stokkete / Depositphotos.com
CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – Sean Hannity has said for years that journalism in America is dead.
I’m a little late to the funeral, but today I will be the eulogist.
Earlier this month, we saw David Muir, the public face of ABC News, embarrass himself in front of 61-million viewers. While moderating the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump debate, he fact-checked only one of the candidates, Trump, while the other got a pass. Harris even repeated the thoroughly debunked troupe that Donald Trump said “there were fine people on both sides” of the race riots in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump’s very next sentence condemned white nationalists, but that escaped ABC’s fact-checking. David Muir’s co-moderator Linsey Davis is a sorority sister of Kamala Harris – both are members of Alpha Kappa Alpha – and yet ABC was either unaware or uninterested in finding a different person to fill her seat.
Last Thursday there were congressional hearings where a whistleblower said the Biden-Harris Administration told him, directly, not to discuss the number of illegal immigrants crossing our southern border, or how many were on the terror watch list. This was not a rank-and-file border agent expressing his frustrations. He was the now-retired section chief in San Diego. The information that he was told not to discuss: that the number of terror watch list suspects, which usually averages 10 or 12 a month, had ballooned to more than 100. To me, that sounds like a blockbuster story. Yet it was not reported on by any wire service or by any of the legacy news networks. If you weren’t a Fox News listener, you wouldn’t know about it.
And this journalistic rot extends to the local level. Last week there was a ruling from an appeals court throwing out state senator Cory Tomczyk’s lawsuit against the web news site The Wausau Pilot and Review. They reported that Tomczyk mumbled a slur under his breath at a speaker at a county board meeting. Now it is almost impossible for a public figure to win a defamation lawsuit against a news outlet. But this case went as far as discovery, and we got a sad, sorry look at how this website put together this story. The reporter who wrote it wasn’t at the meeting. He never heard what was, or wasn’t, said. The comments were confirmed by the late Pat Peckham, who also wasn’t there but suggested that “that sounds like something he [Tomczyk] would say.” WSAU’s Meg Ellefson, who was sitting next to Tomczyk, was not interviewed for the story. She insists such foul language was never used.
What have we learned? That a fair, impartial reporting of facts is vanishing from American journalism. The only profession that is mentioned in the U.S. Constitution is dead. Come and help me put the final shovels of dirt on its grave.
Chris Conley
Comments