Dan Reinhard

Minot

It would be hard to say what happened to the American “muckrakers.” Albeit the origin of that term is not fully substantiated, many believe it was Teddy Roosevelt who first coined that term to describe American journalists. There was a time in our past where many honest investigative journalists existed; those that shot straight down the middle, without regard to political affiliation or partisanship politics. Those days are long gone.

I don’t know if Bob Woodard or Carl Bernstein, from The Washington Post, would have dug as relentlessly as they did for the facts which uncovered the Watergate crimes if the administration in power was a Democratic Party regime. There was great hatred for President Nixon but I’d like to believe they would followed the same course in investigative journalism acumen as they did even if he was a Democrat. But where are the muckrakers today?

I’ve read that journalists today are by a vast majority, either members or vote religiously along party lines for Democratic Party candidates or liberal issues. I have read polls that were taken at all Ivy League colleges that verified the majority, near 90% of all professors considered themselves liberal and voted for Democratic Party candidates. So if this is true then what should we expect as an outcome from those completely endeared to those ideologies? The present administration labels their product: “Fake News.” I agree, and for brevity reasons, I will spare the thousands of examples I’ve read in newspapers and other media sources.

It should not be a great revelation as to why our brilliant Founders chose freedom of the press and freedom of speech to be written as the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights within our U.S. Constitution. Democracy will only survive when a well-informed citizen receives truthful information – where a journalist holds elected officials accurately accountable for their actions. Should that information become slanted or one-sided it would no different than attempting to live with half a brain.

I believe that if we had honest, straight shooting journalists in recent times, the Mueller investigation and 35 million dollars – of taxpayer monies – could have been avoided. Did any journalist out there ever stop to consider why Loretta Lynch was chosen by the Obama administration as the Attorney General in 2015? All of the dots that should have been connected after that, including the bogus Russian dossier would have led a journalist to uncover the greatest corrupted political scheme in American history. Maybe the outcome from the 1981 movie: “Absence of Malice” would finally hit home. But I doubt it.