Some of us know Orson Scott Card mainly because of his work as a science-fiction writer. Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead are still my favorite works by Card. Not as many people know he is also a committed Latter Day Saint (aka Mormon although I try not to use that term) who can be quite independent in both his theology and his politics. He is also a Democrat and a newspaper columnist.
Card cares so much about truth and honor he felt compelled to write one of the most brutally honest assessments of the current state of journalism in his recent article “Will the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn on The Lights?”
If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth – even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.
Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means . That’s how trust is earned.
Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time – and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.
Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter – while you ignored the story of John Edwards’s own adultery for many months.
So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?
Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?
Read the whole thing here. You do not have to register. (H/T to Anglican Curmudgeon.)
Ouch and wow. Particularly interesting in light of how some who favor the Democrat’s presidential candidate retort that Republican complaints about “media bias” is just whining and sour grapes. (Which is not entirely false either.) Here we have a Democrat quite frankly pointing out how journalists have buried stories that reflect badly on politicians they favor and pounded stories that cast in a bad light politicians they do not like.
