I was a newspaper guy — reporter and editor — for 40-some years. (Yeah, scary.)

My attitude was, "Tell me your sacred cows — the stuff you don't want me to write about. Because that's what I'm gonna write about.

Not supposed to look into the real health benefits of marijuana, because it might "encourage kids to try drugs"? You've already got them on all kinds of patented pharmaceuticals, including psychiatric drugs, that are probably much more dangerous. So I'll write about the health benefits of marijuana, and the way Prohibition only makes things worse, like when alcohol Prohibition turned us from a peaceful nation of wine and beer drinkers into a crazed culture going blind on bathtub gin while the distributors shot each other down with Tommy-guns in the streets.

Don't want me to write about how counterproductive it was to send unwilling draftees to fight a "sort of, limited" war in the jungles of mainland Asia, "Take that hill so we can give it back tomorrow"? Thanks; I'll get right on it.

What happened to that instinct to go find the story that the "powers that be" wanted buried? Yeah, I know how the Internet has slashed into the paid-advertising model that supported "objective" daily newspapers. But don't you think the ongoing loss of audience and credibility of the "legacy media" might also have something to do with the fact their little drones now all recite the "Leftist line" in unison – never challenge any of the sacred cows?

That what remains of the American and European "news media" would become captive to the screeching Collectivist/Globalist Left was predictable. First our colleges and now even the government youth propaganda camps ("public high schools") have been captive to unionized Leftists pushing a thinly disguised Marxist agenda -– Franz Fanon, Noam Chomsky and the like -– for 45 years now. Public schools which quite purposely turn out graduates who are just barely literate enough to follow their marching orders, by the way, with most of a troublemaker's innate sense of curiosity long since ground out of them.

(Real research is such a grind. We SO much more prefer the classes where we get good grades for just shouting our opinions about racism and oppression and stuff. And now we even get a free field trip to the state Capitol to shout it out for gun control! . . . even though we wouldn't know a muzzle brake from a stripper clip, and couldn't tell you who wrote the Bill of Rights or why he (or they) believed a citizenry armed with military-grade weapons is somehow "necessary to the security of a free state." . . . Or even where that phrase appears.)