To the Editor:

The traditional news media (newspapers) have killed themselves through poor writing, a lack of balanced reporting, advocacy journalism and an all-around snooty attitude toward their readers/listeners/viewers (“shut up and read/listen/view what we tell you to because we know best”). Increased per issue costs, constant advertisements and big juicy scandals such as the plagiarism affair with Jayson Blair at the Grey Lady (New York Times) 13 years ago didn’t help the industry either.

The two names who lately have seemingly contributed the most towards the demise of traditional media (which started with the opinionated disinformation by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News television broadcast after the Tet Offensive in 1968 http: //tinyurl.com/hsyrfvg) are Jestin Coler and Paul Horner.

Coler was highlighted recently in a piece that NPR did last Wednesday (http://tinyurl.com/hfrquso) on his company Disinfomedia and the various Internet fake news platforms he has created. Coler is a registered Democrat and he “got into fake news around 2013 to highlight the extremism of the white nationalist alt-right.” That hate-filled aspiration doesn’t seem to have worked out very well for Jestin.

Horner, another leftist, runs the Internet fake news site National Report where he attempted to torpedo Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions except it backfired on him when Trump managed to get to 270 electoral votes despite Horner’s Soviet-style agitprop campaign. Horner, who allegedly expressed chagrin with that outcome evidently doesn’t understand the meaning of blow-back. Tisk, tisk.

To the forgotten man, the media actually is easily defined. It is whatever media platform purports to write/speak the news; and yes, The Smoky Mountain News gets lumped in with rags such as Fuzz Busted, because anything in 2016 that is not too blatantly trying to sell stuff to the forgotten man is the media. 

I remember as a boy what it was like to watch my grandfather read the papers on a Sunday afternoon, and I came to do so also. He became informed on events near and far and derived great pleasure from the experience. Today, I subscribe to two newspapers and pick up from the box another two free papers regularly. This is mostly for reasons of nostalgia, as it doesn’t seem to be as pleasurable to read the papers for me as it was for my grandfather. And so it goes.

Nota bene: Jon McNaughton’s painting “The Forgotten Man” is probably the inspiration for the phrase in current usage and as such is entirely apropos.

Carl Iobst

Cullowhee