Intellectual & Media elitist Helen Thomas attacks the free speech & integrity of bloggers.
Sunday, January 6th, 2008Helen Thomas quote:
“What I really worry about is that I think the bloggers and everyone, everyone with a laptop thinks they’re journalists,” Thomas said. “And, they certainly don’t have our standards. They don’t have our ethics, and so forth. There’s a deterioration,” she continued. “Reporters laid down on the job in the run up to this [the Iraq] war.”
Thomas made those remarks in a January 4 round-table discussion that followed the premiere of a documentary about the National Press Club 100th anniversary, “The National Press Club at 100: A Century of Headlines.”
Dan Lee Comments:
As a blogger who readily admits I’m not a part of the “Journalism” profession, I’m very glad I’m not. To be a part of that largely corrupt group of so called “Professionals” known as the Main Stream Media, would be to sell my soul to the devil, for a guaranteed opportunity to force my opinions into virtually every home in America, & call it “reporting the news.”
What I am is an American citizen with a voice, who is exercising my first amendment rights out of concern for my country. I know that frightens the status quo media folks who have turned the news into information brokering, a way of controlling, brainwashing, & ultimately fleecing the masses in our country by endorsing those with whom they are politically aligned. But like anyone with a conscience & a soul that still belongs to God & themselves, I want no part of that.
The difference between bloggers & the main stream media of course, is that no blogger I’ve ever read has ever claimed to be “Your only source for News & Events”. On the contrary, we tend to link to competitors who may have differing opinion, because we believe in a system of checks & balances, as well as actual free speech & information sharing, not the kind of “information sifting & filtering” that’s become the norm for the old guard that Helen Thomas helped to create.
Helen Thomas & her kind are afraid of bloggers, because we represent something her “profession” as a whole lost sight of many decades ago now, & that is the ultimate higher calling of the media. It is to serve their fellow man by providing the information needed to make life decisions, (often in reaction to the information provided) based on wisdom & knowledge that we are all taught in school, or acquire through spiritual wisdom & provenial grace.
We don’t need the media to make up our minds for us, or arbitrarily filter the information to us that they feel is relevant, or in their opinion “important”, but yet somehow the media has made themselves the gatekeepers of all common sense & relevance. The “news” they “allow” us to see or here is “the gospel according to their editors”, instead of a word for word, or pictured chronicle of events.
To Helen Thomas; The problem your industry has is that the general public is tired of your narrow opinions about “why” news happens, & would just like you to spend more time reporting it without always needing to have an analysis or opinion, as if without you, no man or woman could make up his or own mind, & would fail to understand it. You are gatherers & disseminators of information, you are not Gods, Kings, or Queens who issue their judgments & decrees upon the rest of us.
In short Helen Thomas, you may not see me as a “journalist” with your “ethics” & “standards”, but who in hell are you to pontificate at your very readers & customers what is a good product?
I bring my car to have the oil changed not because I can’t do it myself, but because I want to spend my time doing other things. However if I can’t find a shop to do it right? I’ll do it myself again. I’ll go find out what the right Oil filter part number is for my vehicle, & buy the parts myself, & do the work myself. Similarly, when YOUR customers Helen Thomas don’t think you’re doing a good or honest service for us, WE WILL get it done with or without you, & YOU WILL HAVE TO TAKE MY LAPTOP OUT OF MY COLD DEAD HANDS BEFORE YOU STOP ME from ideating (EITHER ALONE OR WITH OTHERS) on how to make or keep the country I Love a better place. If that goes against your “journalism standards”, then DON’T READ MY BLOG YOU OLD MINDED,UNPROGRESSIVE, SELF ABSORBED COOT! How ironic that those who have the most incentive to champion the first amendment, are using it to try & suppress the free speech of others selectively.
