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Monday, March 14, 2016

Indifference to truth is a mark of a great journalist ?

Unbiased NPR columnist Cokie Roberts ?

 [   " Laugh line of the morning comes from Cokie Roberts' Wikipedia entry: "Some have questioned Roberts' objectivity as a journalist."

 Some, indeed. On today's Morning Joe, NPR-ite Roberts, her eyes flashing with anger, asked Donald Trump whether he was......

    "proud" of promoting racism among schoolkids: "There have been incidents of children, white children, pointing to their darker skinned classmates and saying 'you'll be deported when Donald Trump is president.' . . . Are you proud of that?" "]




   
"Here is my basic approach to life," Roberts continued. "I am a totally
unpartisan human being. I don't care which party has the right ideas —
or which party has the wrong ideas. I am very, very, very interested in
civility. I am interested in government working."

     Since when does an indifference to right or wrong ideas mark a person as outstanding in the field of journalism ? There is a long tradition of American radical journalism. I can recall I.F. Stone and his " Weekly " .Jack Reed covered the Russian Revolution and wrote the classic " Ten Days That Shook the World ".

    Any serious democratic socialist will question the rationality of the leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties.. Anything " rational " about what Bernie Sanders would call" unacceptable inequality "? What would the voices of the antiwar movement say about the rationality of the war in Iraq, of the endless " war on terrorism "- now just a cover for the New Colonialism ?

   Sanders -and others -have described the war in Iraq as the greatest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history. This did not stop the cerebral Hillary from supporting it - with " more love and kindness ", I guess.

   I suspect that neo-liberalism no longer believes in objective reality. It supports irrational capitalism just as effectively as right-wing Ayn Rand-ism. Most of the columnists working for pro-establishment news media show a not surprising bias for establishment backed candidates- Republican or Democrat.

 So the Angry Voter , the Trump or Sanders supporter, is no shock for democratic socialists around the world.

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