Ignorance & Responsibility

Hugh Hewitt on why he embarrassed yet another lefty journo-kiddie on his radio show:

Until colliding with Mr. Carter I had never thought to ask a young journalist who presumed to comment on the war on terror if he or she had ever heard of A.Q. Kahn. I assumed...well, there's the rub. I always assume that young journalists would not dare opine on the war without a basic knowledge of the existential threat at its core, and the origins of that threat.

Perhaps a college newspaper editorialist would do so, but not a "senior political economy reporter" for a major political outlet like HuffPo.

I was wrong.

And that's why I ask the questions I do. To expose the utter ignorance at the core of so much of the left. Not their rottenness. I often say there is a difference between "rotten" and "wrong," and I believe that. Some on the left are wild-eyed fanatics and awful people. But most of the lefties I engage with seem perfectly pleasant if also wildly ill-informed and, yes, lazy.

It is hard work to read widely and broadly, and on both sides of the political aisle. Time consuming. Not very fun actually.

But necessary. If you intend to be taken seriously. More importantly, if you intend the country to endure. Most journalists go into the business because they are idealists of one sort or another and they love the whole "first draft of history" stuff. What journalists collectively do is crucial, because lousy reporting leads to lousy voting, the consequences we see now on full display across the globe.

As I've stated here on several occasions, the vast majority of mainstream journalists (and all of the little dancing ignauts at Leftist hiveminds such as HuffPo) long ago abrogated their responsibility as the fourth estate. I doubt most of them even understand the meaning of the term in any real sense. They are reporting from within an echo chamber, which places them on an intellectual par with the average forum commenter on the Internet. That's not very high, in case you were wondering.

When all of the watchers have stopped watching and taken up cheerleading, it's over. We are frighteningly close to that point.