t’s getting lonely out there for Megyn Kelly. At the moment she’s about the only American journalist defending Pamela Geller and, by the way, free speech.
The rest of American Journalism agrees that the First Amendment is okay, so long as it comes with a dash of restrictive Sharia Law. Speak your mind but do not take your opinions to Texas or any place that might offend peoplewho go crazy at the sight of a cartoon.
In other words, as we’ve been listening to the clobber-fest against Pamela Geller, freedom of expression, we’re being advised, must be exercised with caution. So they tell us, these opinion makers, who without a sense of shame insist that they love the First Amendment – but conditionally, fitfully, reluctantly, sporadically.
Who says this? People who by the luck of the draw have the Bill of Rights to sustain their livelihoods.
But apparently Judeo/Christian values are not worth savoring and fighting for, particularly if you are a journalist.
From Moses’ declaration in Leviticus, to “proclaim liberty throughout the land,” how quickly we’ve gone to proclaiming the suppression of liberty.
Who saw this day coming? I did. Not because I’m smart, but because I’m a pessimist. Pessimists are correct 98.7 percent of the time. Novelists are pessimists and that’s what gets us in trouble so much of the time, when we use fiction or part fiction to get digging into the truth – like this book that spills the beans about news media dishonesty and what really goes on in our newsrooms.
From “Half The News That’s Fit To Print” we can hardly be expected to make up our minds intelligently.
We are a misinformed public and nothing is more dangerous than a people being misled by liars and fakes…in this case ideologues of the Left.
The shift may have begun when Edward R. Murrow brought down a Senator, Joseph McCarthy, but it certainly began when Woodward and Bernstein, back in the 1970s, brought down a President, Richard Nixon. A generation wanted to “do good” and found journalism as the perfect means to “repair the world,” quicker than dentistry and root canal.
Now we are still in the clutches of news being presented by social activistswho, starting with The New York Times, hardly pretend to be neutral.
From “Half The News That’s Fit To Print” we can hardly be expected to make up our minds intelligently.
Take George Stephanopoulos, please. This is a journalist? Yes, this is a journalist. ABC-TV hired him straight from the Clinton White House (the old one, not the new one quite yet) where he served as a political advisor. They offered him big money, and presto; he is a journalist, indeed the leading voice at ABC.
You expect both sides of the story?
Or take Geraldo Rivera, who specialized in trash sensationalism, like the search for Al Capone’s Vault, and now reports for Fox News.
But Fox News must be forgiven because despite the presence of Juan Williams and Shepard Smith, it’s all we’ve got for news and opinion fair and square.
This is where we find Megyn Kelly. This is where steady customers to the network were astonished to find Miss Kelly all alone doing battle for Pamela Geller. One by one, the rest fell like dominoes for limits to free speech, while for Kelly it is all or nothing.
We sense her frustration as even the most tough-minded conservative speakers clobber away at Pamela Geller and the First Amendment.
Kelly must have thought she stumbled into the wrong studio when colleagues Greta Van Susteren and Bill O’Reilly sounded like Chris Matthews.
It’s good that we have her, but sad that we have her practically all alone.
Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. The new thriller from the New York-based novelist, The Bathsheba Deadline, a heroic editor’s singlehanded war on terror and against media bias. Engelhard wrote the int’l bestseller Indecent Proposal that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore. Website: www.jackengelhard.com
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