Selling out: Media's decline from Al Doblin to Jonathan Salant
/New Jersey's establishment media -- its editors and reporters -- are in a freefall and have lost their sense of decency. Job security is such that they have all become free agents, writing articles to please prospective employers.
So we have Star-Ledger Editor Tom Moran performing a masochistic panegyric to please Democrat machine boss George Norcross. Over at the Bergen Record, that newspaper's editor was turning out pro-Democrat columns non-stop while engaging in backdoor negotiations with Senate President Steve Sweeney's office. A few years ago, boss Norcross tried to buy the Philadelphia Inquirer, now his machine is getting all the talent on the cheap.
The NJGOP's answer to this was predictably self-defeating. It's idea of a GOP counterbalance to the growing Democrat hegemony over media was to bring back Bridgegate mastermind David "Wally Edge" Wildstein, possibly the only person more hated in New Jersey than his old boss, Chris Christie. To fund Wildstein's operation they found former Jamestown alumnus Ken Kurson. It was Kurson who ran such memorable efforts as incumbent Marcia Karrow's loss to Mike Doherty in 2009 and incumbent Jeff Parrott's loss to Parker Space in 2010. But losing has never been a bar to advancement in the NJGOP. In fact, it generally is an asset.
Yep, Kurson has been accused of sexual harassment by writer and cancer-survivor Deborah Copaken. This comes at a time when Kurson's old firm is trying to convince the women of New Jersey that the NJGOP's choice for U.S. Senate -- Bob Hugin -- is a new kind of man, when it comes to women (whatever that is supposed to mean). You can read about what Kurson gets up to here:
It was Wildstein who outted Al Doblin as the ethical-free-zone he is. Doblin plainly hated the kind of attention he's bestowed on others his entire working life. In a series of whines, he complained to Wildstein:
“I am the editorial page editor. If someone makes me an offer, I have the right to consider it,” Doblin explained.
Doblin called a request for information regarding his employment search “truly horrific.”
“This is unfair. Truly unfair,” he said.
But Doblin is not the worst of the bunch. That "honor" must surely go to Jonathan "short-ass" Salant, a reporter worthy of his own Duranty Prize for consistent blindness to all but the party-line. In case you've forgotten Walter "the hand" Duranty. He's the assbandit who denied that Stalin was starving to death millions of human beings in the Ukraine and elsewhere in what was once called the "Soviet Union". He even won a Pulitzer Prize for it.
Duranty wrote for the New York Times, which later was forced to admit that his articles denying the famine constituted "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." There have been calls to revoke his Pulitzer, but you know how tough it is to get elitist filth to admit they made a mistake. So Duranty's award -- for 1930's era Fake News -- still stands. And so much for journalism.
Salant's latest dry-humping of the news came a few weeks back, when he attempted to write an update of the various congressional races in New Jersey.
He started off by being childishly giddy about Republican Leonard Lance's district having gone for Hillary Clinton in 2016, while failing to mention that Democrat Josh Gottheimer's had done the same for Trump that year.
Salant never fails to describe a Republican donor negatively, offering bits of color, always dark. On the other hand, old short-ass describes such creatures as George Soros in this light: "Malinowski (received a donation of) $5,400 from investor George Soros, a major Democratic donor."
Investor? A major Democratic donor?? How about convicted financial scammer who liberal economists have criticized for his callous manipulations of currency?
Perhaps Salant is displaying his talents for the consideration of one of the many Soros media organs? That seems to be the way these days.
In writing about the fifth district, Jonathan Salant somehow missed the fact that a third Republican, Jason Sarnosky, had dropped out of the race weeks before. He wrote about him as if he were still campaigning.
He went on to cover the race in southern New Jersey's first district. And once again, Salant behaved like he was on a job interview. He never once mentioned the machine that bears the Congressman's name and wrote as if it didn't exist.
Not to place Donald Norcross in the context of the machine of which he is a part is misleading and unethical. It promotes bad government by purposefully covering up the truth and it gives aid and comfort to one of the most authoritarian political machines in America. Don't want to see it, Jonathan? Well just try being an ordinary citizen when the machine decides it wants to use eminent domain to take your property in order to give it to one of their corporate friends. That's what you are shilling for.
The southern region of New Jersey is an example of a dominant-party system or one-party dominant system of government. According to South African political scientist Raymond Suttner, such a system occurs when there is "a category of parties/political organizations that have successively won election victories and whose future defeat cannot be envisaged or is unlikely for the foreseeable future". It is a de facto one-party system, often devolving into a de jure one-party system, a semi-democracy. Usually, the dominant party has a tendency towards "suppressing freedom of expression and manipulating the press in favor of the ruling party."
Well, short-ass, that is who you are shilling for. That is who you are now. All those romantic post-Watergate notions about doing right... well you're over that, right? Expensive restaurants and sexy vacations got the better of you, didn't they?
Sell-out.
