[American Thinker] As a young journalist starting out many years ago, I was proud to join a profession where so many men and women had distinguished themselves through honest, thorough investigations, entertaining features, and excellence in writing. But for a long while, I’ve been depressed to see much of the press openly working as political operatives. Objectivity in reporting was always impossible, but at least it used to be discussed as a goal. Now journalists boast of their advocacy journalism for an increasingly leftist agenda. Former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg chronicled the media’s slanting of the news in the first of his bestselling books, Bias. A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News (2002) and has continued to document the trend ever since. Now that bias has swung to the radical left, the media increasingly damage their own credibility. Even Rolling Stone -- which abhors the president -- has published a piece titled, "The American Press Is Destroying Itself" by Matt Taibbi. It begins: "It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness."
Taibbi condemns the "shaming, threats and intimidation" that are "replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony." Taibbi has nailed it. Journalists who enjoy unfettered and constitutionally protected rights to say or write nearly anything they want in this country, and who predicted that Trump would silence them, now work to wrest rights of free speech from others. Failure to toe the line results in sudden job expulsions, coerced apologies for "wrong" statements, redefinitions of language, threats to ruin businesses and reputations, and campaigns to quash dissenting voices. Respected students of history rightly see echoes of the early days of Communism in these tactics.