Hyperaware

Once upon a time, there was a newspaper that was well-respected throughout the world.  Journalists knew that this paper was an institution.  They knew that it was a good paper and would never lead them astray.

This paper was respected by many, but was at odds with a xenophobic group of warlords.  It proposed a policy that would allow for open borders.  This made the warlords angry.  This contradicted everything the warlords believed.

One day, the paper started having trouble covering its costs to stay alive.  It didn’t have enough money coming in to cover its printing fees.  So, its owners decided to try to arrange a marriage between this paper and someone who had the money to keep it alive.  The paper was eventually given a dowry by an evil warlord who liked to run newspapers into the ground with his evil and unethical magic.

One of the first signs that the Journal was turning into a mouthpiece for the warlords was their defense of Scooter Libby over the leak of covert identity of Valerie Plame, an officer at the Central Intelligence Agency .  The portrayal of him as a martyr, instead of a traitor, made many who had respected the paper turn against it.  The willingness of the paper to justify his leaking of such information flies in the face of everything that its readers had come to understand about the American press and political system.  The unprecedented willingness to destroy a person’s career and to put her life in danger would have normally been considered to be a shameful activity.  It would have been something that people would have expected to have the responsible party’s head over.  Instead of publishing pieces that damned Libby, the Journal told its readers that this was just part of some political witchhunt and a conspiracy by liberals.

More scrutiny from former friends came when the paper published editorials that were skeptical of global warming and when former reporters of the institution began to say that stories were being edited to have a more conservative tone.  It was infuriating to the former friends of the paper.  It was scary how the warlord had begun to change the very nature of American journalism.

The worst day was yet to come.  Everyone had begun to hear of the horrors of what happened in a far away land.  They knew that the evil warlord who owned the Wall Street Journal also owned papers in that land that were accused of harassing innocents and the families of innocent victims in that land.  The people in the land of the Wall Street Journal began to wonder and worry that maybe there were victims in this land as well.

And though they were unsure if it had happened in this land, people were still quite trusting of the Wall Street Journal.  They were wanting to forgive it for its pasts misdeeds.  They were wanting to hope that it couldn’t possibly be as bad as the other papers belonging to the warlord.  Many continued to feel that way until one day in July.

The Wall Street Journal published a story, one that blamed the law enforcement of the far away land for the harassment and crimes that had happened in the land.    It suggested that all that was necessary for its evil warlord to do was to apologize to the fair maidens and good men who had been harmed.  It also suggested that there was irony with regard to the anger that existed toward the evil warlord’s company.  They justified that the tabloids of the far away land had been violated the privacy of celebrities without the amount of outrage that was being directed at the evil warlord’s company.

The opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal suggested that the BBC and the Guardian were trying to influence public affairs.  They suggested that politicians were just trying to manipulate the media with the story.  The anger that the publisher who ran the Wall Street Journal had to resign even though he claimed that he knew nothing about the hacking even reached so far as to say that Les Hinton had definitely testified truthfully to Parliament in 2007 and 2009. The opinion turned Hinton into a sympathetic character–another martyr of the anger of liberals.

The anger from the paper over the scandal connected to the evil warlord read like a political speech by someone who was justifying something that they know people expect them not to do.  It reads like he was Cinderella or Snow White, and that the people who are outraged over the scandal are the evil witches.  It is frightening how this paper pretends that they are the party that is being harmed by the evil world, when it is clear that this paper is truly in the hands of someone who lies so willingly.

It is frightening that in this one opinion piece, the writer manages to claim that people who are actually doing the right thing in the investigation are somehow acting like tyrants.  Claiming that people are losing their rights to free speech and free press because of the investigation, which many can see is simply not true, might influence some who are so quick to believe anything that is published in the Wall Street Journal because they do not realize that the warlord has tainted it.

When it makes the statement that this is a case of the liberal media attacking poor innocent people, it all but admits that it has become the mouthpiece for the conservative movement.  Use of such a simple yet inflammatory statement means that the paper has established itself as the favorite pet of the evil warlord.  It has managed to evoke a statement that is only repeated by other evil warlords.   The paper has become a villain and not a hero.  It has done what a paper should never do: justifying unethical behaviors by other members of the press.

If there were a happy ending to this story, it might feel like a happy fairy tale, but that won’t be happening.  The thing most of us forget about fairy tales is that they usually didn’t have a happy ending when they were started.  And since this is the first telling of this story, the angst and anxiety will be its end.  The damning of a paper that could once be counted upon for its reliability and responsibility is the part we have to deal with, whether we want to or not.