How young females and their obedience fetish killed journalism, and where we go from here...

Last week, I happened to glance over at the newspaper rack at my local grocery store.

It’s been 3-4 years since I stopped reading the local paper. But as a journalist and former newspaper editor and publisher, I can’t help be a little curious about what’s on the front page.

What I saw on the right-hand margin surprised me. It was a re-print of an Indy Star story about a hearing I attended on Feb. 1 at the Indiana Statehouse — a hearing where I testified in opposition to the public health bill — Senate Bill 4.

What was disturbing about the article is that… It isn’t really a news article at all. It’s an opinion piece.

In the first paragraph, the reporter tells you how great this bill is — It expands services in local communities!

And in the second, she tells you that the people who testified in opposition to the bill “used the hearing on Senate Bill 4 as a platform to spout misinformation…”

Yikes-O.

Citizens weren’t “speaking out in opposition” or “expressing concerns” or “explaining to legislators why they opposed the bill.”

No. They were cynically using the hearing as a platform… a platform for “misinformation.” Haha.

But what did they say that could be considered “misinformation”?

The reporter does not say.

But something tells me that the reporter, Arika Herron, did not like what was said by yours truly that day about the Covid-19 vaccines and the 165 deaths in Indiana reported to VAERS as of Dec. 31, 2022.

Here she is in a Twitter post, arriving home after being a good girl and obediently getting her second shot in May of 2021…

Arika Herron @ArikaHerron

Second shot ✅ And back home just in time to get #covid19 updates from Drs Box, Weaver et al.

She appears to be…a Covidian!

But maybe I just misunderstood.

So I emailed Arika at the Indy Star.

I asked her, politely, what she considered to be misinformation, and why she wouldn’t just report what people said, and let the readers decide where the truth lay?

She did not respond.

I would have been shocked if she had.

I pretty much knew she would not respond because, like many young journalists working today — young females in particular — she is not really engaged in a pursuit of truth. She is not there to question things. She’s there to be a good girl, to obey.

The old adage in journalism always was: If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.

The meaning of this was — Take nothing on faith. Question everything. Run everything back to its source.

Journalists are never supposed to take the government’s word for granted. Not ever. They are never supposed to take a corporation’s word for granted. Governments lie. Corporations lie. People lie. People are mistaken. People misspeak.

While a young journalist like Arika Herron might know this intellectually, her obedience instinct is much stronger, and overwhelms her duty to be critical and to question official narratives.

In the tweet above, she is exhibiting this obedience fetish.

She wants the world to see that she has been a good girl — she has done what the authorities told us to do. She is to be rewarded with a pat on the back.

(She not only got the vaccine, but has rushed home to catch the press conference put on by Indiana’s health commissioner, the gynecologist Dr. Kristina Box, and the state’s top doc, Lindsey Weaver, so she can write down every word they say and relay it all to Hoosiers so they can be good and follow orders also).

In his autobiographical book Roughing It, about his trip out West to work as a journalist in the Nevada Territories where his brother was the governor, Mark Twain wrote about the time a bullet flew by his head as he sat in the newspaper newsroom one day, remarking that it meant that his editorial that week had hit just about right!

This would be hard for a young female who craves approval and has an obedience fetish to understand.

She wouldn’t laugh at Twain’s anecdote — it would terrify and confuse her.

Today’s average 30-year-old female reporter or editorial writer would never write anything that might make “cool” people mad. She would never write anything that wasn’t in line with the views perceived as being the “correct” views.

I know exactly what those correct views are. You probably do, too.

They are: pro-abortion (always and forever) and anti-Second Amendment (because guns are mean and bad).

On other issues, they’re flexible — which means, they will always adhere to the Democrat narrative, the “cool” narrative. So they are not pro-war or anti-war. They will gladly take up Democrat-supported wars (they’re all pro-Ukraine, for example) even when it’s inconsistent (fueling a major war when Democrats are traditionally anti-war.)

I’ve been around young females like this for a long time. As a college student, my roommates were mostly journalists, and one was the city editor of our student newspaper.

She was the first generation in her family to attend college, and like so many first-generation college students, she instantly transformed herself into someone who could be thought to be an urban sophisticate. She dressed a certain way and wore her hair a certain way. And she was of course pro-abortion (always and forever).

She did not go to church and did not hold any views that would have been considered uncool.

She was on top of every trend from food to language to fashion, adopting all of them.

I’m aghast that conservatives still sometimes refer to American journalists as “elites.”

Most are kids. Most have never worked at any other job, except for summer jobs while in high school. And many are still supported in part by their parents.

They’re literally children.

Next time you read something in your local newspaper, or even in a storied publication like Forbes, Google the reporter who wrote the story. You’ll most likely find the grinning face of a 20-something looking out at you.

And given the way things have been working in journalism the last couple of decades, this person had to work two, three or even four internships before securing a real first job in journalism — which means, he or she was supported by Mom and Dad well into their early 20s.

It also means they were rewarded all along for being obedient.

They were obedient in school, and therefore able to get good grades and get into OK colleges. They were obedient toward their professors, and thereby able to secure recommendations and internships. They were obedient to their editors, and therefore able to get and keep jobs in journalism.

They did what they were told. They did not step outside the lines.

The contrast with the journalism of even two decades ago is stark.

In about 2002, the Washington Post fired one of its editors for punching a reporter in the newsroom in a dispute over the quality of another reporter’s story.

He wrote afterward in a column somewhere that for years, fistfights in the newsroom — on the sports desk in particular — had been commonplace.

Now you’d lose your job in most newsrooms for calling a guy a “he” if he wanted to be called “she.”

Where do we go from here?

It’s obvious I think.

We say goodbye to what was, for it will never be again.

Newspapers won’t go back to being what they once were, restless cauldrons teaming with courageous truth seekers. It’s all over.

Now they are now filled with young women in their 20s and 30s who take selfies with bunny ears and post them on Instagram (see top photo).

We don’t have to do anything. These papers are dying a slow death. The ones that used to be 24 pages on an average day are now 12 pages, and the ones that were 12 pages are now six.

It’s happening fast.

What’s taking their place is extraordinary. On Substack, Rumble, Telegram, Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, InfoWars, Twitter, ZeroHedge and in a hundred other places, truth is breaking out and spewing forth. It’s diffuse, yes. And it’s sometimes hard to know where to look first, or what to believe. But it’s an embarrassment of riches, really. We are blessed.

May we put this knowledge to its best use, to pursue truth wherever it may lead, to make the best decisions for ourselves and our families, and get this country turned around.