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Huckabee: Journalism in America is dead |
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Monday, 14 September 2009 |
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Former Arkansas GOP Gov. Mike Huckabee, currently a Fox News talk show host, ripped the media this weekend, claiming that journalism has been reduced to “ink-stained drivel that smeared the pages of paper and the people who attempted to read it.”
“I’m sad to report today a death of a good friend to all of us…..Journalism,” Huckabee wrote in a post on his political action committee’s blog. “The once esteemed 4th estate of our nation and the protector of our freedoms and a watchdog of our rights has passed away after a long struggle with a crippling and debilitating disease of acute dishonesty aggravated by advanced laziness and the loss of brain function.”
“Journalism once proudly patrolled our society and sought to tell us the stories that informed and sometimes inspired us,” the former Republican presidential candidate wrote. “They also presented the news that would irritate us—and the irritation was not over the delivery, but the content as corruption and misdeeds were revealed.”
As evidence for his claim, Huckabee pointed to recent coverage of his comments about the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and the controversial past remarks of White House green jobs adviser Van Jones.
Huckabee drew criticism in August for suggesting that, after being diagnosed with a brain tumor, Kennedy would have been told to “go home to take pain pills and die” if he had been covered by President Barack Obama’s proposed health care overhaul.
“Bloggers and other supposedly professional journalists then took those already distorted interpretations, treated them as sources, and added their own spices,” Huckabee said of comments, which were reported by numerous news outlets. “Newsweek even had the audacity to use quote marks around a statement never even uttered as if it were my actual words.”
On Van Jones, Huckabee said that when the former Obama adviser was “caught with bright red lips making outrageous statements about Republicans, police officers, and it being discovered of his belonging to numerous radical groups, the media was incapable of so much as a notice of his record and only mentioned him at the time of his resignation.”
“Journalism had grown increasingly dependent on spin-doctor spoon feeding and the circular and insular quoting of other journalists instead of attempting to locate and quote actual first person sources,” Huckabee added. “No memorial is planned as the practitioners of propaganda seem to be unaware that they have passed away and continue to publish anyway.”
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