Shallow Journalism, you say? Go no further than “Jonah Goldberg”

As usual, the Pantload gets it wrong. When he says:

TV news is, and always has been, the shallowest branch of journalism.

Jonah is overlooking his own vast contributions to shallow journalism.

Just look at the pile of written dung from which this ironic pronouncement was extracted.

Goldberg finds some odd analogy and moral equivalence between the fraudulent press conference government officials in FEMA tried to foist on the people of this country and parodies of news shows like Colbert or Jon Stewart.

Yes, FEMA’s fakery was foolish. But — and here’s what really bugs me — what isn’t in the TV news business these days?

Poehler, for instance, was co-anchoring a fake news broadcast denouncing a fake news conference. All the while, the guest host of “Saturday Night Live” was NBC’s real news anchor, Brian Williams.

Or take Stephen Colbert, host of a fake cable news show, “The Colbert Report,” itself a spinoff from the fake newscast “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

Except those aren’t news shows, they are comedies, a point our dingbat Pantload glosses over.

Next, our fatuous indictment of nepotism mangles the Quayle/Murphy Brown episode:

But in the modern era, I blame “Murphy Brown,” the show about a fictional TV newswoman who talked about real newsmakers as if they were characters on her sitcom. When Brown had a baby out of wedlock, Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the writers of the show. Liberals then reacted as though Quayle had insulted a real person.

Except that it was Quayle who spoke as if Murphy Brown was the real person:

“It doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”

It was fiction, Dan, just like most of Jonah’s scribblings. Maybe Quayle meant to mention the writers, just like Jonah meant to write something which was at least semi-intelligent, but failed.

The reaction to Quayle’s comment was on two fronts. Quayle was mocked because his speech seemingly treated the fictional Ms. Brown as if she were real; the other, more substantive reaction was to Quayle’s limited understanding of diversity when it came to what “family” meant in the then present-day America.

Goldberg asks, “Is fake news now the standard?” He has shown time and again that “fake” is the standard when it comes to “facts” contained in his columns.