Note to "Journalists": Stop Preening. It's Nauseating

Heroes in their own minds.

I am running excerpts from Against the Corporate Media, coming Sept. 10 from Bombardier Books.

The human ego is a terrible thing. Necessary for survival, given just a bit of power, it invariably runs wild. The familiar gloss of humility shines from the faces of those in leadership. Behind most lies grim calculation, if I do this, then I get that.

The working class hero, the activist is a particularly heinous and ghastly manifestation, shorn of reason or common sense, aspirants to the title percolate through social media and legacy or corporate media. It is as if the top publishers deliberately send these people mad, barking into the cameras, drunk on their own significance, in order to make our world stupid and angry, ignoring the real stories right in front of them.

In that they have succeeded.

"Journalists; Heroes in Their Own Minds," by Jon Gabriel.

Sometimes, a selfie is worth a thousand words. CNN White House reporter Jim Acosta, the definition of journalistic self-regard, posted a photo to Twitter midway through the Trump presidency. Taken just before his 2018 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Acosta stares longingly into his Broadway-style lighted mirror, grasping a director’s chair emblazoned with the show’s logo. His reflection gazes into the camera’s eye revealing his bottomless well of self-satisfaction, insolence, and unearned pride. An open box of Zantac sits on the vanity.

The image was widely mocked across social media, much to the shock of the D.C. press corps. That picture revealed far more than the flaws of one spotlight-hogging reporter. It laid the soul of modern political journalism bare: the media’s supercilious id and ego, perfectly framed in an ignorant instant. Acosta quickly turned into a lightning rod, getting banished from the White House after a set of tedious stunts and histrionic hatred for the president of the United States. Yet he is far from the only Narcissus on the Potomac. The legacy media’s love for itself is topped only by its contempt for its audience.

You really can't hate them enough.

It’s difficult to describe how awful modern journalism has become. It is preening, biased, ignorant, vainglorious, arrogant, unfair, corrupt, vindictive, smug, anti-science, and stupid beyond measure. It hasn’t always been this way. Vintage news hawks reveled in their role as a yellow rabble of ill-educated, over-intoxicated, ink-stained wretches. Today’s reporters, inconceivably, consider themselves our betters.

Their pretension to status is puzzling. Perhaps, they could have been lawyers but lacked the intelligence or study skills. Or politicians, but they’re too socially awkward. Engineering is out of the question; they don’t know math. Science, too, as it requires critical thinking. Not good-looking enough to be Hollywood celebrities, not entrepreneurial enough to create businesses, not courageous enough to be out-of-the closet activists, let alone out-of-the-box artists. The only requirement for modern journalism is a rudimentary ability to stitch sentences together at forty words per minute. For on-camera talent, not even that. Contrary to recruitment pitches from the Columbia School of Journalism, reporting is a trade, not a profession.

Average journalism-school graduates watched their fellow undergrads go on to wealth in finance, innovation in technology, or power in politics. Meanwhile, the high Masters of Journalism are struggling to avoid replacement by college interns and to out-write AI software. After years in expensive schools cozying up to the right people, they believe that an equal professional respect is due. The trouble is, they’ve done little to earn it.

The media follows a socialism of status, demanding cultural equity with the newsmakers they cover. The members of the media don’t realize that the elites consider them with as little regard as does their dwindling audience. Striving for acceptance into the right social circles makes them all the more desperate to parrot the conventional wisdom of the ruling class. See, I’m on your team, the reporter thinks, as the Vice Undersecretary for the Department of Agriculture (Tropical Fruit Division) glances across the room to find someone worthy of his notice.

To please their corporate masters and retain their at-risk jobs, today’s media staffers must generate clicks. Sober analysis and accurate reporting never stir the blood as much as cheap emotionalism. Combine that with the old newspaper maxim of “if it bleeds, it leads,” and modern journalists are paid to catastrophize everything. Journalists love a crisis, even if they have to invent one. At least labeling anything they dislike a “crisis.” Each day’s headlines warn of a climate crisis, housing crisis, refugee crisis, energy crisis, and financial crisis—and that’s just on page A1. There are also crises of food insecurity, racial disparity, income inequality, and mental health equity.

Perhaps journalists could improve that last item by not catastrophizing every issue that has plagued humanity since ancient Sumer. But one crisis left unnoticed has doomed journalism to dwindling audiences, rising irrelevance, and public contempt. Newsrooms from Washington to San Francisco, New York to London, suffer from a humility crisis. What makes this odd is that journalists have so much to be humble about...

Pre-order here. 

Independent media that readers, not publishers, think tanks, government or hedge funds pay for is the only media that is honest. Please consider an inexpensive annual subscription. Here are a few reviews of my work:

Brenda Broley Cook

THANK YOU. elegant wordsmith of so many of my hearts feelings. Wisdom of the real feminine voice.

Allen Roth

Elizabeth Nickson is one of the great contemporary commentators, who writes beautifully, and with passion.

DBMG

Every single word could have come out of my head, but I wouldn’t have had your talent to put it down as coherently. Thank you, from someone who understands those angry, screaming young women, who think they know what matters in life. I am one of the 58% who believe abortion must be legal–early–and that women, now empowered, must use that power to reclaim control over their bodies. That means paying attention, noticing, not blowing off the missed period, getting a drug store preg test, and resolving a positive result–one way or the other–not waiting so long…so they won’t have to struggle with the knowledge that they stopped the beating heart of their own child. Maybe the only child they would ever have. The fight over the right to abortion–and the extremes to which it has been taken–has truly sidetracked and destroyed the women’s movement. We’re expendable human machines now, whose useless breasts can be lopped off at age 15, who can be erased by a 6’4″ muscular woman with a penis. Bless you, Elizabeth. May your voice be heard far beyond this page

Washington Times

Eco-Fascists is a superbly written account of the devastating political agenda of the environmentalist junta…The book’s bombshell revelations alone will make it one of the year’s most talked-about releases…[This] book should also get people talking, reflecting and reconsidering previously held positions about North America’s environmental movement.

Esquire Magazine

“(The Monkey Puzzle Tree”) is a horrifying and gripping novel”

C2C Journal

Elizabeth Nickson’s story has all the makings of a Hollywood biopic: A Westmount exile, who rebels against power and privilege, becomes a globe-trotting leftist journalist chronicling the great revolutionary narratives of her time. Then she sets out to discover the awful truth about her patriarchal 400-year-old colonist clan and everything changes. But Hollywood won’t touch her script because what she finds are eternal truths, about love, charity, sacrifice, Christianity and genuine freedom.

The Times

A gripping tale, a thriller with all the stops pulled out.

Republic of East Vancouver

Furthermore, Fulford is nowhere near as entertaining in his public breakdown as fellow National Post columnist, barking mad Elizabeth Nickson.

The Ottawa Citizen

Read this novel….it was so disturbing. The Monkey Puzzle Tree tells us what Cameron did to destroy his victims and their families. It also teaches us why we should not forget what he did.

Macleans

Tender and poetic. Nickson’s work deals with a staggering atrocity…(She) brings a keen eye for telling detail and a grace with the language to her story.

The New Statesman

Nickson creates a harrowing account of a downward spiral into madness cut with a sinister, political edge.

rabble.ca

What a fucking bitch. Patronizing General Dallaire?! Elizabeth Nickson could not carry the lunch of the guy who carries the lunch for the guy who carries the lunch for the guy who carries the lunch for the guy who carries the lunch for the guy who carries the lunch for Romeo Dallaire.

The Fraser Institute

Ever spirited, Elizabeth Nickson has continued to inspire, amuse, outrage, and provoke Canadians on a wide range of issues.

Wiki Quotes

“Well,” said the Oregon State Senator, “what would Jesus do?” My mind hit a brick wall and slid down it. No one I considered entirely sane had ever said something like that to me before.

Elizabeth Nickson in Wiki quotes