Great cover photo for a Time “guardians of truth” issue.
Trump journalism is obsessive, manic and unboundedly adversarial. Much of it is wish-fantasy in print or online. The evidence was clear from the night of his election, when that great organ of higher reportage, The New York Times, was giving Mr. Trump an eight-per-cent chance of victory, and poor Hillary a wild 92 per cent. Error of that magnitude doesn’t spring from faulty polling or inadequate assessment of the public mood.
Time, that tattered, shrunken revenant of a once-popular news magazine, continues in its endless decline to delude itself that it has either the authority or the competence to name the “Person of the Year.” Brilliantly it named journalists — “The Guardians” — as 2018’s collective heroes, with Jamal Khashoggi given pride of place on the once-iconic cover. Time neglected to check on Khashoggi and now finds that it nominated a Qatar stooge, whose columns were midwifed by officers in the Qatar government, and whose “journalistic” career was but a distracting pendant to his many more serious activities, latterly as an anti-Saudi lobbyist, nephew to the one-time world’s biggest arms dealer, and a host of other shadowy mésalliances.
There is an old word, not seen much in modern writing, quite possibly in near full decay from lack of use. Which is a shame for it still remains possibly the only full semantic vehicle for certain phenomena. The word is incompossible, and its meaning (taken here from the Oxford English Dictionary) is: adj. – Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both.
To illustrate the meaning, I offer a few sentences: Environmentalism and journalism are incompossible. Hatred of and contempt for Donald Trump and honest reporting on him are incompossible.
It is incorruptible evidence that a once great newspaper had chosen to report what its owners and reporters wanted to see as reality, its fantasy of reality, as the reality. They had cut all anchors to objectivity and fact to drift on the currents of advocacy and wish-fulfillment. On that same night, as the results came in on the networks, people saw on the crestfallen faces of the anchor “guardians” for whom “speaking truth to power” is their prayer and motto, just how unwelcome the real truth was, when their power to declare what that truth should be, had been denied them.
Source: Rex Murphy: Time is wrong. Today’s journalists are not ‘guardians of the truth’ | National Post
This is a familiar rant , of course , but the puzzle is how the mass media has evolved into a weird playground for the stupid children of rich people. One clue is the guy who runs The Atlantic , Jeffrey Goldberg. He is a serious guy who used to take pleasure in torturing Palestinians on behalf of his people. No kidding. His vice , however, is he likes to be surrounded by shiksas and toadies , so The Atlantic is now festooned with silly girls from good schools and young men fond of hearing Goldberg’s IDF stories.
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