Reporter Fired for Believing in Objective Reality

No, it is not a joke.It did not come from The Onion. A reporter named Jonathan Springston was just fired by the Atlanta Progressive News for believing that new reporting should be based on objective reality.

Editor Matthew Cardinale explained his action this way: "At a very fundamental, core level Springston did not share our vision for a news publication with a progressive perspective. He held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our policy at the Atlanta Progressive News." Link here.

The candor is shocking, but I doubt that the Atlanta Progressive News is the only journalistic enterprise that functions as though objective reality is just a figment of someone's imagination, a ruse perpetrated by the ruling class to maintain its power.

If you believe that there is something strange about Editor Cardinale's viewpoint, then, at the least, you are poorly informed about what is being taught in our institutions of higher education. It is not, as the Huffington Post suggests in the link above, bogus or aggravating. It flows simply and directly from the leftist thought that has saturated far too many humanities departments for lo these many years.

Within the confines of a French department it sounds charming to deconstruct reality; in the hands of the media it turns reporting into propaganda. Pushing an interpretation of reality that furthers your cause trumps any consideration of what really happened. In fact, the more sophisticated thinkers do not believe that anything really happens until someone says it has happened.

Of course, a political movement that does not believe in objective reality cannot be expected to be presenting itself as it really is. The supposedly progressive agenda touted by this Atlanta newspaper looks an awful lot like socialism in disguise.

This "progressive" publication declares that its goal is: "to bring us closer to universal health care, living wages, affordable housing, peace, a healthy environment, and voting systems we can trust."

How could anyone find except to those lofty ideals?

In one sense they are simply peddling a grab-bag of leftist shibboleths. In another they are promoting a massive government intrusion into our economy and our lives.

Worse yet, the gauzy vision of a future where children will frolic in pristine green pastures, where there will be no more war or competition, where everyone will have the best affordable health care... this vision can only be sustained when you take your leave of objective reality.

What happens to the progressive vision when it becomes real? A great American example is California, a bankrupt state that is drowning in progressive principles.

Here is the objective reality, as rendered by Victor Davis Hanson: "Her in California we idle farmland, though we have the water, enterprise, and soil to produce far more food than we do. We put vast swaths of both land and sea off limits to gas and oil production, though we could produce far more petroleum and natural gas than we do. We snub nuclear power, though our population steadily increases and its desire for electronic appurtenances grows, not shrinks. We like 'wilderness areas' (who doesn't?) where we build no roads, harvest no timber, and build no dams. We strangle Silicon Valley with all sorts of labor and business regulations until it fabricates and outsources abroad." Link here.

You might consider that the Atlanta Progressive News does not represent true progressive thought. But then, what of California? It was not governed by a bunch of extremist propagandists.

Apparently, when you take progressive ideals and put them into practice you get a failed state. .

Like Greece,California is both broke and broken. That, dare I say, is an inconvenient objective reality.