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Great cover photo for a Time “guardians of truth” issue.

A highly partisan operative who worked with a handler to publish propaganda

As far as journalists collectively being honoured with the ascription “guardians,” that surely cannot apply in North America or Europe if we take most of their coverage of Donald Trump as the testing ground. Trump journalism will some day earn its place in medical literature, side by side with malarial fever and LSD as engines of hallucination and fitful nightmares.

Throw in the scandal saga of Der Spiegel, whose star investigative reporter, Claas Relotius, has been proven to be an industrial-scale fraud, a fantasist fictionist, who gulled Der Spiegel and its readers for years, and is now the face for “fake news” worldwide, and ask again how journalists could even be considered the heroes of 2018? The Relotius problem was correctly described in a Facebook post as “a product of an absurdly leftist writers’ fraternity that is increasingly seldom prepared to leave its own convenient moral comfort zone in favour of the facts.”

Photo by Ursula Dueren/dpa/AP

Journalism is frequently as wayward as the social media it ritually deplores, propelled by a lust-like drive to the parts of a story that accord with its prejudices and predispositions. It has long since replaced the attempt to be objective with a commitment to activism and advocacy. Much of contemporary journalism does not report on the game. It sees itself as part of the game — it seeks to massage opinion, reinforce favoured perspectives, take down its “enemies” and shield its heroes.