Daily Broadside | One Year In and the Media is Still Garbage

Daily Verse | 1 Kings 4:20
The people of Judah and Israel were as numerous as the sand on
the seashore; they ate, they drank and they were happy.

It’s Wednesday and a small celebration. I started this blog just over a year ago on April 1, 2020. It’s been a year of learning as I developed content and tried to find a rhythm that suited me—and you, the reader. My “Daily Broadside” has become the spine of the blog that gets sent to more than 200 subscribers every Monday through Friday at 5:00 AM.

A big thank you to you subscribers for signing up and supporting this venture. I do no advertising so I assume most of the growth is due to word-of-mouth from fans of this blog.

I have some ideas of how to keep evolving the blog and I’ll be experimenting this next year with changes that will hopefully keep you engaged and build a larger audience. If you have friends who you think would like what we discuss here, I’d be grateful if you’d share the site with them and encourage them to subscribe. When you share it means a lot to me, especially these days when cancel culture is a thing and Constitutional conservatives who follow Christ are shouted down for refusing to follow the herd.

I don’t expect everyone who reads this blog to agree with everything I write, but I do hope there’s a lot of like-minded people gathering here to consider what’s happening to our country politically and culturally and where faith in God fits in. And I’ll bet that there are a lot more out there. Let them know there’s a place that is making the effort to represent their view too.

The other thing to note is that if you’re reading through the Bible with me this year, we’re now 25 percent of the way through. Keep going! You can download a copy of the plan below if you’d like to join us.

All I want to do with this morning’s Broadside is reinforce what I’ve repeatedly said here and on social media. The legacy media is garbage—absolute garbage. There are plenty of examples out there and I’ve offered many in the past. What I want you to see is a couple of quotes from Mollie Hemingway, senior editor at The Federalist, who wrote a terrific piece on March 31 called, “It’s Important To Be Honest About What Today’s Media Actually Are.”

In it she examines Resident Biden’s “press conference,” which was really a staged and carefully managed public Q&A with pre-determined questioners and written answers for the cognitively disabled man at the podium. Hemingway writes, “Biden had his own struggles in the slow and painful press conference, repeatedly having to read off notecards to get through the few mild foreign policy topics, and occasionally getting lost in ‘rhetorical cul-de-sacs,’ as Fox News’ Bret Baier kindly put it. But somehow it was the media performance that stood out as particularly cringe-inducing.”

After carefully analyzing the presser and showing how unprofessional the “journalists” were, she offers a couple of paragraphs (below, with my emphasis) that I think sum up what is increasingly obvious about “journalists” these days.

The term for people who lobby for Democrat policies in this clumsy of a manner is “Democrat activists in the propaganda field,” certainly not reporters, or journalists. They need to be treated as what they are.

It’s time to stop acting like these political activists are professionals who do honest journalism. Continuing that pretense is not doing a favor to the public. It’s not true. With very few exceptions, these people are not there to do journalism, and we need to be honest about that with the public. Not everyone is as bad as everyone else, but nearly the entire press corps is somewhere on the Democrat activist scale, from lefty to fringe, from shrewd to clumsy and clownish.

So what do we do? We stop giving them our time, attention and money.

They need to be treated as what they are. So for the love of all that’s holy, stop calling them the “mainstream media” when they are anything but mainstream, with views far to the left of the average American, and they’re not media but propagandists and political activists. If you hear anybody else refer to the “mainstream media,” rhetorically slap that 1980s term out of their mouth.

Average Americans need to stop reading and watching the corrupt corporate media. They should immediately stop subscribing to them, stop advertising with them, and stop paying attention to them. Reporters at these outlets quite obviously hate many Americans and the values they hold, and it’s time most Americans realized that and acted appropriately in response.

Don’t just take it from me—Hemingway and others who are a lot smarter than I am and get paid to write opinions say the same thing. One of the first I read was Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit, who often remarks, “Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.”

I’ve learned that is true and so should you.