Doubleplusungood

Okay, now that we've solved the health care crisis and everyone is living healthy long lives with instant access to the best medical care ever for free, and now that we've solved the financial crisis and our messianic leader has promised us that there will never, ever be another financial bailout by the government ever...

Now that we've accomplished those things, I think it's time that our administration turn it's attention to possibly the new most important issue facing our society: The problem of bad journalism.

By now you've heard of the deliberately sloppy reporting by an unabashedly biased conservative blogger that resulted in the firing and severe emotional distress of Shirley Sherrod, a completely innocent and kind-hearted servant of the people who has absolutely no agenda of her own other than the ennobling of all of mankind.

To review of the situation, let me quote yet another ennobler, the late, great Xaview Onassis:

Conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart posted a video of Shirley Sherrod (a HUGE PUBLIC TARGET, being Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the United States Department of Agriculture) addressing the NAACP.

The video appeared to show her exhibiting a racist attitude towards a white farmer who came to her seeking help. In a knee-jerk reaction by the racially sensitive Obama Administration, Shirley Sherrod was immediately fired.

But guess what? The 2 minute video had been intentionally and maliciously edited down from a 44 minute video to make it appear that she was saying exactly the opposite of what she was actually saying!

That a mere blogger can have such an impact on the administration of our country is clearly a national security risk.

And this kind of thing isn't isolated or even rare. Examples of improper journalistic behavior are common. Remember Stephen Glass's scandalous reporting for neo-liberal publication The New Republic where he made up fictional facts, quotes and even people in his stories.

And who can forget disgraced TV journalist Dan Rather, who created fraudulent government documents for the sole purpose of attacking and discrediting a sitting president.

It's clear that there are systemic and endemic problems with the state of journalism in our republic. This is a problem that we cannot allow to fester.

Journalism is our window into the performance of our leaders. We, as voting Americans, rely on the news media to alert us to government malfeasance, to let us know what our leaders are doing with our tax money and what our national policies are, to keep us abreast of Lindsay Lohan's jailhouse granny panties.

So I think we can all agree that our news media is too big to fail.

Given that, I think it's time for the Obama Administration to step in and take action. We need new regulations that will ensure that the news media is telling us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Since the free market is unable to guarantee this, we obviously need better government regulation of the news industry.

I propose a new cabinet level position in the White House, the Secretary of Truth.

This new secretary-level position, which I'll just call the Truth Czar, will lead the Department of Truth which will be given the mission of monitoring all news media (including blogs) to make sure all communications are truthful and contain no misleading opinions or partisan slants.

Using the latest technology from various other government agencies, the Department of Truth will be able to exert real-time control over all online, broadcast and print content.

Through the efforts of the government's new Truth Czar and his various regional Truth Agents, we will finally be able to rest assured that we're getting only the highest quality information.

Never again will we have to worry about good people losing their jobs because of unsubstantiated opinions posted on a person's blog.

tagged: Obama, Shirley Sherrod, journalism, reporters, news media, government, Andrew Breitbart