Editor’s note:  Today’s article is drawn from a speech John Kass delivered earlier this week to students and faculty at Center for Conservative Alternatives seminar held at Hillsdale College. 

It is an honor to be here with you today. As you all realize, Hillsdale is beautiful and a very special, necessary place.

How necessary?

I’m thinking of that wonderful book by Thomas Cahill, “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” and his description of Ireland as  an “island of saints and scholars” preserving the Western tradition.

That’s the role I see Hillsdale College playing in today’s America.

But we’re not on some rocky island in the corner of Europe.  We’re in the center of a Western civilization that is in trouble.

Today, I stand before you as something of an oddity worthy of exhibition by PT Barnum, perhaps in a cage:

An old newspaperman, and even worse, a conservative newspaperman.

My good friend Prof. Charles Lipson, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago and a frequent guest on my podcast, the Chicago Way, offered some advice on this talk.

“You’re not a professor, so don’t act like one at Hillsdale. You’re a reporter. Talk like a reporter on the ground. Not from 30,000 feet.”

So here I am on the sidewalk. A gumshoe reporter without a Camel filter.

As some of you may know, I was a reporter and nationally syndicated lead columnist at the Chicago Tribune for some 40 years, that is until leftist billionaire George Soros showed the Tribune and me that Soros was boss.

The Jacobin, pro-Soros newsroom union at the Tribune defamed me and I had to get out. The Jacobins demanded that I apologize and submit to a struggle session.

I refused.

So, I left, took a buyout, and started in new media, johnkassnews.com  where I write twice a week and run guest columns featuring other excellent writers, too.

And I continue doing my weekly podcast, The Chicago Way. johnkassnews.com is successful, and it pays the bills, but it’s not all candy and nuts.

For example, The Illinois Supreme Court has taken it upon itself to play the Chicago Way by deciding who can write for me and who has to shut up—and they’ve decided to silence a well-respected retired judge.

So now I’m reaching out to legal scholar Jonathan Turley, who is also familiar with Chicago’s corrupt political culture. If any of you know Professor Turley, or any good First Amendment lawyers, please let me know.

Meanwhile, the Tribune is dying as are many other legacy papers. I was able to climb out from the wreckage and start something new. And so can you.

Today’s talk is about  THE DECLINE OF TRUST IN LEGACY MEDIA, and I was there when it went bad and newsrooms began looking down their noses at the middle-class people who supported and paid for the newspaper.

But before then, I was able to interview one of my heroes, Victor Davis Hanson, for a column and so, since we’re at Hillsdale and before we begin in earnest, I’d like to have a moment to pray for his recovery from serious and difficult surgery. (Pause)

America needs VDH for his clarity, especially now, when what we know as the establishment news media refuses to provide needed context in this time of chaos.

And as the Democrat nullificationists of Minnesota are refusing to follow federal immigration law as if we’re in South Carolina of 1861.. In this, the Democrats are reverting to form by refusing to follow immigration law in most blue states.

So, how did the Legacy media lose the public trust?

Simple: By mocking the people who bought the newspapers and supported the advertising, by opening the newsroom wide to the snobs of the American left, by adopting the language of the left.

And by manufacturing demigods like Barack Obama to lead the country where it did not want to go.

Journalism lost something irreplaceable as corporate legacy media created Obama as something of a plaster saint. What they lost, or abandoned, was the one thing a journalist needs to do the job:

Curiosity.

And he, Obama, led American journalism into a special hell, having his shadowy Deep State operatives like the CIA’s John Brennan and the FBI’s James Comey manufacturing phony evidence to cast Donald Trump as the tool of Putin’s Russia—even though they knew that was totally untrue.

But that didn’t stop Deep State, establishement newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post to push these notions into Pulitzer Prizes, and American journalism sealed itself into the vault of horror.

I suppose I’d like to begin with  a biddable orchestra playing something like Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, along with clacking typewriters of an old-time newsroom in the background, some blend of hard-boiled knowingness with optimism in the big cities, the skyscrapers, the pedestrians hurrying to and fro…

Those rising notes of the clarinet make me think of Chicago and big cities and much younger versions of me in a suit and smoking a cigarette on Michigan Avenue in the shadow of the great gothic skyscraper we still know as The Tribune Tower, though the paper has abandoned it.

And the clear-eyed optimism my grandfather had, Papou Yianni, when he came to Chicago in the 1890s. To make a living he became a fruit and vegetable peddler, first carrying his wares on his back. And later, he could afford to buy a horse drawn wagon, and still later 10 wagons.

Our extended family—Roosevelt Democrats and Reagan Republicans—were newspaper readers, learning the mysterious ways of the strange native people we called the Americani.

In the pages of the Chicago Tribune, we learned how to become American. My aunts loved the paper and learned from it how to make that most American dessert, Jell-O, with the horrid chunks of fruit suspended in it.

In those days and beyond you had to be a fool not to lose money running a big city newspaper like the Tribune. You could make a 25 percent profit year after year after year. These were not newspapers that despised capitalism. They were the bibles of capitalism.

And if you were in private business, you depended on the newspaper to reach customers. Business had to play ball with the publishers of the Tribune, or the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer the Detroit Free Press and so on.

And then Al Gore ruined it all by inventing the Internet…and newspaper advertising revenues went to hell.

Many of you know the story. The collapse of ad revenues meant the newspapers relied heavily on subscriptions.

And everything became about feelings and emotion, and unfortunately so did the news itself.

There’s a Ray Bradberry story from 1963 that I’m fond of, “To The Chicago Abyss,” a dystopian tale of an old man about my age now.

He travels through a bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape where cultural memory has been forbidden or lost, subversively reminiscing about the wonderful foods, items, and sensory experiences of the past—such as hot coffee, real butter, chocolate, and crisp autumn air—to remind people of what they have lost; vacuum-packed coffee, fresh milk, chesterfield cigarettes and candy bars.

He’s a threat to the establishment, and his reminiscing is seen as dangerous, and it tries to suppress him.

Please keep your eye on the door in case the authorities try bursting in, but I’m not going to tell you of canned cream corn or chunky candy bars or big macs and fries in beef tallow.

I do remember a name that helps illustrate the point: Melissa Click…

November 2015 at the University of Missouri (Mizzou).

Melissa Click, one of the first AWFLs, an assistant professor of mass media at Mizzou, was filmed shrieking for “muscle” to remove student photojournalist Tim Tai from a public, on-campus protest “safe space.”

Leftists demanded a safe space at Mizzou and later even journalists were demanding safe spaces from the dangerous, triggering ideas found in the Federalist Papers.

When did America journalism break faith with the people?

Conservative writer Jude Russo wrote recently that it wasn’t only one thing that caused the loss of trust. There were many things.

Yes, the unions came in to the newsrooms, and that pushed newspapers farther to the left.

And yes, online advertising took print advertising and shook it to death like a Manchester Terrier pouncing on a rat in the alley.

What ties the demand for safe space and the collapse of advertising was the advancement of Barack Obama.

And I was there in Chicago when he was hatched from an egg laid by America’s foremost domestic terrorists of the day, William Ayres and Bernadine Dorn.

They had powerful friends. Ayers’s daddy was close friends with Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, a name that college deans take notice of. And so, the University of Illinois hired Ayres and Northwestern hired his wife, Bernardine Dorn. Obama was introduced to the leftist Chicago intelligencia at the home of socialist Alice Palmer and the communist Buzz Palmer. I knew them.

Who wasn’t interested in the hatching of the Obama egg?

The New Yorker, the New York Times, Time Magazine and the others of legacy media. They weren’t interested in the real Obama history, but they were most interested in Obama hagiography.

Consider just one image from that period; Obama walking barefoot on the beach in Hawaii, as if Pegasus rising from the sea foam.

But legacy media wasn’t interested in the fact that the federally convicted Chicago bagman Tony Rezko helped buy Obama’s first home in Hyde Park, or what that means. They didn’t want to know he was a creature of the political machine. Manipulating narratives replaced reporting and analysis.

The Tribune broke the story about bagman Rezko and Obama’s first dreamhouse in 2006, but it didn’t even make the Tribune’s own front page.

What does that tell you?

As the beat reporter or political reporter in Chicago at the time, I got a lot of calls from the New Yorker and the New York Times.  But they didn’t want to hear anything about Tony Rezko.

All these people said they wanted to know the real story about Barack Obama, but they really didn’t want to hear that real story.

I’d tell them he’s a silky. He’s a socialist. I tried to tell them the fact that his beautiful mansion in Hyde Park Chicago was secured by the corrupt Rezko, and they didn’t want to hear that.  And so I saw first hand that what we now call the legacy media—of which I was a part back then—had a certain way of dealing with the truth and the narrative.  Which was to ignore it.

They would select the narrative and shape it and they didn’t want some yokel from Chicago, some peasant gumshoe telling them what they already knew but didn’t want you to know it.

They didn’t want to you to know about that Barack Obama.

The servant of the crooked Chicago Daley Machine, the friend of the federally jailed bagman Rezko who was without an arrow pointing to the true north. In Springfield where the Illinois legislature meets, Obama was nothing, a back bencher, the kind of guy the big guys would  send out for coffee.

I’ll tell you a story they didn’t want to know about years ago. That was when I first started writing the column. It came out Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, four times a week.

It was a terrible ,terrible schedule because I missed Sunday, the day for church and our family.

In February 2003 the E2 nightclub disaster happened. 21 young people were trampled to death in a locked stairwell.

A fight broke out on a Saturday night and one of the security guards tried to use pepper spray to break it up. People smelled that pepper spray and panicked and ran for the doors, but they couldn’t get out because the doors were locked.

So, the next morning on Sunday I was driving out there and pulled up.

Cops knew me so they let me pull up.

And there was Barack, hands in his pockets, posing like a sad, lonely man. He said the owners were friends of his. He was sad the kids had died.

Across the street were weekend news crews, the legacy media’s Obama hagiography machine was taking shape.

They hadn’t recognized him, but the weekend crews knew me and they complained that I was on the other side of the police line.

“They know me,” I said. “When they get here, they’ll ask you questions. Get out of here if you don’t want to answer.”

He loped away fast.

In the years after, the media’s obsequiousness continued, intensifying.

I was at his first inauguration, and the legacy media treated him as if he was Mr. Tumnus, the forest faun from Chronicles of Narnia, and they would have cakes and tea with him and take a nap in his lap.

But that coziness led to disaster for the American republic and the media itself.

Obama, the silky of the Chicago Machine became the silky of the Deep State.

And we found that the gentle Mr. Tumnus is extraordinarily vicious, according to documents declassified by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

What I said about Obama as the silky of the Deep State is underscored by  recent reporting by Real Clear Investigations and Paul Sperry, that I have reposted with permission from Real Clear Politics.

Obama had his intelligence chiefs manufacture evidence that Donald Trump was a creature of Putin. And legacy papers got their Pulitzer Prizes and kept them. Will that end in indictments? One can hope.

Credibility of the legacy corporate media began to fall apart.

But don’t be sad.

All that means is there are many more opportunities now that the old statist guardians are gone.

And that means optimism for a free press and free inquiry.

When I learned journalism, it wasn’t an excuse for creative writing.

I learned it as a trade, a blue-collar trade from grizzled old timers at the Tribune’s City Desk, beginning when I was a copy boy.

The legendary city editor Bernard Judge would scream “COPY’ and we’d run to grab the copy books—sheets of typing paper and carbon copies—and separating them as we literally ran from desk to desk, spiking that copy (no OSHA in newsrooms) on the foreign desk, city desk, national desk and to the ladies of the feature department

We learned to build stories the way we’d learn to frame a house, from the foundation up.

The basics were who was there, what happened to whom, where was it and how was it done.

Who what when where how.

There’s nothing mysterious about it. AND IF YOUR MOTHER TELLS YOU SHE LOVES YOU, CHECK IT OUT.

Newspapering was a blue-collar enterprise.

The Tribune’s managing editor was a tank commander in Vietnam. Our editorial page editor was a soldier in Vietnam. He went to Yale Law school, received the Pulitzer Prize when it meant something. They had common sense.

They did not look down their noses at subscribers. And they did not engage in the creation of saints, that came later.

Our managing editor, Dick Ciccone, gave me some good advice.

“Don’t reach for your notepad at first. Listen to what they’re talking about. Let them know you’re interested in what they have to say.”

They were of a common-sense generation that went to war. They were not overtly sentimental. They were not hagiographers.

When it came to politics, they were iconoclasts.

One word of caution as we look to the past. It wasn’t all that great. Not really.

The publishers were gate keepers, as were the network anchors from ABC, CBS and NBC who would decide what the news would be.

They were the establishment. They would dictate the narrative and the narrative leaned to the left.

It wasn’t the so-called Golden Age. Not really.

They would ram the news down America’s throats.

In recent years it became obvious that as they raised Obama to the status of demigod, establishment journalists had lost their curiosity.

In the journalism culture the left controlled, curiosity threatened to veer off into dangerous territory.

The processing of Barack Obama began strangling the republic years ago, just about the time the media began treating him as a mythological creature. They lost all credibility about him. And he took that journalistic adoration, turned it and killed legacy media, too.

And I witnessed firsthand all the reporters wiggling like puppies, all but soiling the carpets at Obama’s approach. The media treated Barack Obama as something of a winged sea creature, a Pegasus up from the beaches of Hawaii as they smoked their Hopium in every newsroom in America. Their eyes were slits. And he was their wizard of a thousand kings.

They wanted to ride him as if he were a unicorn. They wanted to love him too. He was their fantasy black politico.

There was no way they could have been objective about him, any more than a child could be objective about their first pony.

So, to get some distance, I called a wise colleague Steve Huntley, the retired editorial writer for the Chicago Sun Times. He spent 30 years there. And I worked across the street at the Trib.

He explained that there are many reasons the American people have lost trust in legacy media. If you had a sharp enough scalpel, you might consider the shift to exclusive subscription models, increased where partisanship has greater leverage.

Things change. Twitter now X has changed it. They hate that Elon Musk, owner of X, has broken the iron grip of the gatekeepers.

The Tribune and the rest of the legacy media may be closed to us, and is calcified, but all you have to do is look at your phone to find the open gates.

John Kass News is succeeding, so is the Federalist, edited by the great Mollie Hemingway. As are many others.

The old leftist gatekeepers have lost the plot. They are panicking and desperate.

This is the time of the curious intellect. This is your time and this is Hillsdale’s time. The path is well lit, but it’s not easy. But all you have to do is take that first step.

Thank you for your time.

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About the author: John Kass spent decades as a political writer and news columnist in Chicago working at a major metropolitan newspaper. He is co-host of The Chicago Way podcast. And he just loves his “No Chumbolone” hat, because johnkassnews.com is a “No Chumbolone” Zone where you can always get a cup of common sense.

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