Don’t Meet the Press

When the print media was dominated by men with high school educations or less, armed with real-world experience and an enthusiasm for clarity of language and for “getting to the bottom of things,” the news was commonly reported with literacy and punchy verve, in vocabulary and grammar suitable to a population of self-governing adults. Today, as the print media — paper or virtual — is dominated by people who could not pass an elementary school English grammar test from 1930, but who all hold post-secondary degrees in tribal warfare from the social engineering training centers that used to be popularly known, without mocking irony, as citadels of reason, the news is not reported at all, but merely commented upon without context, spoonfed in illiterate phrases and incoherent voice-recognition-app transcriptions to an incurious, historically uninformed, and personally inexperienced audience of pleasure-addled infants utterly incapable of understanding the term “self-government,” let alone embodying it.

Ernest Hemingway cut his teeth as a reporter for the Toronto Star. There is probably no one at that paper today who could read Hemingway in the proper sense of the word — although I am sure two-thirds of the staff could tell you why he was a sexist homophobe and white supremacist whose writing promoted toxic masculinity.