In a puff piece on the launch of Al Jazeera America, The New York Times quotes Bob Meyers, president of the National Press Foundation, lauding the premiere of the channel. “I am reminded of three other news organization launches in the US that were transformative,” Meyers wrote on his blog. “One was the launch of CNN on June 1, 1980; the second was the launch of Bloomberg News in 1990; and the third was the launch of Politico in 2007.” He finished, “Could be fun, and even beneficial, to watch.”
Meyers misses, of course, the two most transformative news launches since CNN: the launch of the Drudge Report, which spawned the growth of the internet news revolution, and the launch of Fox News, which launched the voice of opposition to the traditional left-leaning hierarchy in the mainstream media. But that makes sense: Meyers is a mainstream media liberal through and through. He recently lauded anti-Semitic journalist Helen Thomas as a truth-seeker who “did not shy away from impertinent questions – believing that actions by the president were something the public should know about and she should find out about for them.” He also wrote that equated gun control with protecting the public, and urged the media to run photos of the dead children at Sandy Hook in order to generate a public push for such gun control: “a picture of the bullet-ridden bodies of 20 children would make the violence real….Bullets fly; kids die…. I would weep for the parents if the pictures are released. But the parents have wept enough already. We need to focus on the next group of kids playing with block letters and waiting for their juice boxes and snacks.”
The National Press Foundation says that its primary mission is “to increase journalists’ knowledge of complex issues in order to improve public understanding.”
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
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