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Bill Rice, Jr.'s avatar

Cutting Room Floor text ...

Today, “pack journalism” distinguishes itself by all the stories the pack decides are taboo or off-limits to investigation. But history has given us plenty of examples of what’s possible when every smart reporter is trying to break the same scandalous stories.

What happens today is that no crooked official gets any tough questions at a press conference. What if every question said official or spokesperson got was antagonistic or skeptical of the authorized narrative? The liars would be under siege. They’d no doubt triple down on past lies … but you’d now have a room-full of reporters trying to document all these lies.

The sharks would smell blood and the pack of fearless journalists would soon come in for the kill.

But this scenario would require only one major news organization to break ranks from the pack and perform their real “watchdog” job. It’s possible all the other news organizations wouldn’t follow the lead of this news organization, but this probably wouldn’t matter if the news organization that was pursuing these scandals stayed the course. If everyone else wanted to give this news organization a monopoly on the “Great Scandals of history” …. so be it.

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Dave aka Geezermann's avatar

Well written article, with proposed solutions involving those entities.

Why hasn't this happened? Why is it an uphill battle against evil forces? Cowardice. Men and women in all these positions have abandoned the tenets of their youth involving attributes like courage, honesty and loyalty.

Cowardice. The ones in a position to do the right thing are allowing fear of ostracization and ridicule to prevent them from acting courageously.

Cowards.

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