A Treasure To Be Shared

Christie Blatchford 1951 - 2020 | Journalist par excellence Do not leap to conclusions. Feelings are not facts. Do not confuse the two. Develop your own moral intelligence and judge actions objectively. Weigh facts according to rigorous standards. Primary sources are required. Avoid filtering facts through a biased mindset or framework, e.g., a political orientation. Do not trust nor support the court of public opinion because mainstream media editors who fuel public discourse, largely to maintain or increase market share and profit, compress and distill information to the point that nuance is lost; and because they lack the necessary intellectual formation to comprehend and analyze a subject. They cannot and do not represent issues in a fair, accurate, constructive and thorough manner. Thus, the "news" is too often nothing more than a jumble of juxtapositions and speculation amounting to coffeeshop gossip. There are reliable journalists. Most reliable journalists work for al...

Sohrab Ahmari calls out authors fueling the present menace. Over the past four years, credentialed academics and public intellectuals published a mountain of books and articles warning of rising authoritarianism and even fascism in the United States—and offering guides on how to resist this political menace. “Save democracy” books became something of a cottage industry: If you had what publishers call a “platform” and relevant scholarly authority, you were a fool not to try your hand at the genre. The titles revealed the high stakes: The People vs. Democracy , The Twilight of Democracy , How Fascism Works , On Tyranny , The Road to Unfreedom , How Democracies Die . And on and on. Only now are we beginning to witness the damage wrought by these irresponsible exercises in middlebrow hysteria, as radicalized activists set fire to American cities on the belief that they are locked in an existential battle with the forces of political darkness. This past weekend, hard-left activists in Port...

You've seen the image. CNS/Vatican media How utterly incompetent were those who missed the incongruity between smiling prelates and the purpose of their gathering? Smiling prelates gathered to discuss decades of horrendous sexual abuse, assault and clergy managerial malfeasance is hardly the kind of image the Church should release for general consideration. If given half a chance, the secular media will, too often intentionally, sensationalize issues and use images to maximize impact and thus profits gained from selling the news. Given that the news is highly commodified and that the secular media, in particular, rely on adapting images to maximize impact to maximize market share to maximize financial gain, the Church cannot be so naive as to release images which have not received a thorough assessment to minimize exploitation. Thus, photographs should only be released after a two or three stage vetting process that should include the following considerations: th...