As I noted the other day…”Matt Lauer, because it’s Wednesday.” Too subtle? Obviously it means another day, another shoe drops.
Days earlier it was Charlie Rose. You can be sure there’s more to come so far as big time journalists caught in the round up of sex predators.
It’s not always the usual suspects.
That’s why I’m writing this in a hurry. I can’t imagine who’s next. I never imagined Garrison Keillor, Minnesota’s answer to Mark Twain.
Speaking of Minnesota, how’s Al Franken working out for you over there…or didn’t you know that he’s an SNL actor only playing the part of a senator?
But let’s stick to journalists because that’s mostly what’s happening (besides U.S Rep. John Conyers) and given the trend, we don’t want to be left a day behind.
Seems that some men have found something new under the sun. Behold -- women. Trouble is, they don’t come with instructions. Except “handle with care.”
For those who don’t know how to do that, we have already written “A guide for men perplexed by women.”
The shocking result from all this is that these so-called media “icons” are no better than you and me and sometimes worse.
That is why the nation is talking about nothing else. President Trump had them figured from the start.
My own eyes were opened when there I was in Israel as part of a group, a group of Grade-A journalists and found them to be so…ORDINARY.
Particularly so were the TV types. They arrive anyway with an inferiority complex. They know print journalists are the real deal. The two sides never get along.
I got along with nobody.
“What are you writing?” they kept asking. I was writing about them. I was not on assignment. So I had time and I wrote it all in a book – about them and their biases and their prejudices. They had their minds made up. Like the 10 (out of 12) false scouts mentioned in the Book of Numbers, they came as spies to curse the land and they left cursing the land.
They wanted only “the plight if the Palestinians” and nothing, zero, about Zionism’s rise from the ashes…a land with liberty for all, including the Arabs within.
Shlomo wept. He was our guide and in private he told me, “They did not come as friends. They came as enemies.”
True, but I saw them as being so ordinary. Back home, on TV, they seemed so authoritative, so believable. I found it hard to square these with those, when they’d come to my room in Jerusalem to check their copy – practically all of it lopsided against the Israelis.
I objected, to no avail. I still object and I still remember how they mutinied and refused to look out the window of the bus for a glance at Israel’s splendors. They murmured and gossiped and chuckled. They drowned out Shlomo with their boom boxes playing rap.
Telling so many false tales about Israel, what else are they lying about and passing it around? Surely Trump. They’ve put him in the same boat with the Jewish State.
Especially these days, I keep thinking that these are the same people who take it upon themselves to shape our minds and our politics.
Telling so many false tales about Israel, what else are they lying about and passing it around?
Yet they were so ordinary when I saw them up close and in person. There were the usual hook-ups as happens when men and women are in another town. Temptation happens. A fling here and there is to be expected. I wrote about that too, thinking of it as a work of fiction when indeed I was writing fact.
Now that the facts are coming out, one by one, I take no satisfaction in the reckoning that’s taking place. I love journalism. It’s too bad that so many of the wrong people have taken up the right profession. We should not expect from them anything heroically balanced, but honesty is the least they can do.
So now honesty is catching up with them and destroying them, one network at a time.
Except for Megyn Kelly whose career has been revived by the scandals of sexual harassment that have snared her new home at NBC, there is nothing to rejoice.
But where is the hero to deliver us from this swamp of fake journalists?
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva. Engelhard wrote the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal” and the ground-breaking inside-journalism thriller “The Bathsheba Deadline.” His latest is Megyn Kelly unzipped in “News Anchor Sweetheart.” He is the recipient of the Ben Hecht Award for Literary Excellence. Website: www.jackengelhard.com