Why Time is wrong DER SPIEGEL ... IS NOW THE FACE FOR ‘FAKE NEWS’ WORLDWIDE.

TODAY’S JOURNALISTS ARE ANYTHING BUT ‘GUARDIANS OF THE TRUTH’

Time, that tattered, shrunken revenant of a oncepopular news magazine, continues in its endless decline to delude itself that it has either the authority or the competence to name the “Person of the Year.” Brilliantly it named journalists — “The Guardians” — as 2018’s collective heroes, with Jamal Khashoggi given pride of place on the once-iconic cover. Time neglected to check on Khashoggi and now finds that it nominated a Qatar stooge, whose columns were midwifed by officers in the Qatar government, and whose “journalistic” career was but a distracting pendant to his many more serious activities, latterly as an anti-Saudi lobbyist, nephew to the one-time world’s biggest arms dealer, and a host of other shadowy mésalliances. The neatest summary I have read of Khashoggi, the journalist, is: “a highly-partisan operative who worked with a handler to publish propaganda at the behest of the Emirate of Qatar … in other words, an agent of influence.”

Great cover photo for a Time “guardians of truth” issue.

As far as journalists collectively being honoured with the ascription “guardians,” that surely cannot apply in North America or Europe if we take most of their coverage of Donald Trump as the testing ground. Trump journalism will some day earn its place in medical literature, side by side with malarial fever and LSD as engines of hallucination and fitful nightmares.

Throw in the scandal saga of Der Spiegel, whose star investigative reporter, Claas Relotius, has been proven to be an industrialscale fraud, a fantasist fictionist, who gulled Der Spiegel and its readers for years, and is now the face for “fake news” worldwide, and ask again how journalists could even be considered the heroes of 2018? The Relotius problem was correctly described in a Facebook post as “a product of an absurdly leftist writers’ fraternity that is increasingly seldom prepared to leave its own convenient moral comfort zone in favour of the facts.”

Journalism is frequently as wayward as the social media it ritually deplores, propelled by a lustlike drive to the parts of a story that accord with its prejudices and predispositions. It has long since replaced the attempt to be objective with a commitment to activism and advocacy. Much of contemporary journalism does not report on the game. It sees itself as part of the game — it seeks to massage opinion, reinforce favoured perspectives, take down its “enemies” and shield its heroes.

There is an old word, not seen much in modern writing, quite possibly in near full decay from lack of use. Which is a shame for it still remains possibly the only full semantic vehicle for certain phenomena. The word is incompossible, and its meaning (taken here from the Oxford English Dictionary) is: adj. – Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both.

To illustrate the meaning, I offer a few sentences: Environmentalism and journalism are incompossible. Hatred of and contempt for Donald Trump and honest reporting on him are incompossible.

Place the adjective environmental to govern the noun journalism and the former swallows up, nullifies, extinguishes quite the latter. What we may call real journalists on the global warming file are, to use a familiar category, on the very sharp end of the endangered species list. The majority of environmental journalists are a choir in perfect harmony on a one-note score, the settled-science symphony of the IPCC and Al Gore.

Trump journalism is obsessive, manic and unboundedly adversarial. Much of it is wish-fantasy in print or online. The evidence was clear from the night of his election, when that great organ of higher reportage, The New York Times, was giving Mr. Trump an eight-per-cent chance of victory, and poor Hillary a wild 92 per cent. Error of that magnitude doesn’t spring from faulty polling or inadequate assessment of the public mood.

It is incorruptible evidence that a once great newspaper had chosen to report what its owners and reporters wanted to see as reality, its fantasy of reality, as the reality. They had cut all anchors to objectivity and fact to drift on the currents of advocacy and wishfulfilment. On that same night, as the results came in on the networks, people saw on the crestfallen faces of the anchor “guardians” for whom “speaking truth to power” is their prayer and motto, just how unwelcome the real truth was, when their power to declare what that truth should be, had been denied them.

This was infallibly not the year to declare journalists the heroes of our time. but then, it was Time that declared them so, so who, really, thought they were?