The press was supposed to be the Fourth Estate; instead, they’ve become the Left’s propaganda arm, while Wikileaks has stepped up to do the job the media was meant to do. The really sad part is that the same Left that once hailed Wikileaks as the “new Fourth Estate” has now turned on its one-time buddy. The Left is now hailing the media as the arbiters of what is real and what is “fake news,” even though the media themselves have been telling more lies than a meth addict begging for cash.
Once upon a time, the media was expected to hold government accountable. Even as far back as Samuel Adams, those who reported the news held the honorable and sometimes dangerous job of calling out corruption and wrongdoing, serving as the ones who exposed the bad things that governments like to keep hidden. Even as recently as the 1970s, journalists brought down Presidents and exposed an overreaching intelligence community.
Those days, however, are long gone, replaced by sycophants who email liberal presidential candidates their debate questions in advance and ask for guidance in how they should interview their opponents. Meanwhile, as scandals of horrific proportions played out on Wikileaks and individual citizens learned far more than they could ever stand to know about how corrupt Hillary Clinton and her crew were, the media decided Wikileaks had to be taken down. Suddenly Julian Assange was a pedophile. Facts didn’t matter—all that mattered was the narrative, and the narrative of the day is Democrats are off-limits.
Back in 2010, the Huffington Post lamented that “the same corporations that buy our politicians now own the journalists.” At that time, Wikileaks had just published Bradley Manning’s leaked documents, making the young Army private the darling of the Left and Wikileaks the new hero of the people. HuffPo was angry that journalists refused to look at the content of the information; they were incensed that the media didn’t buy into the absolute wonder that was Wikileaks. Even then the media hated Wikileaks because they recognized the potential that Assange’s efforts brought to the table—a total deposing of the corrupt and entrenched media, and the creation of a new Fourth Estate that was interested in holding everyone accountable, and not just the people the Left wanted to go after.
In this post-election maelstrom, the Left, forgetting all about how it drooled over Assange and Wikileaks during the Manning fiasco, suddenly wants to reinstate the rack as a torture method just for him. The lesson from the Left is as simple and hypocritical as always: Burn only what we want you to burn, or we’ll burn you.
