Teach Your Children Well

Lis­ten Up to What Our Élite Edu­ca­tors are Thinking

No Won­der They Call Them Egg Heads

Soft, Scram­bled, a Lit­tle Runny

Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity Pres­i­dent Lee Bollinger joins the drum­beat of those propos­ing fixes that are guar­an­teed to make the MSM much, much worse — and he wants to do it with your tax dollars.

Here’s “the money shot”

“Trust­ing the mar­ket alone to pro­vide all the news cov­er­age we need would mean ven­tur­ing into the unknown — a risky propo­si­tion with a vital pub­lic insti­tu­tion hang­ing in the balance.”

That’s really what he said. Got that? The mar­ket alone has pro­vided all the news cov­er­age from the days of Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac right up through the Wash­ing­ton Post, the Atlanta Journal-​​Constitution, and the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle. But to trust to the mar­ket alone now would be a risky proposition.

The fool makes an asser­tion that can’t even be dig­ni­fied as a lie. With one sen­tence he com­pletely fire­bombs the his­tory of Eng­lish (the lan­guange, not the coun­try) jour­nal­ism from Steele’s 1709 Tatler through the present day (even though the main stream media of today has hewed true to the Tatler’s mis­sion state­ment:  … while instruct­ing “these Gen­tle­men, for the most part being Per­sons of strong Zeal, and weak Intellects…what to think.” right through the 2008 elec­tion, com­plete with detailed instruc­tions on what to do about the leg tin­gles and heart pal­pi­ta­tions which occurred when Obama’s image appeared or his name was mentioned).

What should we think of some­one who would make such an asser­tion? What, indeed!

He even goes on to give a good exam­ple of what passes for clear thought in acad­eme these days: start­ing with a fal­la­cious state­ment he pro­ceeds through using the kind of obfus­ca­tory huff-​​and-​​puff Obama has famil­iar­ized us all with to make the case that we will never get any truth if the gov­ern­ment doesn’t pro­vide it. At least, not the instruc­tion Mr. Bollinger’s media has been foist­ing upon us, com­plete with forged memos of Bush’s National Guard ser­vice and slanted news cov­er­age from both the Soviet Union and Hussein’s Iraq in order not to make Com­mu­nism look bad or Hus­sein angry.

Come to think of it, under the gov­ern­ment we would could prob­a­bly still have the type of jour­nal­ism made famous by the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Janet Cooke and the New York Times’  Jayson Blair, who made up their sto­ries and got prizes for them.

These are the peo­ple so called The Élite. These are the peo­ple run­ning the uni­ver­si­ties and most of the main stream media. Ain’t it grand?

The whole post and the under­ly­ing op-​​ed are worth­while read­ing. So, with­out fur­ther ado, Clau­dia Rosett with Next Up in Wash­ing­ton, a Media Czar?

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Tags: Bollinger, Journalism, Steele, Tatler