By Andrew L. Urban.
Gender-fluidity leads to fact-fluidity, it seems, and as gender fluid floods the schools (that are safe), so fact-fluidity is being introduced into our profession like a virus, direct from the University of Columbia Journalism Review distributed in Australia to the profession by the Arts and Media Alliance, ‘trendy successor to the old Australian Journalists’ Association’, according to The Spectator’s Hal P.G. Colebatch (November 2, 2016).
Colebatch puts it thus: “The article is sub-titled ‘Media in the Age of Trump’ which seems to give Trump stature of transcendent importance.
It continues: ‘Regardless of what happens on Election Day (November 8, 2016), dark clouds are gathering in politics. But above the storm, blue skies are visible in the media world. Trump’s effect could well be, if journalists wholeheartedly seize the opportunity, a liberation.
‘Who could have guessed that Trump would come to embody a ray of hope and a new dawn for journalism? Yet here he is, offering everyone working in the media a new objectivity, a chance to throw off the shackles that made Trump possible.
‘Objectivity.’ it continues, ‘is always in flux.’ In fact, of course, the point about objectivity is that it is not in flux. It deals with unchanging facts. He claims oddly that ‘Just as the word “cancer” no longer means what it did in a scientific context 50 years ago, the word “poverty” no longer means what it did in a political context a half century ago.”
It argues that because of Donald Trump, journalists are now free from the shackles of truth and facts – they can be unobjective, biased, liars. The author of this piece in the New Stupidity is Lee Siegel and I suspect if he were an Australian journalism lecturer he would have used Tony Abbott as the reason. It doesn’t have to make sense or adhere to democratic principles, it just has to be radical enough to give a warm and fuzzy feeling to his fellow ideologues.
We can expect the coming of democracy-fluidity, in which the now old fashioned notion of democracy is whatever anyone wants to make it. For proper speak refer to Nineteen Eighty Four …