The Death of American Journalism

By John Ubaldi, “Ubaldi Reports”

In the age of President Trump, journalism entered the dark side by ignoring any pretense of objectivity and therefore solely engaging in the sordid reporting normally associated with supermarket tabloid publications.

The ethical standard normally associated in journalism began to erode during the Obama presidency when journalists would provide cover for the president, never challenging or seriously investigating the many scandals such as with the IRS targeting conservatives or former Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department lying about conducting surveillance on various media outlets

With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency which shocked the journalistic establishment, the media then made its mission to take down a president and in the process perpetuated the death of journalism by aligning itself with the Democratic Party.

In the preamble of the Society of Professional Journalists ethical standards states that ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair, thorough and more importantly avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.   Unfortunately over the past few years we have witnessed the death of journalism in America as the media have violated every tenet of their own code of ethics.

In the ethical standards for journalists again states journalists should be accurate and fair. Journalists should be honest and courageous in gathering, reporting and how they interpret information.

The key element of ethics for all journalists is that they should avoid any and all perceived bias and act independently, thus avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived, and should disclose unavoidable conflicts.

Even former pollster and political strategist Mark Penn for both Bill and Hillary Clinton has stated that many of his media friends have openly stated to him that there sole mission is to take down the Trump presidency.

The media in its seal to take down the Trump presidency engaged in actions that are normally associated with authoritarian states like Russia and China, not the United States.

Just this month we learned from the Interior Department’s inspector general who debunked the false claim that President Trump had cleared Lafayette Park of protesters so the president could in fact hold a photo-op. The real story was that the park police planned to clear the park to install a fence which was unrelated to Trump presence at historic church recently burned in a riot.

We are now learning of the possibility of the origins of the coronavirus which has killed almost 4 million worldwide and over 600,000 in the U.S., initially thought to have originated in a Chinese wet market, may have in fact begun in a virology lab in Wuhan, China.

This theory was always plausible, but because President Trump and Republicans mentioned the fact it was always labeled as “conspiracy theory” by the media and big tech social media companies who squashed any mention of this.

Even ABC News’ chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl openly admitted the reason it wasn’t followed up on was because it was put forth by Trump and the Republicans.

Karl without knowing has stated the media has violated its own ethics by aligning itself with the Democratic Party. They never were curious how Covid originated, and couldn’t believe this wasn’t Trump’s fault.

The biggest of all media failures and outright lies was in relation to the Russian collusion narrative which was the only plausible reason Trump won the 2016 presidential election. The first few years of the Trump presidency was consumed with this narrative, even the Washington Post and New York Times won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.

Four months later Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued his findings and found no American knowingly or unwittingly had colluded with Russia. The reporting was all based on a lie!

Other stories the media got wrong or just plain lied in their zeal to take down President Trump;

• Jussie Smolett alleged hate crime.
• Covington High School confrontation.
• Russian bounty given to the Taliban to kill U.S. Marines.
• The Muslim Ban.
• 2017 tax cuts were only for the rich, when data shows 80% of the U.S. population benefited.
• How the media handled U.S. Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination of alleged sexual assault compared to how they covered President Biden’s alleged sexual assault accusations.
• What about the border crisis of photos of migrant children in metal cages, when in fact they were built by the Obama-Biden administration in 2014.
• The Ukraine impeachment of Trump was a complaint from an anonymous member of the foreign policy bureaucracy who never testified and still the American people don’t know who the person is.

Why hasn’t the media followed up or did any serious investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop when the New York Post first reported about it in October 2020, which showed shady foreign business deals and has shown how Joe Biden gave him more help than he has admitted to.

Why hasn’t President Biden or his son Hunter Biden been asked about the flagrant use of the n-word in various text messages?

Now that Trump is no longer president, you can see a dramatic difference how the media deals with Biden. Questions have been asked on what kind of ice cream he is having or is he getting a cat for the White House.

Nothing has been asked on how the Biden administration is dealing with;

• The border crisis.
• The Vice President’s disastrous trip to Central America.
• How policies by the Obama-Biden administration has destabilized Latin America.
• Biden’s 2022 budget which highlights $6 trillion in new spending but growth only averages less than 2% over a ten year period.
• The substantial increase in inflation.
• Voting reform legislation.
• The Russian hacking of key U.S. infrastructure.
• How he plans on dealing with Russia, China, and Iran.
• Look how the media covered Biden’s first foreign trip and his subsequent meeting with the Russian president.

It’s prophetic that the famed Russian dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent years in a Russian prison for his outspoken beliefs before being exiled to the west in the mid-1970’s gave a commencement address at Harvard University in 1978.

In his address Solzhenitsyn admonished the media; by stating, “What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to his readers, or to his history — or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? It hardly ever happens because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist usually always gets away with it.”

Solzhenitsyn continued to what the media is like today inside the United States of America, “Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none — and none of them will ever be rectified; they will stay on in the readers’ memories. How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press — The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus, we may see terrorists described as heroes, or secret matters pertaining to one’s nation’s defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: “Everyone is entitled to know everything.” But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era. People also have the right not to know and it’s a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls [stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk.] A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.”

He finally concludes that “Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislative power, the executive, and the judiciary. And one would then like to ask: By what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the communist East a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has granted Western journalists their power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives?”

These are just but a few examples of how the media failed to check its bias, but instead now has openly aligned itself with the Democratic Party.

Unless the media revives itself and returns to the fundamental aspect of journalism found in the Society of Journalistic Ethics the media as we know it today in America is dead!