QotD: Reporters

As I recall, we did manage to get some newspaper reporters to come up and talk to us, and I believe at least one TV channel from nearby Pensacola. But it was then that I first suffered an extremely strange and very frustrating experience. If you've ever been associated with anything that got the attention of the media, I'm sure that you'll recognize it immediately. It was exactly as if the reporters and TV personalities had attended some gathering other than the one all of us had.

The simple truth is that, in all the forty-six years since, during which I've been pretty politically aware and active, there hasn't been a single issue, event, or phenomenon — not one — that the mainstream media haven't lied about, blatantly misrepresented or distorted, or overlooked, ignored, or suppressed, by accident or design. Even when they try, the fools never get it right. I have never been involved in anything I would have recognized afterward from their description of it.

Thomas Jefferson believed that a free press would be the salvation of this country's libertarian values and traditions, but sadly he was wrong. The mass media are uniformly populated by cowards, bullies, and toadies who will unfailingly suck up to whomever they perceive to have power — and immediately fall upon and rip out the throats of whoever they believe to be losing it. They know nothing of history, economics, or the law. They give not a fig about freedom or the future. I have sometimes observed that if the American people ever became fully aware of just how badly they're being served by the media (of course most of them don't want to know), there wouldn't be a single newspaper or radio or TV station left standing above its own ashes anywhere in the country.

L. Neil Smith, "The Bottom of the Birdcage", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-09-23