Conscience calls in vain
Mainstream news media and viewers share fault

It is important to remember that they are deaf to conscience.

I'm referring first to those journalists and news media companies that have throughout this election season sadistically sliced away at Donald Trump with their every accessible torture-tool, while championing the crafty and duplicitous Hillary Clinton as a salvational, pantsuited goddess. 

The list includes individuals Wolf Blitzer (CNN), Nicholas Kristof (New York Times), Ruth Marcus (Washington Post), John Harwood (CNBC), and Kristen Welker (MSNBC). 

Also appearing are entire media operations that have effectively acted as DNC propaganda arms. Here, one finds not just orthodox examples like NBC and the LA Times, but such online straight news sites as Politico and The Hill. 

(An aside: News media's daily practical assisting of the Clinton campaign is of a part with a general unity observable among the pyramid-topping powerful. See also the social bond between the moneyed Clinton and Bush family dynasties, and such partners in Washington's do-nothing status quo as Paul Ryan and Harry Reid. 

The political, economic, and media elites are swinging from chandeliers at a party to which we average Americans are not welcome.) 

I used to wonder how, after American voters had elected Trump, the enthusiastically partisan inky assassins would explain themselves to viewers. How could they assure them of post-balloting trustworthiness? 

But eventually, I had an epiphany.

There will be no apologizing. No going back. A great separation has occurred, one sure to endure as the standard journalism industry model long after 2016 campaign ads have ceased.

The era of generally ambitioned, theoretically objective news reporting has passed. (To whatever degree it ever truly existed.)

In its place, now and on into years foreseeable, is an informationally self-segregated age in which every outlet is a specialty one and caters pointedly to peculiar interests.

Mainstream media mouths that have so openly spat on quaint ideals of professional ethics and marched unveiled down Main Street in Hillary's unsightly, ugly-hearted parade will in future years suffer no losses. 

They and corporate news executives know that viewers already at their table each morning prefer, not faithful accountings of events, but ones misrepresentingly prepared to partisan palate. And their cultivated and coddled prejudices aren't going anywhere. 

To them, just as to the deceitful scribes and chatterers whose malpractice they so heartily sanction, conscience calls in vain. 


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