Student Journalists: The Left-Wing Liars and Shills of Tomorrow
“So, should white boys still be allowed to share their ‘opinions’? Should we be forced to listen? In honor of Black History Month, I’m gonna go with a hell no.”
So wrote graduating senior Leda Fisher in an Op-Ed published last week by The Dickinsonian, Dickinson College’s oldest and most well-known campus newspaper.
This 500-word Op-Ed — which asserted that collegiate discussions of race and gender should occur without the input of white male students and ran under the descriptive title “Should White Boys Still be Allowed to Talk?” — was not, however, the only racist diatribe published by a college newspaper last week.
A few hundred miles away at Yale, the Daily News published staff columnist Isis Davis-Marks’ “Evil is Banal.” Davis-Marks’ Op-Ed, though marginally better in quality, was arguably worse in content.
Davis-Marks’ work read like a manifesto. In one of the nation’s most prestigious student newsprints ran the nearly 800-word call for female students, women of color and other “marginalized” students to photographically document every instance of white male misbehavior, purposeful or incidental, for the sake of ruining their lives should they ever be granted a position of acclaim or authority.
Fortunately for the authors, worse than the quality of their writing and its logical grounding was the fact that numerous editors actually thought such demonstrable and patent racism was suitable for publication.
And the writers’ good fortunes did not stop there.
With the recent news cycle so chock full of significant stories — from congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s appalling anti-Semitic remarks to a bipartisan Senate committee finding no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia — these items were easily, and unsurprisingly, overlooked by the mainstream media.
Still, their silence on this matter remains disturbingly hypocritical considering the tongue lashing they would have self-righteously administered to these publications should roles have been reversed.
Just imagine if this were a Caucasian or male student calling for the invalidation of another student’s thoughts based on the grounds of their race, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation.
We never would have heard the end of it.
If evidence for that claim is even necessary, just look at the way the mainstream media managed to milk one Catholic schoolboy’s smirk for an entire week’s worth of content. And the transgressions of the Covington boys were both minuscule and entirely fictional.
But anyone with their critical thinking abilities left intact already understands the left-wing mainstream media’s willingness to do anything to stay relevant and say anything to advance the progressive agenda.
With that in mind, why waste energy beating that dead horse?
The publication of these radically progressive, unfathomably racist opinions in two of the country’s best-acclaimed university publications is not only indicative of the fact that major problems in the news media complex have spread from the top down. It also signifies that we are ignoring a key battlefield in the culture war.
It is well past time we discussed the mainstream media’s minor-league affiliates — the collegiate press.
State of Collegiate Journalism Address 2019
Student journalism is no longer an invaluable practice tool for fledgling writers to learn how to conduct interviews and convey relevant and key news, both local and otherwise, in a professional manner.
It has rapidly evolved into one of two things: A tool for the incessant publication of puff-pieces pertaining to on-campus clubs or the quality of a university’s cafeterias and dormitories or an opportunity for aspiring left-wing hacks to fill their portfolios with deeply biased or editorialized articles about national political events or local progressive rallies.
And the Op-Ed sections are, 999 times out of every 1,000, laden with the radical progressive ramblings of increasing numbers of young-adult fools recently introduced to the works of Alinsky and Marx.
The state of collegiate journalism is that of a massive yard sale. There may be a few gems scattered about, but most of it is garbage — or shameless agenda-pushing.
Breitbart Was Right
Universities nation-wide are bastions of progressive and neo-Marxist thought and academia has long been known as a breeding ground for left-wing ideologues.
As such, the fact that student journalism on American campuses is superficial and radically left-wing is likely beyond self-evident for most conservatives.
This does not, however, make it inconsequential.
In fact, a brief glance at Davis-Marks and Fisher’s Op-Eds or, the contents of any private university newspaper, should bring about a sense of dread in conservative and centrist readers alike.
These soon-to-be “journalists” are living out a sizable chunk of their formative years eating, sleeping and breathing the new age progressivism.
In class, they internalize post-modernist and post-structuralist thought, and, as a result, demand learning spaces in which they need not address lines of questioning, thoughts or core values antithetical to their own. Their professors are happy to create such an environment — one in which the student’s subjective experiences are termed “their truth,” and slowly but surely conflated with the truth.
The late Andrew Breitbart once said in an interview while on tour for the release of “Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!” that the most dangerous thing the left-wing “Old Media Complex” has done is somehow make itself synonymous with objective truth.
Breitbart was right.
Because among those students eating, sleeping and breathing the neo-Marxist agenda on our college campuses are many who yearn to be journalists.
They religiously read CNN, the Huffington Post, The New York Times and The Washington Post. They are looking up to the Jim Acostas and Anderson Coopers of the world and saying, “That is who I want to be.”
And as conservatives mistakenly write them off as silly student journalists or foolish adolescents stuck in their “liberal phase,” they are rapidly growing into the lying, left-wing agenda-pushers of tomorrow.
Worse yet, if the fact that two large groups of student editors did not hesitate to post Davis-Marks and Fisher’s Op-Eds is any indicator of what is to come of these student journalists, the next generation of mainstream media heads looks to be far worse than the current.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
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