimes it changes all by itself, without your help. And you find yourself working for a magazine that once considered itself “countercultural,” now comfortably part of the bourgeois, and hating the real counterculture. To coin a phrase, how does it feel?
Plus two other things:
1. Fox News is winning the viewer popularity contest.
2. Fox News is saying all the things that the leftist reporters have been trying to suppress.
I think that most modern journalists are people who are sure that they are independent thinkers that they think for themselves…. they are sure of this because everyone they know says so.
“Further, most of them are losers who did not play sports and could not get dates in high school and college.”
This describes me! I joined the Navy in 1976 and retired in 1996. I am still unable to dribble a basketball.
Revolutionaries set out to undermine the current order, in order to seize command of it.
They succeed, become that current order, and then use the very powers they have achieved to ruthlessly attack and destroy anyone who might even dabble in the very same kind of thinking that they themselves indulged in to such effectiveness.
They give not one nanosecond of thought to the irony, if not outright hypocrisy, of their doing so. It never even occurs to them.
Gosh, that Rolling Stone and their fellow travellers are unique! Whoever heard of such a dynamic before. Simply unseen in the history of man!
Whatever with those idiot conservatives whose worldview is largely defined by the ridiculous idea that human beings run true to form.
Has it occurred to any of y’all that Journalists and Teachers, in the current era, share a common flaw? Both are trained experts of their “profession” [journalism and education] with little or no experience in the subjects they are applying their professional training to.
I’m a teacher. Not all of us are as bad as those now drawing the attention of the press. Many of us are highly educated in our fields and are dedicated to teaching your children honestly. Of course, more and more over the years we have been twisted and shaped to be agents of the State. We’re told not just what to teach and when to teach it, but how to teach it and how to grade it. The focus of all education is now the lowest 25%. We must raise their performance, often at the expense of the remaining 75%.
But some of us resist. Some of us have integrity. Some of us bear the current “hate-on-teachers” political rhetoric while working hard to serve you and your children to the best of our ability. We love your children and we believe it is a privilege to teach them. We thank you for that privilege.
Cynthia, yours is a heartfelt, and heartbreaking post.
Note that, because some similar themes underly unionism as underly affirmative action ( a reasonable desire for “social justice”, treating all members as equal, discarding almost entirely measures of merit and talent… etc), one tragic result is that the genunely talented Teachers / African Americans may be doing stellar work, but they are deliberately lumped in with large numbers of people who are not near as talented, or near a driven to excel whether they are extra talented or just “normal” if you will. The fact that they are better than such peers is rendered irrelevant by the structures of the union and/or affirmative action….. and thus they are ill-judged as group, rather than as talented individuals, like yourself. And frankly, why shouldn’t they be? That is exactly what the union and the “social justice” advocates specifically and clearly want. It is what they set out to accomplish.
God bless you for the work you do and the passion you have for it. You are most certainly not the problem. We all wish you were not chained at the neck to those who are.
Liberals in journalism also have a very pre-1932 mindset, in that it’s inconceivable to them that big government can be bad, except in the case of when liberals aren’t running it. If there’s a problem with big government, the logic is like Paul Krugman’s on the trillion-dollar bailout — it’s only a problem because government hasn’t done enough. They live in a world where Upton Sinclair or Jacob Riis as still doing investigative reporting on slum housing and sweatshops, and that the little people have no power to challenge the status quo except via government.
In their minds, it’s only big business, greedy millionaires or individual hate-mongers who cause problems; the concept that an all-encompassing, red-tape, producing, freedom-limiting government could be a bad thing doesn’t exist. That’s why it drives them wild that there would be something out there like Fox News that people have widespread access to that dares treat big government as a problem, not as the end-all, be-all to everything. They think Fox is the pawn of those they see as evil in trying to thwart what they think is the solution to the nation and the world’s problems.
Not a bad take on the left’s paranoia about Fox, if a bit glib. I mean, c’mon, high school?
I expect they just don’t like the competition. It’s a threat in most fields, but journalism does try to project a special veneer — as if they’re immune to such tawdry market forces. They’ve certainly succeeded with the left: mention the ‘F’ word in any discussion with a leftie and — in my experience — they don’t even deign to discuss it. Usual reaction is a quick snort and an eye-roll, as if to say “why waste your time?” They just don’t want to know.
My favorite anecdote about Fox was from a card-carrying NY liberal who was peeved at Anderson Cooper at some point and in a discussion with me at a Manhattan bar said he actually preferred recent coverage from … (at this point his voice lowered to an earnest whisper and he actually glanced left and right) … Fox.
I think if we take a lot of the Left’s actions and view it with a similar filter – i.e. – Back in High School, we can see many similarities. Maybe alot of them were the losers, but alot of them still seem like the stuck-up, clique-ish, enclosed, social-power-hungry High Schoolers.