Attention, students of journalism: change your major before it's too late! Former President Donald Trump ruined it, along with democracy. Who made this idiotic claim? Dan Le Batard, the former ESPN leftist wacko who’s been reduced to hosting a podcast. He made the stupid comments late last week while appearing on the podcast of former ESPN colleague Kenny Mayne, "Hey Mayne with Kenny Mayne."
Mayne says he feels terrible about the state of journalism, but he still hopes people will make career choices to go into the field. That remark triggered Le Batard to assail Trump for his claims of “fake news”:
I have been sad for 20 years about how little people care about the work and vetting that has to go into journalism so there can be checks and balances on protecting democracy. And never more so than to have this orange, racist turd without a subtlety in his body be able to just crush my industry with ‘fake news! fake news!’ as I see propaganda takeover and misinformation all over the internet.
Vetting by the lame-stream media? Was former Clinton paid liar George Stephanopoulos vetted before landing his disinformation forum on ABC? Ha! Rhetorical question.
Le Batard is not the first lefty to accuse critics of the left-stream media of harming democracy. His charge is totally out of step with the American people, however. Just a month ago, a New York Times/Siena poll found that a majority of registered voters believe the media is the real "threat" to democracy.
Fox News reported that 71 percent of the 792 registered voters questioned in that poll said, "American democracy is currently under threat." Among them, 60 percent of all registered voters, view so-called "mainstream media" as some sort of threat, and 59 percent consider the media a "major threat to democracy." Just 15 percent (who must take CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, et al as gospel) believe democracy is not under threat from the media.
These findings are totally predictable. People who are paying attention to the media have seen the bias for quite a long time. In addition to Stephanopoulos, Chris Matthews had a slobbering love affair with Barack Obama on his MSNBC propaganda forum, Walter Cronkite admitted to being liberal, and many, many more agenda “journalists” have crusaded for the Left.
In sports, the woke media who sided with Colin Kaepernick’s anti-American protests, Black Lives Matter, and claims of “systemic racism” in the U.S. are in the majority. Precious few question anything woke.
Such criticism is too much to bear for those like Le Batard who actually believe in journalism disguised as fake and biased news reporting. He called journalism a “great career choice ethically and morally,” but shame-immune politicians make it impossible for (slanted) reporting to solve injustice.
Additionally, Le Batard says just a couple newspapers have the “wherewithal and resources to actually fight back on things.” The New York Times and Washington Post? He didn’t say.
“How can I advise anybody to choose that as a career path when it feels so unsafe?, Le Batard asked Mayne. “You can choose it with your heart. It’s just not something I would advise with my head.” Perhaps these statements will encourage the media to establish some safe spaces for future anti-media tirades by Trump.
Mayne said Le Batard’s remarks made him feel awful about the state of journalism. Why did it take Mayne so long to recognize America’s badly broken journalism field in the first place. He and others employed in left-wing cocoons don’t know anything else and they certainly don’t identify with Americans who correctly pegged journalism for the fake news it is.
