A reminder

The day before Thanksgiving Michelle Malkin posted a list of reasons why American journalists of whatever political persuasion (I believe there are a few who are not on the left) should be thankful that they live in the United States.

Mutatis mutandis, that applies to our own miserable band of hacks. They may not be quite as bad as the people Michelle describes:

Give thanks we live in America, land of the free, home of the brave, where the media's elite journalists can leak top-secret information with impunity, win Pulitzer Prizes, cash in on lucrative book deals , routinely insult their readership and viewership, broadcast enemy propaganda, turn a blind eye to the victims of jihad, and cast themselves as oppressed victims on six-figure salaries.

But a good deal of that applies to them as well. Above all, it is high time we asked (and come to think of it we do so in this blog all the time) why, given all the advantages our hacks have, they do such a bad job of reporting, exploring and analyzing?

After all, their lives are rarely at risk if they tell the truth about the Middle East, yet they are content to reproduce Hamas and Hezbollah propaganda. (The words green and helmet spring to mind.)

They are not likely to be poisoned if they write something sensible about Russia or try to find out what really happens in Chechnya yet they are content with stories about Roman Abramovich's possible divorce.

Nobody is actually likely to behead them but they have chosen, one and all, not to reprint any of the Danish cartoons while happily printing the most insulting cartoons about Jews, Judaism and Christianity.

And, of course, they whine. They whine when war correspondents are injured or killed in battle, they whine when blogs, such as this one, criticize them and point out all their mistakes and misinterpretations. They whine whenever anyone suggests that the BBC should make its own way in the world and stop extracting a poll tax from every TV set owner. They even whine when government spokesmen are rude to them.

To quote Michelle again, well,boo-freakin-hoo. Or as the old Jewish saying had it and as many journalists and writers around the world might think: "I should have your problems."