The Czar states, without fear of exaggeration, that this site is read by perhaps several, or even billions, of people. He is comfortable with humiliating or enraging some of them with this screed.

Blame yon Volgi, who sent the Czar this piece on media incompetence—which is clearly designed to provoke such a response, as this is one of our hot buttons. Jimmy Akin’s piece is a good start, but is not the whole story about why the media is little more than the crazed aunt at the family party that insists on telling the family history completely wrong every single time.

The reason the mainstream media, which now includes an awful lot of media, is so godawful, is not merely they are incompetent. It is actually quite a multiphasic process that elevates bad news to an art form.

We start at the beginning: the people who gather the news. This is a surprisingly non-judgmental group, who does not question whether the event is special, unique, newsworthy, or colorful—instead, the end points simply gather up as much wheat and chaff as they can, and dump it on the wires for others to make sense of.

What a good group, right? Actually, not necessarily. You, dear reader, could easily get a news story on the wires. Simply write a press release, post it to your own website, and let the wire spiders find it and forward it. You could therefore write a breaking story that advertises yourself, your company, and its services with nothing more than ad copy. Many companies do it by the thousands. Some do it every day.

The next step is that assistant editors find some of these stories, and they cull out the ones that speak to them as interesting. These are then assigned to writers, who spend as much time as the Czar does on research and writing: simply find a bunch of seemingly related news stories, and string them together into a twenty-page montage.

The assistant editors then cut this down to a paragraph or two. Imagine the Battle of Britain reported by today’s process:

Today, the RAF engaged German bombers over the skies of England. A spokesperson for England declared victory, although significant property damage occurred. A spokesperson for Germany’s Luftwaffe was unavailable for comment. The RAF is generally regarded as the best air force in England.

Why on Earth does this happen? It is essential to remember that both writers and assistant editors started out as Journalism majors in college. Remember them? The Czar knew a few. They were the folks who were biology majors their freshman year, psychology majors their sophomore year, communications majors in their junior year, and finally journalism majors their senior year. The ones who spent their free time dressing in loose, dark clothing and posing for photographs with their skateboards, drinking coffee, and quoting Pauly Shore. These are not people with bachelor’s in politics, criminal justice, science, history, or sociology or any of the things they write about. (Not all: the Czar went to high school with a kid who at 14 insisted he would become an investigative reporter, blew through college with honors, and is now a well-known investigative reporter. Funny thing about focusing.)

Then, this stuff is sent to the Editor. He alone decides which story is above the fold, or buried on page 38. He decides the font size of the headline, and whether the writer gets credit at all. On television, he decides which stories are shown in which order, how much time is spent on each, which telecaster reads which part, and whether a simple graphic is shown or looped stock video is shown. The Editor (PBUH) is the final authority. And you can recognize him: he has little experience outside copywriting or video production, and understands even less. So he goes with his gut (whatever that is), and this is where media bias can spill right into the story: he injects his own sense of importance into the reporting.

At this point, the news reaches you. It has transformed itself from a factual reporting of an event of no immediate importance, to a collection of Googled wire searches pastiched together, to something parsed down to irrelevancy, and then redone to meet time or space restraints and is merely a shadow of one editor’s prejudice and belief.

That isn’t incompetence: that is systematic destruction. As always, you have your happy Gormogons to put things right and in their place.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.