Alexandra Kitty - When Journalism Was a Thing

First published by Zero Books, 2018

Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach, Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK

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Text copyright: Alexandra Kitty 2017

ISBN: 978 1 78535 654 4

978 1 78535 655 1 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936411

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

The rights of Alexandra Kitty as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Design: Stuart Davies

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY, UK

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To the two women in my life, past and present: my grandmother and my mother.

I thank Andrea Sierer for her gracious generosity in editing my book. In a world filled with uncertainty, your kindness is never in doubt.

Here is a lie. I know its a lie, but I must print it because it is spoken by a prominent public official. The public officials name and position make the lie news. Were the source some unknown person, I could and would gladly throw it in the wastebasket.

Oliver K. Brovard.

You are working in a dead profession that you all had a part in killing. The time for denial is over. Journalism has been dead for a very long time. Deal with it.

The list of your sins is too long to place in a single volume of a book, but you have much to answer for.

For starters, you openly lie to each and every news consumer with your every story by cribbing from press releases and parroting whatever tidbit you hear from public relations hacks, and pretend it is original research.

That is your first lie and everything else begins from there. You have done no research on how to better do your jobs. You have the nerve to run to focus groups and market researchers to tell you what the public is thinking, and how to better pander to them with your deceptions.

You have caused wars. People have died and been falsely imprisoned thanks to your ignorant propaganda. You have spread lies that have forever altered and ruined lives, and no, there is not a single story you can cite that can make up for the countless deaths that you are responsible for. The lives you purported to save cannot nullify a single one your irresponsible ways have caused.

You have spread hate. You have spread prejudice. You have spread fear. You have spread absolute panic. You have spread lies. You have turned ordinary people into targets to be reviled for life. You have constructed false pecking orders, rewarding psychopaths and narcissists who have contributed nothing to society, causing untold damage. You have confused running a Bedlam with being journalists, rigging coverage with loaded language, distorted videography, and selective reportage.

You have no moral high ground to take, and you have proven to be unteachable.

You have incited the populace to treat their fellow human being as monsters. You have perpetuated countless stereotypes, an ironic twist as it was the journalist Walter Lippmann who coined the term.

You have plagiarized and stolen ideas. You have smeared the reputations of countless lost souls as you cheered on grifters, swindlers, liars, rapists, psychopaths, and murderers who appealed to you. You have let lies go unchallenged as you stalked and hunted anyone who does not think just like you, and then pretended as if your xenophobic tendencies did not exist. You have fabricated stories or allowed others to do it for you.

You have become shrill, irrational, paranoid, and deluded monomaniacs as you threw your countless childish temper tantrums in public. You have pretended to go through war zones, even as your own video footage gives your choreographed games away. You are not fooling those with a working mind. Grow up.

You have sexually harassed employees and generously employed a casting couch as you drank too much and snorted even more on the job and then went out and condemned those who play in the same gutter as you.

You have ignored stories that mattered because they involved the poor, the foreign, the disabled, and the uncharismatic time and again. You have ignored genuine rape victims as you fawned over the liars. You have cost the economy billions of dollars as you extolled the brilliance of con men such as Kenneth Lay, Tyler Cassity, and Bernie Ebbers. You have bankrupted hard-working people. You have cost those people jobs, their homes, their dignity, and peace of mind forever because the notion of actual work and research repulsed you. You have been clueless, racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic, all while trying to pretend you extol something that resembles progressive values. Stop believing your own hype. It is as fake as your concern for humanity.

Because your newsrooms have been stubbornly white and male. The way you spin your yarns have always been and continues to be misogynistic patriarchal in structure. You have set up false divides as you demanded that civilians be bombed in the name of morality, but of the real tyranny in the world, you have seen it, but kept unrepentantly quiet.

Your logic is nonexistent. You liberally appeal to authority, stoop to personal attacks as you commit strawman fallacies, and the confirmation bias. You have made fun of the mentally ill and bullied people you deemed unhip, poor, and homely. You fill up your pages and newscasts with celebrity garbage and troll social media instead of getting off your backsides to do actual work.

Your sophistry is childish, yet treacherous. You look down on others as you boast, gloat, and puff your way up the ladder.

You have destroyed the industry with arrogance, deceit, and immaturity, and now expect a single soul other than your mothers to actually believe a word you say.

There will always be the lost and the fearful who think they need to hear lies and insults to hide from reality and truth the two most important goals to reach for any journalist, yet both are routinely ignored in lieu of fluff.

The last handful of journalists who still do their jobs cannot keep a dead profession going. Media concentration is out of control, and do not look to Canadians for a clue as their own journalists have become paupers holding their tin cans, asking their government whether they have a dime and had they done their jobs and paid attention, they would already know the answer is their government is as broke as they are.

You have become mudslingers covered in the stench of your own laziness. There will be those forever ruined and traumatized thanks to your games.

And now you have been reduced to the vile and uninspired bullying of the President of the United States because he played you and you never saw it coming. He was the love of your shallow life, and if it werent for your decades long drooling over him, he would not have made it further than any of you ever will.

When he was aligned with the Left and the Democrats, none of his practices or beliefs bothered you or got you to expose his ways he is a product of your side of the fence, but now you scream and writhe in agony. When he was one of yours, you cheered him on. Do not think for one second that you can fool all of the people all of the time.