America Needs to Have a Candid Discussion About the Real Danger to Our Democracy

I left TV News in part because I became frustrated by the direction it was taking. It was being taken over by large corporations which had little interest in investing in news. I felt that my accomplishments as a news manager were not being rewarded because what I did was viewed as unimportant by them. Hard-hitting journalism which led to historic record news ratings gains were irrelevant and maybe even damaging to their business model.

But I never stopped believing in the importance of good journalism for America.?That's one reason why I’ve been firing off articles on LinkedIn about the latest disturbing twists in this election because I’ve been really, really alarmed by it all.? The Biden debacle has me venting about the joke the mainstream media has become to many Americans today.

One of those who shares my disgust for this entire Biden media catastrophe is columnist Matt Taibbi.? Taibbi first became known nationally when he was a journalist for Rolling Stone.? More recently he was an author of the Twitter Files investigation into how the federal government arm-twisted the social media app to censor information they didn’t like. It was excellent work, but Taibbi also saw big pushback from so-called journalists who did not like that he was reporting on it at all because they personally disagreed with the information being censored.

I enjoy Taibbi's perspective so much that I subscribe to his Substack.? In a recent post, he criticized ‘The Washington Post’ for an article entitled “Historians Say Biden’s Withdrawal Shows American Democracy is Working”.? He then details how Democrats rigged the primary process to Biden’s benefit and criticized the ‘Post’ for its fawning coverage of that closed process at the time. Now we have a new nominee anointed by Democratic power brokers, not chosen by voters who have never elected a single delegate for Kamala Harris ever. This is democracy in full disfunction.

How did we get here? Many of us suspected what was really going on with the president but there was no consistent, credible reporting on it. It was an epic news media failure, and I'm fearful that our democracy cannot operate properly without a more vibrant Fourth Estate. That would be a news media made up of journalists who dig for facts and information instead of selecting facts that fit and then giving us their opinions.?

When Special Counsel Robert Hur's report on Biden came out in March describing the president as an elderly man with a very poor memory, that should have been a watershed moment in this race.? EVERY media organization should have pursued the story aggressively and demanded the tapes of his interviews with Biden be released.? Most didn’t because I suspect they feared what those tapes would reveal. The decision to pursue only the facts which support your narrative isn't journalism, it's advocacy, and it's getting worse. Let me give you one admittedly egregious example.

After the Hur report came out, cable news network MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough gave his panel a lecture of sorts (you can see it here). His program 'Morning Joe' is known to be a Biden favorite, and Scarborough told those assembled around his anchor desk that he'd had personal interactions with the president recently. His conclusion? He found President Biden to be “better than he has ever been” cognitively. Now maybe he hadn't talked to the president on one of his so-called bad days, but better than he has ever been? We now know it was a lie bigger than Scarborough's bouffant hairdo.

For an anchor of a major cable news channel who has first hand access to the most powerful person on earth to come out and outright lie about his diminished cognitive state to his audience is beyond bias. It's journalist as a dis-honest broker, and it's hardly a first. Trump Derangement Syndrome has so infected Morning Joe that NBC execs pulled it off the air the Monday after Trump was shot for fear what would be said about it on the program according to a report by CNN. How much more has to happen before the network realizes it has a serious problem on its hands?

I taught journalism including investigative journalism as a newsroom manager for decades.? I believe I’m still the smallest market News Director ever who earned his station a Polk Award for investigative reporting for starting and supervising a series of reports which led to the prosecution and conviction of the mayor of Boise, ID for corruption.? I’ve trained journalists to do stories and produce newscasts which generated hundreds of awards including Emmys and drove up ratings.? I’m not bragging.? Those are my credentials when I say this:

Much of what passes for ‘journalism’ today is a complete farce.? It doesn’t even resemble journalism.? That's why I believe that many members of our news media are the ones putting democracy in danger today, and there's no sign that objective fact-based journalism which people in a democracy need to make objective fact-based decisions is coming back.

So yes, I’m venting because the people of the greatest democracy in the history of the world deserves better than this. If democracy dies in the darkness, it's obvious we've all been kept in the dark.