Afflicting the wrong people?

I've been a working journalist off and on since the autumn of 1966 and always strove to be objective and free of bias.

I took pride in the notion that our job is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

But I heard that credo picked apart on the radio this afternoon and came to the disturbing realization that it implies a bias to always champion the underdog. It suggests that the underdog is always right and the successful/comfortable are always wrong. The more you think about it, the more glaringly liberal and intentionally subversive it becomes.

What if the little guy is a fledgling Hitler or Stalin or Mao? Are they automatically entitled to better treatment in the press than the Pope or a Franklin Roosevelt or a Harry Truman? Does success always equate to corruption? I think not.

The more I chew on it, the clearer it becomes to me that a lot of us have mistakenly believed our job is to disrupt the social order just for the sake of doing it.

How depressing.