Ron Collins
Aug 31, 2018 · 4 min read

What do you do professionally?

Last several years I do home improvements in a small farm town, before that spent thirty-odd years building houses, and a fair amount of whatnot.

You may find, if you become acquainted with many in the trades, that the tolerance for bullshit is down around zero. A thing either gets done or it doesn’t, and things that fellows like me do don’t tend to do themselves, nor are they particularly served by mindsets, slogans, secret-code language nor anybody’s hifalutin world views. I find so little room for sympathy or extenuationist defenses for today’s journalists, because I deal in facts much like they are supposed to be doing, except in my work trying to pretend or rationalize one’s way around what simply is, may well cost somebody a lot of money, get someone hurt or even potentially killed.

Journalists have those same consequences awaiting their making a mockery of their own stock in trade, too, but there tend to be a lot more buffering factors to protect the individual reporter from their own decisions and actions, so if what they do lends itself to someone getting hurt or killed or even taking their own life, there seems always to be somebody around to make excuses for them until the next time they go shoving mikes in faces to get juicy quotes about people’s feelings, the kind that sell lots of ad space.

I’ve long believed that for a lot of professions, journalism certainly near the top of the list, instead of wasting time at universities (known on the job site as “a four-year party with a six-figure cover charge….”), some of these people ought to get out and get their hands dirty and actually take part in getting some real things done. The idea that one’s own actions and contributions really can make the total difference between success and calamity in a given undertaking seems to escape a lot of these college types, who I mostly steer well clear of because I consider them a danger to themselves and others.

Journalism isn’t rocket science. And it doesn’t take four-plus years of beery bacchanalia disguised as matriculation at it, to grasp what a god-damn FACT is. My brother, a high school dropout like me (and both damn proud of it), taught himself the journalist’s craft beginning by spinning records at a tribal public radio station and went on to spend several years as both a staffer and freelancer for various publications, including two dailies with substantial subscription reach. He eventually moved on to web development (also self-taught, he spent less than three weeks in a college his entire life, long enough to know a re-education camp full of delusional automatons looking for someone to give them orders, when he saw one), because he got tired of being upstaged constantly by college-degreed (and duly half-assed) staff writers and editors, who took their positions in the office-politics hierarchies more seriously than they did discovering and disclosing facts, people who treated him as a threat because he did the job instead of sitting around the bar bragging about it.

From him and from a general observation of the way American pseudo-journalism has made a mockery of itself my entire life, I have gathered that just about anything I read in mass media is going to contain some element of rank untruth, either because the venue is lying as a policy to uphold a political slant, or because the individual reporters are lying to get their copy chosen for advantageous positioning, or because their sources (for umpteen-squared obvious potential reasons) had lied to them and the Joe and Jane College reporters were too middle-class clueless to even know they were being played like pianos.

Or, any or all of the above at once.

A person just cannot behave in such a childish and petulant way with tools in their hands and genuine tasks to complete, and expect any sort of result other than one ranging from mediocre to useless to outright disastrous. That, is one plain FACT that I doubt one in a million “journalists” knows as one.

There is no excuse whatsoever for the disgrace journalism has made of itself, and the worst part is, the entire industry is so isolated from everyday realities of human life that they don’t even know how badly they really are doing their jobs. The scary part is, I don’t think they care.

Nor do I expect any of the above to improve any time soon. Not so long as a job that a fourth-grader could do, given some rudimentary guidelines and having some basic character and integrity, is being perverted instead by the “higher education” system and the corporate titans who own and operate it, into the propaganda mill that it now is and will almost certainly remain.

So if they’re being disinvited from public events? BOO-HOO.

They earned it.

    Ron Collins

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    Facts don’t care about your faction