If I had a dime for every time I’d seen a journalist on social media, television, or elsewhere talk about how stunning and brave it was to be a reporter under a Republican administration — especially the Trump administration — I could retire, hire some cabana boys to do my bidding, and buy a private island in the Pacific where I would plot a takeover of America first, and then the world.
So imagine my non-surprise to log on to the Twitter machine to find the “open letter” from Lousiville, KY WHAS 11 news director Julie Wolfe praising her fellow journalists for making it through a tough year and “doing a job some people hate you for doing.”
“Stay strong, because what you do matters,” she stated in the letter she tweeted out Tuesday. “2020 proved that”:
An open letter to journalists at the end of the toughest year of our careers: pic.twitter.com/AZ9FeIsxwz
— JulieWolfe (@JulieWolfe) December 22, 2020
I wasn’t the only one who read the letter and rolled my eyes in contempt. Twitter user Fusilli Spock went off when he saw it and posted this must-read thread in response, which I wanted to share here (my own comments will be posted below his):
Good Lord, what a bunch of weak-ass losers our media are.
Everyone had a hard year.
Everyone wore masks & washed their hands
Everyone battled isolation & fear.What the hell makes you think that your lives were somehow harder than the rest of us?
1/x https://t.co/pHRL9lso5p— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) December 23, 2020
None of you worked as hard or as in much danger as doctors, nurses & first responders.
2/x pic.twitter.com/jpDrUEMw9B
— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) December 23, 2020
None of you worked as hard or as in much danger as our soldiers, sailors, airmen & Marines
3/x pic.twitter.com/bJziLJ3YHN
— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) December 23, 2020
How many of you lost your businesses, your life’s work due to lockdowns and overreaching government tyranny
4/x pic.twitter.com/VCLDmPSSzO
— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) December 23, 2020
Some people said mean things to you, so what. Grow the fuck up. You’ve been just as nasty or worse to the fly-over Americans you show your disgust for daily.
5/x pic.twitter.com/U1thN5YnKh
— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) December 23, 2020
I’ll never understand why journalists think that their jobs are more important, better or more deserving of praise. They abused their roles and sacrificed their respectability in the name of being partisan advocates.
6/x
— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) December 23, 2020
"Journalists" then demand we give them unearned sympathy and admiration for their heroic roles as partisan hacks while wearing the skin-suit of a reporter.
Nope, you have to earn my respect (or sympathy) and I've got none left to spare for the media.
7/7
— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) December 23, 2020
There was plenty more where that came from, too.
Fusilli Spock’s second to the last tweet was especially on point. Considering how the MSM pushed fake news story after fake news story this year about President Trump and other Republicans, effectively became front men and women for the Biden campaign by downplaying or suppressing much of the news that made him look bad (the Tara Reade allegations and Hunter Biden story come to mind), and deliberately undermined Trump’s touting of the vaccine in the run-up to the election, I don’t see where much if any congratulating and back-patting are in order for the media here.
If anything, what 2020 reaffirmed for us about the media is that they’ve gotten worse in their nakedly partisan behavior, with recent examples demonstrating in no uncertain terms that state-run TV will be alive and well — and celebrated in the usual elite journalism circles — in 2021 under a Biden-Harris administration.
While there have been some diamonds in the rough this year, this is nevertheless not the time for media figures to be high-fiving each other. It’s a time for them to be reflecting on what went wrong, why so many continue not to trust them, and how they can do better in the new year. Most won’t, however, because as history has shown us time and time again, these people simply never learn from their mistakes — probably because they don’t think they’ve done anything wrong in the first place.
Which is exactly the problem.
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