The Hard Pressed Press

With news this week from France, comes the revelation that President Sarkozy sees the following: "...from this current crisis, will a new world emerge." Of course, Sarkozy was referencing the many riotous actions occurring in many of France's cities. Cars ablaze, shops looted, and all in the name of displeasure over Israel's actions taken against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The press, although not underplaying the mayhem, did grossly under report the many events of national distress so evident to a casual observer.

Of course, there were similar occasions of boistrous denunciation of Israel here in America, notably in Florida. A woman, obviously in support of the Palestinians, was heard to say that " We need bigger ovens!", a reference to the Nazi extermination devices found in every liberated concentration camp in Second World War Germany. Nice talk coming from Americans one might think, but were these people really Americans, or were they merely pretenders wearing the image hiding Burkhas? Nor was Oklahoma City free of the dissenting protestors. About 200 mostly Islamic (Americans?) paraded in front of Oklahoma's capitol building also.

CAIR (Council on American Islamic Affairs) members were also visible, both on the streets, and on the tube. Quite naturally, the protests were framed by references made to the civilian casualties suffered by the Palestinians. Is it appropriate to wonder why there were not similar protests against the Palestinians when they were sending their child suicide bombers into Israel over the past many years? The press in it's haste to provide only the news they deem worth reporting, are caught within the horns of an 800 pound dilemma. TV, and youtube videos are better sources of instant news, though in the case of television, the networks also have an agenda of their own. They will simply not report real news when it is happening, unless a "fair" balance can be struck between warring parties.

Europe burns! But that is not the real story. Why can't everyone just "get along" they ask rhetorically? Today, a man, a real man, is tempted to ask where are this generation's "Horace Greelys"? Greely, a noted editor of the New York Tribune, a man who looked more like Benjamin Franklin, than did Franklin himself, is most known for having advised "Go west, young man, go west, and grow with the country!" Today, some 143 years later, fewer and fewer young men, and women too, are going in any direction which would allow them to "grow with their country".

So long as the press is held to agendae which support goals other than simple trruthful reporting, we shall never really know exactly what is happening within our world, unless it meets the standards of a Liberal template. You may thank God for the internet, and not Al Gore, you may thank yourselves for a willingness to seek out other reputable sources of honest news reporting. And they are many. Witness the failing circulation numbers of major American news papers, and the truth junps out at you. They are failing, because they fail to hold to the harsh standards imposed by men like Horace Greely. Call him what you will, he none the less established himself as a man of some distinction, and moral character, in the newspaper world.

When journalism students put aside their beliefs that they should do something "good" for the world upon graduation, and remember that their responsibility, their sole responsibility, is to the ferreting out of the "truth" in any story they are asked to cover, and report it that way, then may they become the doers of universal good.

When holding elected office, I actually feared the local, and regional press. In my idyllic state of mind they, the press, were bent on getting to the bottom of whatever it was they were pursuing as being newsworthy. Later, I learned whom it was I could trust, and who they were, that had something else in mind. Luckily, these days you don't need a trained eye to determine which reporters are in honest pursuit of the truth, and which are in it for personal, or devious reasons. It is no accident that the press has lost it's nose for the truth. The heavy scent of Democrat stink is more than not wafting from every room they occupy.

It really doesn't matter where they go. They may go west as Greely advised, but they are already there in the pressrooms of the Los Angeles Times. Or, they may go east to New York, but they are already there also, in the press rooms of the New York Times. My compass tells me to advise them to go north! All the way to the north pole, where they may commiserate with an advancing, and not declining polar bear population. They are called "cubs" as young journalists, are they not? The pole is befitting of their relegation to the darkest place on earth in winter.

That should be easy enough, for they have successfully kept us in the dark for years now.

Pity the press? Nope!.Don't forget to check out the Brussels Journal folks, That's where the real news is these days.