Journalists are supposed to be the record keepers, the fact checkers, the referees in the battles of ideas. Such is how journalists have long made the “Great Conversation” possible-the idea that writers and other thinkers reference and build upon each others’ work, as well as the vast body of work created over centuries before them, in order to improve us and our societies.
As with science, in the fields of journalism, literature and philosophy, we are supposed to build upon, or, as necessary, to rethink and even refute, the ideas that are accepted today.
In this way, we don’t start from scratch. Rather, ideas have pedigrees. We are supposed to grow and hone, or rescind and disprove, these ideas with deep, hard, fact-based investigations.
A basic ingredient of this process is honesty, complete honesty, a sort of honesty that also requires us to investigate our own biases, and to be truthful about this with ourselves and our readers, as we go.
Today, however, this Great Conversation is being purposely stopped.
Social conformity—which, today, basically means staying in step with the progressive or far Left—in newsrooms, book publishers, Hollywood studios and within the tech giants, is dumbing down the Great Conversation and chaining it to an increasingly harsh political orthodoxy.
This is frightening, as a robust First Amendment is important for protecting all of our other rights.
This ideological control of the conversation is particularly apparent when it comes to reporting on issues related to the Second Amendment of the U.S. Bill of Rights. This ideological control is dividing Americans from each other, as it is destroying any possibility of a shared, open discussion.
This is the reality Sharyl Attkisson ran into at CBS when she had the audacity to look into Operation Fast and Furious. This is the social conformity most journalism students get in step with in college today.
Meanwhile, left-leaning news outlets have long since pushed out the moderates and conservatives in their newsrooms and are now in the process of purging the last of the free thinkers on the Left.
“I’ll turn to a conservative publisher if that’s what it takes to be true to liberal principles,” Alex Berenson, a former New York Times’ reporter, and now an author who is too-free-thinking for the new Left, said in The Wall Street Journal last December.
The Left is thus killing the Great Conversation in their quest for power. Their politicians then use this power to pass their preferred policies—including gun bans and restrictions.
History clearly shows, with stark repetition, that this kind of control—by censoring what people are allowed to know—has never ended well.
Somehow, some way, we need to reopen the conversation.
In this battle to print and broadcast honest, fact-based analysis and reporting, America’s 1st Freedom isn’t an alternative media; no, “alternative” implies an implicit bias in the other direction (if you can be biased for individual freedom). This magazine (and our website) is simply working to unearth the truth, the whole truth, about Second Amendment-related issues.
Please, tell anyone who might not be a member of the NRA about us.
