The 2009 Schieffer School of Journalism Symposium: The Newspapers’ Last Stand

Bob Schieffer is a TCU alum and former moderator of CBS’s Sunday morning show Face the Nation. While he excelled at rarely revealing his biases, April 1st,2009 will remain the exception. TCU’s Schieffer School of Journalism hosted a Symposium entitled, “Obama and the Press: Is the media doing its job?” The subject matter originally was what drew me into wanting to go to this symposium; I had very little interest in the guests panelists, especially PBS’s Gwen Iffil and MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, two journalists who are openly biased and show no qualms about it. If I have not expressed my thoughts on the media’s adoration of Barack Obama; let me pull no punches. I always thought that the worst brand of hypocrisy came from churches here in the United States; that is, until, journalism, news, and media outlets, which are trained in academia to be unbiased and fair, took the historic opportunities before them in the 2008 election, as well their liberal political preferences to bash the presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain at every turn they could. Perhaps the most glaring piece of evidence came every time the cable news networks would show a McCain supporter or a member of PUMA interview in one segment, and then in the very next, go on to show an entire Obama speech live. McCain speeches, while not as inspiring or exciting or as articulate as Obama’s, did not get even half the coverage Obama’s speeches and townhalls received.
Andrea Mitchell was not able to make it to the Schieffer Symposium because MSNBC assigned her to London to cover the G20 summit. CNBC’s Trish Regan replaced Mitchell. At the symposium, the case was made by all five panelists, over and over again, that blogs were evil, and that newspapers were necessary to filter out the truth. I would like to ask, “Whose truth are you referring to?” The truth where only a select group of facts are chosen to give to the masses for liberal, mainstream propaganda? Is this the same truth that consistently puts racial minorities (besides BHO) on the front page as criminals despite only making up one-quarter of the population and even a smaller percentage of its drug-related crimes? Is it this very same truth that perpetuates the stereotype that Christians are uneducated and Republican? Tell me, Schieffer Symposium panelists, were you all making the case for a bailout of the newspaper industry in front of our eyes? If you all were, it was pretty pathetic.
Newspaper corporations, in comparison, are like John McCain to Barack Obama, in Barack Obama’s mind, who said in the DNC nomination acceptance speech, that John McCain just did not understand (economics, that is), and neither do the pushers of newspapers. The newspaper industry will go the way of General Motors, AIG, and the horse-drawn carriage: extinction, relics in the new economy in the 21st century. There is nothing new under the sun, as the writer of Preacher in the book of Koheleth wrote. There is a time for everything, a time for to build and a time to tear down. No institution that is made with human hands is eternal; all is temporal and everything has a beginning and an end, an Alpha and an Omega.