Why We Need Noel Sheppard

The incomparable Noel Sheppard of the Media Research Center’s NewsBusters site is dealing with some scary health issues. That makes this an excellent time to consider the great work the guy does.

We are living at a time when our freedoms, our Constitution and our economic well-being are under attack by statists. This is not a rare occurrence. In fact, it’s a constant throughout history. Liberty is the exception not the rule. But after a century that proved the efficacy of free markets and free minds beyond a shadow of a doubt, a resurgence of these pests in the form of the disastrous Obama administration would not have been possible if it weren’t for the ideological corruption of the news media. In order to promote tyranny by their political allies, the vast Democrat majority of the American news media have now transformed themselves into professional liars — liars by omission and false emphasis as often as by commission, but liars nonetheless.

The American news media have become the enemy of the American people and of the American people’s power to self govern. Those who oppose the media are modern Minute Men battling an Empire of Lies. Noel Sheppard’s among the best of them.

Brent Bozell III deserves full props as the founder and president of MRC, but the site  just wouldn’t be what it is without Noel. Moral outrage is all well and good — and American journalists certainly deserve it — but it doesn’t strike at the real chink in the media’s armor. That chink is absurdity. That those who are tasked with bringing information to the public should be spreading mis-information instead is inherently absurd — especially when they parade themselves as fair and moral people. Noel brings a deliciously fine sense of the absurd to MRC. And, like Andrew Breitbart and John Nolte, he understands what the media are going to do before they do it. That’s what makes NewsBusters rock — and I know it rocks, because I steal Noel’s stuff as often as I can get away with it, and so do a lot of other people.

Noel has been tweeting the progress of his illness at @NoelSheppard and it’s a dramatic, frightening and compelling story — but it’s not the story I want to hear. I want more NewsBusters, more truth-telling, more Noel — right up to the moment we see the news media’s lying empire fall.