Mark Levin on recent show rips "yellow journalism" of mainstream media; also Citizen Kane in the 21st century

If you are not listening to Mark Levin's radio show--or catching him on his podcast--you are cheating yourself, unless, that is, you are not a thinking person. But if you are reading my blog I believe you are a thinker. Levin, known as the Great One, is a noted legal scholar and the former chief of staff to US attorney general Ed Meese. He clearly prepares for his show in the same meticulous manner a skilled doctor does for a major surgery.

On Tuesday Levin opened his show by justifiably savaging the mainstream media--which embarrassed itself twice over the weekend. First, in regards to the BuzzFeed fake news tale about President Trump directing his lawyer to lie to Congress and the gleeful pile on led by MSNBC and CNN, and then the use of a selectively edited video about a confrontation at the National Mall involving Catholic school boys wearing MAGA hats. Among the falsities that were exposed in that story is that a group calling itself the Black Hebrews began the face-off, not the Make America Great Again kids.

Said Levin:

Here's some of the fundamental problems I see with the American media. There are no uniform standards among news outlets, no clear line between news and opinion, no universal rules of professional conduct for journalists--no particular experience required. Look at Chuck Todd, Chris Cuomo, George Stephanopoulos. These are not professional newsmen. And no commitment to objectivity. You can hardly distinguish between news and opinion. The mass media is overwhelmingly left-wing and overwhelmingly pro-Democrat Party. I think this presidency has demonstrated that more than ever before. They hate President Trump, they hate his supporters--even more broadly they're very cynical about our founding principles, capitalism, [and] national sovereignty.

After blowing the whistle on how the media champions leftists such as the Obamas, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders--but never seriously questions their expensive and impractical proposals such as "college for all" and a "minimum income for all," the Great One gets to the point.

"So the result is what? Old fashioned yellow journalism," Levin observed. Meaning the type of reporting that dominated the newspaper industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, "very unprofessional and very unscrupulous," Levin said of that era.

Yep, Levin is right. The sanctimonious yet dishonest contemporary media, with a few exceptions, is an internet age yellow journalism operation.



William Randolph Hearst was one of the yellow journalists mentioned by Levin in that show's introduction. Today Hearst is mostly known as the model for Orson Welles' Charles Foster Kane in his masterpiece Citizen Kane. In that film, during the Spanish-American War, Kane's foster father reads a Kane newspaper headline, "Galleons of Spain off Jersey coast." When he objects to Kane, "There is not the slightest proof of this," he receives this reply, "Can you prove it isn't [true]?"

"Spanish galleons" type headlines are the ancestors of today's clickbait.

Which brings me to another favorite fable of the 21st century yellow journalists, Donald Trump's collusion with Russia to get himself elected president. I see no proof that it happened. If I come face to face with a Trump-hating media leftist I expect to told after I make my feelings clear on this so-called scandal, "Can you prove that there isn't collusion."

We've gone from Citizen Kane to Citizen Leftist.