No mercy for the mainstream news media

The mainstream news media has been complaining about economic industry problems long before the economic meltdown hit this country. Some people feel sorry for them but as an industry, I don't feel sorry for them at all. I think the mainstream news media as an industry has brought its own demise on its own head, and if they are suffering, they deserve.

I'm conflicted a bit. While I feel sorry for many of my friends in the journalism profession and those good and principled journalists who have lost their jobs or are concerned about the decaying industry, the industry itself does not deserve any sympathy at all.

They deserve what's happening to them and instead of crying for them, especially those Americans who have victimized and excluded and slandered and ignored by the mainstream news media, the American public should be excited that the once arrogant, mighty and often dishonest news media may have to reinvent itself. And maybe even start from scratch.

Maybe this time, if they do have to start from scratch, they will get it right.

For too long the mainstream news media has violated the very principles it set up for itself, claiming to be professional when in fact they have been anything but professional. I think that the media hung the "We're professionalists" stereotype on themselves as a shield from the criticism they have earned.

The mainstream news media is not professional at all. They're whores who pimp for certain insider agenda's and they routinely deny equal voice to the voiceless who are in fact voiceless in America because the media has made them voiceless. Editors pick and chose Op-Eds and commentaries not based on the principles of free speech, equal access, Democracy and fairness but on the basis of "journalist politics."

And there is a Journalism Politics that is sinister, corrupt and the cancer that has slowly eroded the moral fiber that mainstream journalism once asserted.

They have been for years the least respected profession in America for a reason. Mainstream journalists are hypocrites who exclude facts to make the stories and commentaries they right seem more right. They use their power not to enlighten the public but to control and manipulate the public. The robber baron elitists in the media's ivory tower have done so out of pure selfish greed, while lowly editors have done it out of power corruption.

The American public, which has suffered based on their race, religion and ethnicity, has a chance to stand up and exercise true free speech without having their words distorted, filtered or excluded. Americans, with the demise of the mainstream news media, can help redefine the news media to insist on true fairness, true objectivity, true principle and true freedoms.

With the death of the mainstream news media -- and I hope it comes fast -- we can finally have a national discussion about issues without worrying about whose views are popular and whose are not. Americans are smart people. We are educated people. We do not need politicians and power brokers disguised as the Fourth Estate pretending to be caring for our interests when it fact under their stewardship the American people have been children of abused and negligent parents.

-- Ray Hanania

Author, "Secrets of New Media Networking"

www.TheMediaOasis.com