'Angry Journalist' Scowls at 'Right-Wing Lunatics' for Bashing His News on the 'Pirate Community'

April 18th, 2009 2:20 PM

The sour turn in the news business has inspired the website  AngryJournalist.com, where anonymous reporters vent their frustrations with the media business. "Angry Journalist #8521" sounds too ridiculously liberal to be real. Check out this rant about being fair to the "pirate community" in Africa:

I’m angry because I’m getting so much hate email today.

I have a buddy who’s a stringer in Africa. He hooks me up with some phone numbers of people in Somalia who know guys who know guys who know pirates. I make some calls, research the pirate community’s side of the situation.

Then I write an article. I mention that the pirates don’t really think of themselves as pirates, and that they try to be kind to their hostages. They’re just poor young guys in a bad situation trying to make a living.

I was as evenhanded and unbiased as I could be. Just because I happen to be a US citizen, I shouldn’t be biased toward my own country, I strive to be a citizen of the world who just happens to have been born in the US. I tried to respect the pirates’ perspective as much as possible, give them equal dignity as fellow human beings. The story was as objective as I could make it. No favoritism for either side, no opinions, just straight reporting.

So my story goes out, and now I’m getting hate email from right-wing lunatics who call me a "traitor," and worse, just because I gave equal consideration to the plight of the pirates as I did to the people they inconvenience, and the military people who hunt them down.

So now I’m angry. I’m angry at the stupid, backwoods, cousin-marrying, tooth-missing, gun-toting, SUV-driving neanderthals I’m stuck with as fellow US citizens, who don’t even want to consider the poor pirates’ point of view in these recent events, and just want to slam and threaten honest journalists, who are merely trying to bring enlightenment to their dim, backwards, pathetic lives.

I blame the public schools, frankly. They are not doing enough to teach about the UN, NGOs, and other international forums. They are not training the kids to become citizens of the world first and of the country they were randomly born in second. They are doing a disservice to the world community by over-emphasis on "American" things, Americentrism. It makes me sick. It makes me angry.

If you can find the offending story and the reporter, it would be fun to hold it up. Or if you think it's someone playing a prank, pretending to be a liberal, how skillful was it?

(HT: Hoystory)