… and now explicitly biased!
Sue Robinson is why Fake News. The University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism professor is why Sean Hannity and Donald Trump, Rachel Maddow and Bernie Sanders.
To every excess there is an opposite and even crazier reaction. Professor Sue Robinson is proof of the postulate. The lady teaches the sneering Don Lemons of tomorrow to scour the ground with righteous indignation — the facts be damned if they don’t serve the cause of “social justice.”
Sue and her ilk are why few real journalists ply their trades these days, entangled as they are by the platitudes of the moment. Healthy skepticism has succumbed to the cant of identity politics, victimhood, and race shaming. The result is that all news is suspect, the wildest conspiracies gain credence. John McCain is a Vietnam traitor, the NRA bayonets babies, and the white power structure murdered Michael Brown in cold blood.
Here’s to you, Sue Robinson. You helped elect Donald Trump with academic piffle like this (from Madison Magazine, January 2018):
… I was attending a three-day workshop on social-justice training. … I was face-to-face with the realization of how much my white, middle-class unearned privileges had played in my success to date. My thoughts drifted to the stories I had written as a white business reporter about “the American dream” [NOTE the ironic quotation marks] and my fervent commitment to the notion that hard work was all it took to achieve success. …
How foolish, the young Sue! Assiduously completing her homework assignments, for what? Those unpaid internships, a waste! Now, properly recalibrated, the professor understands that she was accepted into college thanks only to affirmative action for white folk. Her cushy, tenured faculty position? The Rainbow Coalition of competitors for the job was never seriously considered.
The lady’s guilty whiteness goes back generations. One of her ancestors, she reveals as if such fact unlocked the mystery of her psyche, massacred Native Americans. Shame on him. Ancestors!
Other of her forebears, the prof relates, “benefited from racist government policies,” whatever that means. After this rote re-education camp self-abasement, Professor Robinson confesses that the journalism she learned in school — pre-Ferguson “hands up, don’t shoot” — taught journalists to approach their stories objectively. How foolish was “the generation of newsroom protocol … that mandates reporters remain free of conflicts of interest.” No more!
Fie! The John Nichols School of Journalism
Regrettably, Professor Robinson is unable to expunge her damnable skin color. (Out, damned spot! Out, I say!) To compensate, she rushes the ramparts with full-throated progressive advocacy.
I developed a course called “Reporting for Social Change: Amplifying Marginalized Voices in the Local Community” to help journalism students embark on their racial journeys to rethink what “expert” means, collaborate with citizens on stories and interrogate their own biases. … Be critically distant with the facts but be close to the community.
Should be popular at a university that teaches “The Problem of Whiteness,” harbors the socialist Havens Center and its annual “RadFest,” and once embedded Bill Lueders to help mold its young minds in the occult arts of progressive advocacy. (The former Isthmus news editor now edits Progressive magazine.)
In Sue Robinson, Derail the Jail has found its Boswell. Being critically distant with the facts will help.
For Extra Credit: the professional news media is largely to blame for low trust according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
