Ian Underwood

Recently, Skip started a post with this charming thought:  ‘The job of a journalist is to report facts, add context where necessary, and leave it to the consumer to decide what he thinks.’

I would have agreed with that before I read Neil Postman’s excellent book How to Watch TV News.  But Postman helped me understand that it’s a fairy tale version of the actual job.

The job of a journalist — what journalists are hired to do — is to get people’s eyeballs pointed in a particular direction (or their ears tuned in to a particular source of sound), so that advertisers can try to sell them things. Once you understand that, a lot of otherwise incomprehensible things about journalism start to make sense.

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I keep hearing that Brett Kavanaugh is a committed textualist, a clear thinker, someone who reveres the written Constitution, and so on.  I have to say, I’m not seeing it in his opinions.

To take just one of many examples that people are discussing, let’s look at his dissent in the second Heller case, which Fox News holds up as an example of the kind of ‘clear and succinct reasoning’ that we can expect from Kavanaugh if he’s confirmed.  This is essentially his closing argument:

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