Now, an Ombudsman is someone hired by a newspaper to keep it fair, balanced, and not easily swayed. Ombudsman is a Swedish word, imported into our country by those dear Social Democrats who flock to book-signings by Garrison Keillor and who like to think of themselves as populists, not liberals. They think that taxing the people to keep NPR on the air is just another example of good government. Ombudsmen are people who cheer when they see you putting out your re-cycling bin. Shoveling public monies for their pet projects is something they regard as populist, a shovel-ready project if ever there was one.

I was intrigued by the idea of the Washington Post going populist. Does that mean that former Post editor Ben Bradlee will hold his 91^st birthday party in, say, Williamsburg or Annapolis, instead of where he held his 90^th—in the plus chic Ile de Re, off France’s Atlantic coast? (What, Ben, has Martha’s Vineyard become passé?)

Mr. Pexton assures us that the Post can’t be “a liberal or a conservative [newspaper]. It must be hard-hitting and scrappy and questioning—skeptical of all political figures and parties.”

Uh, the Post is not a liberal newspaper? You may have heard of this week’s earthquake in Washington. Nature herself must have hiccupped at the bald assertion that the Post is not a liberal paper. Is the Leaning Tower of Pisa leaning left or right? Well, it depends on where you stand. But everyone knows it leans.

Here’s a little reader’s test of the Washington Post’s self-proclaimed populism. Which of the following groups gets called in the Post what it calls itself: The People’s Republic of China, the old Soviet Union, al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Marriage Equality, or the Pro-Life Movement?

The Post’s Ombudsman may want to be populist, but not that populist. National Public Radio (NPR) caught a lot of flak from its liberal listeners when it dared to use the term “pro-life.”

NPR has an Ombudsman, too, a gentleman named Edward Schumacher-Matos. Last year, Mr. Schumacher-Matos wrote:

 I checked with NBC, CBS, CNN, the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer and not one of them uses the terms “pro-choice” or “pro-life.”

“We call them pro-abortion rights and anti-abortion rights because it’s the right to abortion that we’re talking about,” said Linda Mason, CBS senior vice president of news and in charge of standards. “What does pro-life mean? That leaves people scratching their heads.”

In their world, abortion is of course a right. And we should be taxed to pay for it, as we are under ObamaCare. So CBS’s Linda Mason wouldn’t dream of calling us pro-lifers we  call ourselves. For them, abortion is not just a right; it’s a rite.

One of the reasons so many groups known to us simplistic types as terrorists get called, with all due respect, by the name they call themselves, is that they have a record of kidnapping journalists they don’t like. They murdered the Wall Street Journal’s Danny Pearl and held FOX News’ Steve Centanni hostage until he agreed to renounce his Christian faith on camera.

Non-violent pro-lifers simply march on Washington every January 22^nd We pray and sing and call for laws to protect innocent human life. Hundreds of thousands of us have come for thirty-eight years to petition for the redress of this grievous grievance.

Still the liberal media scratch their heads. Violence is not an option for pro-lifers. But registering, voting, and speaking out are options for us. Sometimes, we even get to laugh. Like when we read that the Washington Post is not liberal, but “populist.”

This is exactly what our friends in theMSMshould not do. They should know this by now. Do we want more mass murders, like the recent bloody episode inNorway? Then go ahead and put the killers’ pictures on the covers of news magazines, publicize their names and their bloody deeds, show photos of their victims, provide timelines, print graphics of their bullets’ trajectories, and always, always show the grieving family members of their victims.

But if we want to stop this madness, we should listen to researchers who have studied suicide and mass killings. They know that contagion and suggestibility play a real role in sparking these events. They know, for instance, that when a single car accident claims the life of a famous movie actor or singer, there is a measurable increase in “copy cat” deaths that may well be hidden suicides.

No small part of the Hollywoodappeal of certain “rebels without a cause” is due to their premature deaths in circumstances that strongly suggest self-murder. In Europe, the author of “L’homme revolté”–The Rebel—was widely believed to have done himself in.

Mass killers and suicides are closely aligned with assassins in their mindset. Serious studies of President Kennedy’s killer show him to have been a loser, a nobody, a Communist-inspired misfit who first tried to kill a right-wing army general. Only when he missed that shot did he reach for a perverse kind stardom by killing the hope that John F. Kennedy represented for millions.

John Wilkes Booth was different. He was no loser, and certainly not a nobody. He was as famous an actor in 1865Americaas Brad Pitt is today. But he wanted to live out the fantastic characters he portrayed on stage. After shooting the president at Ford’s Theater that dark and gloomy Good Friday night, he fled the scene. He tried to reachVirginia, a state still in rebellion. He expected a hero’s welcome there.

Booth had broken his leg jumping down from the presidential box. He had galloped out ofWashingtonjust ahead of War Sec. Edwin Stanton’s order to close all the bridges. Hiding out in the thick woods ofSouthern Maryland, Booth and his accomplice were cold, hungry, dirty. Still in intense pain, Booth begged for just one thing: newspapers.

Like the American idol he was, he hungered to see his name in the papers, to see how people were applauding his desperate act. Imagine his chagrin when he learned that even in Confederate Virginia, he was denounced as an ignoble coward, a vicious villain.

Bill Bennett, host of the Morning in America talk show, challenged NBC News several years ago. The suits at NBC decided to air the video made by the Virginia Tech shooter.

“But we might have learned something from that video,” the network’s news editors protested. After they went ahead, broadcasting that video rant, Bennett asked if we were in any doubt the killer was mad at the world, and had paranoid delusions of persecution before subjecting the country, and especially the victims’ families, to that deranged man’s harangue.

Bill Bennett is right. Let’s not give them what they want. Ever.

Life Today with James Robison

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Monday, May 30
Tony Perkins
Freedom and Religion
The president of the Family Research Council lays out remedies for our spiritual and a moral crisis.

Thursday, June 2
Tony Perkins & Jacob Aranza
God’s Kingdom in You
The president of the Family Research Council and a longtime church pastor encourage believers to be involved in every sphere of life.

Watch Tony’s May 26 Fox News segment below:

There are others.  One of them is the inescapable reality that abortion involves not a collation of tissue but the destruction of a person, a human being.

This is not just a theological assertion or philosophical rumination: We know from medical science that from conception, the unborn child has the entire DNA of a fully mature adult.  What changes at time of birth is not the humanness of the child but his or her place of residence: For nine months, the womb was home; for the remainder of a person’s life, it is the world around us.

Even the mass media cannot help itself.  In ordinary stories, the personhood of the child pops up in the simple reportage of stories of the day.  However much the pro-abortion movement has sought to shape the language of popular culture and public education, the fact that the little ones in the womb are, in fact, people, keeps intruding itself into public discourse.  For example (bold and italics are mine):

• On Monday of this week, the ABC affiliate in Minneapolis-St. Paul noted that a “grand jury has returned an indictment charging a Buffalo man with three counts of vehicular homicide after a multi-vehicle crash in Lakeville killing two people and an unborn child.”
• On April 28, the Montgomery (AL) Advertiser had this headline: “Family grieves loss of woman, her unborn child.”
• In Bowling Green, Kentucky, the CBS affiliate told us late last month that a “Kentucky state investigator testified Tuesday that Kathy Michelle Coy, the woman accused of killing a pregnant mother and stealing her baby.”
• Yesterday, the Today Show news site reported, “Mom recounts saving unborn child from shooting spree.”
• Also yesterday, the Chicago Tribune, one of the nation’s largest papers, informed us that “Cook County Judge James Linn sentenced James Larry, 33, of Madison, Wis., to five natural life sentences on murder charges, two 30-year prison sentences for attempted murder charges and two 45-year prison sentences for charges of intentional homicide of an unborn child.”

These are only a few examples from just the past couple of weeks.

Seminary president Al Mohler has observed that while “The American conscience remains deeply divided over the question of abortion … the truth has a way of working itself into view.”

That view is clearly seen in every ultrasound, but is also known to the “law written on the heart” described by the Apostle Paul (Romans 2:15).  We can euphemize our language, speaking only of “fetus” and “choice.”  We can deflect the demands of intellectual honesty when confronted by medical fact and common reason.  But in the depth of our hearts and minds, we know better.  We know.

I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.

Those were President Obama’s words in an interview with editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade. The President was explaining his openness to a federal bailout of struggling big-city daily newspapers. For that reason, Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) have introduced S. 673, their so-called “Newspaper Revitalization Act.”

These two very liberal senators should have acted even sooner. They should have sponsored the Manual Typewriter Preservation Act. You see, the computer revolution put great pressure on Royal, Underwood, and Olivetti. Those companies represented thousands of jobs. We can’t just let the free market run rampant. Save typewriter ribbons! Save white-out! Save carbon paper! There’s no telling how much damage these new-fangled computers might do.

The President is concerned that the Internet will not provide the kind of fact-checking and balance that was once provided for us by, say, the New York Times. Remember Jason Blair? In firing the 27-year old reporter, the Gray Lady had to confess: “[He] committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud while covering significant news events in recent months, an investigation by Times journalists has found. The widespread fabrication and plagiarism represent a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper.”

Or what about the care taken by Dan Rather of CBS News? Shall we recall Rather’s careful fact-checking in 2004 of the letters purportedly written by 1/Lt. George W. Bush’s commanding officer in 1972 and 1973? Those letters, it was quickly revealed, were typed in a Microsoft Word computer typeface. This was most interesting, since Word hadn’t even been invented in 1973.

It was the blogosphere that provided the fact-checking that exposed Dan Rather’s trafficking in clearly demonstrated forgeries. It was intrepid bloggers who put a stop to Dan Rather’s long-running career in gonzo journalism.

Dan Rather was typical of the liberal journalists who reigned unchallenged on the airwaves for decades until Ronald Reagan’s FCC appointees in 1987 abolished the so-called Fairness Doctrine. I’d prefer to call it the Furnace Doctrine, since that’s where it consigned our First Amendment guarantees of free speech and free press. After that, radio talkers rose up to challenge the liberal media’s monopoly. The Internet quickly followed. Then, along came FOX.

Obviously, President Obama would prefer town hall meetings where 9-year olds read scripted questions. Real town hall meetings do sometimes get rowdy. So do tea parties.

And so does a truly free press.

If someone today alleges that some of the 53 government bureaucracies to be established by ObamaCare are “death panels,” there are many voices prepared to debate that, voices left and right. Isn’t this vigorous debate preferable for a free people to federal government bailouts? These newspapers are declining because their readers have either fled their decaying cities or have opted instead for Internet sites and talk radio.

Presidents have historically been unhappy with negative coverage in the press. President George Washington was enraged by “that rascal Freneau,” a caustic anti-Washington propagandist who was secretly on the payroll of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. John Adams actually had opposition editors imprisoned under the Alien & Sedition Acts. Lincoln closed down a number of newspapers he charged were inciting rebellion. In modern times, JFK famously threw across the Oval Office a crumpled up editorial page of the Herald Tribune.

But none of these Presidents past actually tried to bail out failing newspapers. They had too much respect for a free press, free markets and the free exchange of ideas, and for the American people, whose resources should not be employed by the federal government to prop-up industries that, due to innovation and creativity of our fellow citizens, are less and less needed as means of communication.

We don’t need another industry bailout. If we bail out failing newspapers, what’s next, a government bailout of MSNBC? This bailout would result inevitably in a government-controlled press. We don’t need President Obama to issue us our “mutual understandings.”

You may have noticed: I wrote this without capital letters and without exclamation points. See? No shouting at all.