The (Liberal) Truth

I'm sick of it. Sick and tired of it.

Tired of being lumped in as the "liberal media."

Enough. No more.

I'm sick of being distrusted. I'm sick of people imposing unnecessary rules to protect others from the big, bad reporters out there. I'm sick of being blamed for exposing something that many people would have rather not known about, being blissfully unaware of the problems that surround them.

Here's the way I see it: We're the media. Our political beliefs are no one's business but our own.

The problem becomes that we reporters and journalists end up being lumped in with commentators and interviewers. People like Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly. Neither is a true "journalist" in the sense that they're going out and reporting on the news. They are interviewers, and each has his own agenda that their networks encourage.

But for the rest of us, the so-called "ink stained wretches" who still work on the ground, doing the reporting, there is no agenda. We're not allowed to have one.

Most newspapers have ethical guidelines that its reporters must adhere to. Everything from not signing political petitions to not publicly supporting a political candidate to watching what and how you say things in social media. Me writing this could be considered a breach ... if I were still working full-time for a media company.

The other thing that people always accuse journalists of is that we're out to get people. Trust me, if we were, we likely would find reason to be "out to get" them. Most of the people who end up being portrayed negatively in the news did something on their own to get themselves there. No one was out to get Bernie Madoff, he got himself in trouble all by his lonesome. And no one in the legitimate media was hoping that starlets like Lindsey Lohan go nuts or end up in jail (though, yeah, we do have our laughs about it).

In fact, if you want to see the framework of the ethical code most of us live under, check out the Society of Professional Journalists' code of ethics.

Oh, but what of the editorial pages, you may ask? What about them? None of the grunts whose names appear on top of the stories write them. And even if we did, they would be dictated by a faceless editorial board (in most cases) that is picked to reflect either the publisher/company's point of view (such as the OC Register's Libertarian influences, the Wall St. Journal's Conservative or the NY Times' Liberal). Any bias that most newspapers display are on those pages ... not on the news pages.

Sigh, ya, I'm a little upset while writing this. I try not to write upset, but sometimes it helps to get the feelings out. And yeah, there was an incident that spurred it on, but I'm not going to get into it, because the people who caused aren't worth the trouble.

Anyway, thanks for letting me vent. Hope you're checking out my blogs over at Loma Linda Patch as well. This one didn't seem to fit in what I write about over there. But I promise to keep going in both places as the muse hits me.