Posted on 08/14/2011 6:42:12 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
Graneros: There you have it. Because the MSM and the Dems in are full attack mode against the Tea Party it can only mean the Tea Party is successful beyond anything anyone thought possible and that the Dems are very scared of them. Reading the news in the new bizzaro world of the USA means whatever they say you can count on the opposite being true.
That isn't anything new. It traces back to the post-Civil War era which is also the founding era of wire service journalism.
points out that the Associated Press was challenged for blatantly accruing centralized propaganda power. The Associated Press's response was to point out that the newspapers which made up the membership of the AP were (at that time, and traditionally) notorious for not agreeing on much of anything. So the AP itself was objective. We see how that worked out; now the news outlets, broadcast as well as print, are notorious for agreeing about everything.
- News Over the Wires:
- The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897
by Menahem Blondheim
This, IMHO, is the logical consequence of the need of the news organizations for national and international news which only the wire services could provide, and the lack of which dooms a news organization to the ghetto of strictly local reporting. That suppressed openly opinionated/partisan journalism, but it empowered the inherent tendency of journalists to promote their own importance, now no longer checked by competition among journalism outlets. All report the same stuff, from the same sources, according to the same criteria - so the individuality among them is expressed only in distinctions not actual differences.
The criteria - "Man Bites Dog, not Dog Bites Man," "If it bleeds, it leads," and "Always make your deadline" - are obviously designed to interest the public (for profit), and have nothing to do with the public interest (informing people on matters of importance). The lack of competition among journalists has led to a lack of introspection within journalism - the only concern among journalists is for the conformity which they confuse with objectivity. Journalists make no effort to be objective in fact. Any actual attempt at objectivity would be incompatible with claiming - or even associating with those who claim for them - that they actually are objective.
Compare with the similar conundrum recognized by the ancient Greeks - any attempt at actual wisdom must start by limiting one's self to claiming to love wisdom (see, philosopher) rather than claiming to actually be wise (see, sophist, origin of our term for slippery argumentation, sophistry).
Journalists "don't plant 'taters, they don't plant cotton" - but let the crop or either fail, and they can always make a buck complaining about the failures of others. Second guessing is cheap talk, and that is the specialty of journalism. And the extreme of cheap talk is socialism. It is no accident that Lenin was a writer and Mussolini was a reporter/editor - the idea that critics rather than doers should run things is naturally congenial to writers.
So journalists and writers are naturally attracted to socialism, which puts critics in charge. And what, therefore, could be more natural than for ambitious politicians to attach themselves to the natural propensity and predilection of journalism, and thereby to avail themselves of the propaganda wind that places at their backs?In short, nothing could be more natural than that politicians should align themselves with journalism, and that journalism should reciprocate by assigning positive labels to their political allies. The result we observe is that there is no example of a virtue ("moderation" a.k.a. "centrism" being a classical virtue, and "progress" and "liberty" being American virtues) which has not been used as a label for the allies of journalism. Reciprocally, opposition to socialism gets labeled "conservative" (opposite to the American virtue of a belief in progress), "extreme," or "right wing."
In reality "liberals" do not promote liberty, "progressives" do not promote progress by the people (but only by an encroaching central government), and "moderates" are merely soft-spoken allies of the above rather than holding positions not simpatico to journalism. In reality "objective" journalists, like their "liberal/progressive/moderate" allies, are systematic perpetrators of sophistry. Which explains why we have so much work to do deconstructing the endemic distortions we find in "objective news."
Ping.
BTTT.
So a big part of it is that most of them get all their big news from the wire services?
BTTT
Yes, but beyond that, it's that they contribute to the wire services too - so that the "Associated Press" is aptly named. All the major news outlets are "associated." Which has the same effect in news that it has in the labor market:"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices." - Adam SmithIn the sense that the AP promotes a distinction between ordinary citizen and reporter, the Associated Press is "a conspiracy against the public." It even, in 1945, was found by SCOTUS to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act! Back then its mission - the conservation of communication bandwidth in the transmission of the news - still seemed to make it "too big to fail." In the satellite/fiber optic/laser/microwave era, the Internet is a much more powerful communications network than the AP was back then. So a news "world" without the AP is now entirely plausible.The Internet promotes citizen reporting; for all I know you could be halfway around the world from me, and yet we communicate freely between ourselves and whoever else has Internet access - even via an Internet cafe, did we not both own our own computers. The www is certainly in the spirit of the First Amendment, providing the reader with a universe of free and independent presses - exactly what the Associated Press is inimical to. When the First Amendment refers to "the freedom of . . . the press" it does not imply that there was only one newspaper in the founding era - but that is the practical effect of the "association" of the newspapers which was created in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Indeed, up past the Civil War the newspapers were famously fractiously independent.
In those days there was no real thought that the news reporters were objective - how could they all be objective when they were all so opinionated and contrary? They didn't need a separate "editorial page" for opinion; that was what the whole newspaper was, quite openly, about. This promoted a "caveat emptor" approach to reading the paper - if you didn't like the newspaper's perspective, you bought a different paper (if available in your area).
Of possible interest.
Did CBS really invent original reporting on TV?
I can’t recall off the top of my head just why newspapers consolidated over the decades so that now nearly all American cities are de-facto one-newspaper towns.
The big argument that the MSM continually uses against the internet/blogosphere is that only THEY can afford to send out reporters to do real, full-time, shoe-leather investigative journalism (even as they cut back ever further on reporterage).
I know, of course, of such self-funded, Paypal-registered reporters like Michael Yon or Michael J. Totten of Pajamas Media. They do seem to be rare birds at the moment.
Is there a business model that could work for this Brave New uncontrolled world?
Is there a business model that could work for this Brave New uncontrolled world?
My opinion - at least my hope - is that the market for socialist propaganda might actually have peaked. The fact that "objective" journalism is and traditionally has been, for generations, nothing but socialist propaganda - and my opinion as to why - is the burden of my article. If you are asking if that business model can survive the erosion of its advertising base due to the competition of the Internet, my answer can only be, "Gee, I hope not!"What we need is a much less credulous market for news. We want what the Democrats and socialist-minded journalists would call "conservative" - even "right wing" - journalism. Democrats are never going to be willing to respect the "philosophical" in the etymological sense - sort of journalism which they would characterize as "right wing." That is what "talk radio" is, tho.
So my point is simply that so-called "objective" journalism will always style any competitive viewpoint negatively. As long as that is the case, you simply have to reconcile yourself to having the choice, not between various objective news reporting venues but between more or less philosophical reporting and the sort of sophistry posing as objective journalism which we have now.
abb may have something to add.
IMHO, it STILL doesn't explain what happened to competing media; that is, news presented from a more traditional, conservative; dare I say, right wing point of view. Talk radio and after a fashion, FoxNews, says there's a market for this point of view for news. So, where is it?
One of the antidotes is that we do it ourselves.
I just got back from covering a hearing in Monroe, LA in a federal case of two city councilmen that were convicted of bribery. They’re trying to get the conviction overturned.
In two years, my newsblog has become a credible source of local news reporting that competes heads-up with two TV stations, a daily Gannett newspaper and another local daily.
While obviously I cannot be everywhere at once, my news coverage of government meetings (city council, school board, etc) is consistently more comprehensive than that of my competitors.
All it costs is my time and a bit of gasoline.
It’s been years since I’ve had so much fun!!
it STILL doesn't explain what happened to competing media; that is, news presented from a more traditional, conservative; dare I say, right wing point of view. Talk radio and after a fashion, FoxNews, says there's a market for this point of view for news. So, where is it?
Talk radio and after a fashion, FoxNews - that's it. At least apart from the Internet.The point, surely, is that if you restrict your consideration to what the associated press counts as journalism, you will look right past what you think you are looking for without recognizing it. If it is a " traditional, conservative; dare I say, right wing point of view," it Rush Limbaugh's POV - and it sounds like Rush Limbaugh, it does not sound like The New York Times. "Talk radio" is "conservative" in the sense that it sounds like America, sounds like middle class America. Well, it would - that's what it is.
An Air America can't sound like that because it isn't that - the editors naturally have to censor middle class American voices in some way in order to project a non-middle class American viewpoint. If they don't the callers, and not the hosts, will sound sensible to the middle class American audience. The fallacy of the "Air America" conceit is that the hosts can be interesting without being respectful of the audience, and that just doesn't work. The host has to handle opposing viewpoints to his own with some grace, which is hard to do when you don't respect the people who hold those views.
Which socialists, take them as they run, do not. Socialism rejects reality, in the sense that it rejects respect for bottom lines and red ink. They can view Obama's ocean of red ink with equanimity and even joy because they seal their minds off from ultimate consequences. I was much taken with an article about Christianity in Africa which pointed out that Westerners can't relate to the Bible verse which speaks of "sowing" being associated with "weeping." Africans understand it because seed is edible. If you are hungry, it takes faith and long-term thinking to bury perfectly good food in the dirt. If you don't do it, of course, you must look elsewhere than to your fields for your food after the seed corn runs out. But that is later, and if you show a hungry socialist the seed corn he will have no doubt what to do. After the seed corn is gone there is even more poverty than there was before - but the socialist will always have a scapegoat for that.
But the defining characteristic of journalism is that it's unidirectional communication, hit and run. As Rush calls it, "the drive-by media." It never stays in one place long enough for the chickens to come home to roost. C-Span's Washington Journal was the rare example of journalists taking on all comers in call-in format. But by going to its "Republican, Democrat, Independent" pre-screened format, C-Span changed it so that only a third of callers represented middle class America. In general journalists avoid a situation where they are on equal footing with middle class Americans like they avoid the plague. It isn't a situation conducive to the cultivation of the appearance of superiority which the journalist cultivates.
Which essentially restates the question. Various surveys have shown a sizable majority in this nation to be center-right to right; something in the neighborhood of 65% to 70%. Half of them of course labeled right wingnuts by the Ministry of Information. What happened to our champions in "mainstream" news media? Where are our pamphleteers? Where is the ANTI NYT, ANTI LALA Times, ANTI Houston Comical, ANTI ChiTrib, etc? They once existed; why are they now gone? And yeah, C-SPAN was once interesting to watch. Why did they change their format when it was obvious conservatives were much more engaged than libtards?
I know you like most Freepers are acutely aware of the symptoms of the problem; that is, the fever of liberal media bias but it doesn't address or suggest a treatment of the underlying infection. How did they come to dominance in a nation that mostly disagrees with their politics?
If you restrict your attention to the individual member journalism outlets which are part of the associated press, they individually pass the buck and it stops nowhere. But if you look at the Associated Press as a whole, its employees and its member outlets, the entity as a whole violates the Sherman Antitrust Act and systematically libels identifiable people. Specifically, anyone who is representative of the middle class - elected or otherwise.
When telegraph bandwidth was scarce and expensive, the AP seemed to serve a valuable function and was viewed as being "too big to fail." Now with the Internet, which is enabled by fiber optic cables and satellite communication, whatever bandwidth economies are achieved by the AP "wire are de minims in value. This posting can be read anywhere in the world that the government (e.g., of China) doesn't actively interfere with that possibility - and I'm supposed to be impressed by the transmission capabilities of the AP? Break it up!!!
People positively lust to know what is going on. That's why Adam ate the apple, and why Ulysses went crazy when he heard the Sirens' song. Is it any wonder that people have been making a buck selling information ever since? Now, with the Internet (made possible by the dirt-cheap communications bandwidth of fiber optics and lasers as satellites), all of a sudden (in historical terms) people can communicate so freely on a global scale that the business model not only of dead-tree journalism but even of radio/TV journalism are shaken. Because people want to be heard, just as much as they want to hear. And because the business of journalism was always to sell the "sizzle" of knowledge but deliver only titillation ("'Man bites Dog,' not 'Dog Bites Man'") and irritation ("If it bleeds, it leads), leaving the thirst for knowledge and understanding unassuaged.It's hard for us, who have lived with the "magic" of electronic communication all our lives, and whose grandparent lived with it all of their lives, to grasp what it was like to not be able to learn of events until days and weeks after the fact. The commercial transmission of news via telegraph had a huge cultural impact. This was the opportunity which the Associated Press exploited to create a monopoly of news, and the concomitant cult of the "objective" journalist. The cult of the objective journalist is a central feature of monopoly news, so the associated press (not merely the Associated Press, but any journalists anywhere who are willing to go along and get along with the AP) cooperates in promoting it. The cult of the objective journalist is incompatible with the idea of the equality of the people; it is a hierarchy which is maintained by propaganda "pecking" just as surely as the hierarchy of the barnyard is enforced by the dominant chickens pecking the less dominant ones.
Perhaps in that context it is understandable that the culture of the news business does not permit it to adapt to the distributed and interactive Internet model of journalism exemplified by Free Republic.
Layoffs Coming to LA Times Pressroom (Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™)
Might well be helpful but I would ask, into what? From my perch it looks like the good little leftist soldiers J schools have turned out over the last couple of generations will still be the prevalent players regardless of where or how they end up. The media muckity mucks will continue to embrace marxist ideology, probably to their dying breath. Dissolve AP altogether and distribute the assets, such as they are, to the media owners? What then? Will a conservative leaning "wire" service of sorts spring up to take its place? I doubt it and anyhow, WHO would see to it that conservative values were represented in the "news"? Would wealthy conservatives, such as the Koch brothers for example, jump into the melee? Doesn't seem likely now given the fact the news delivery industry is circling the drain.
For the life of me I can't see look far enough ahead to see how this will end. What do Pravada and Izvestia look like now since the ostensible breakup of the Soviet Union? Maybe more importantly and more to our point, what does TASS look like today?
I agree. The duty of the fourth estate in a democracy is to be a watch dog of government. They have failed miserably. Everything else followed from that failure.....The press was the glue that held our politics together, by exposing it to the light of day. Their abrogation of this duty has collapsed our system.
No, the problem is thatThe wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . .The idea that "The press was the glue that held our politics together, by exposing it to the light of day" is one of Smith's "stories" which "The wisest and most cautious of us all . . . is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing." It is a fable. First of all, it assumes that "the press" consists of competitive investigators who independently ferret out truth. It does not, and for a century and a half has not, been so constituted. Our problem is that we have a free but not an independent press. Wire services with names like The Associated Press, and United Press International, should make that excruciatingly obvious, and yet I overlooked it for an entire generation after I had realized that journalism wasn't objective and began looking for the reasons. We have an associated press, with the results which Adam Smith could easily have predicted:It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity,
and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices." - Adam SmithWire services unite journalism, and the result is that journalism is free to pursue its interest even when that conflicts with the public interest. And, considering that bad news (for the public) is good for journalism, the overlap between the public interest and the interest of journalism is shockingly slight. Many things - destructive fires, criminal activity, war . . . (the list is endless) interest the public (thereby serving the interests of journalism) but are inimical to the public interest. As I type, a tropical storm is moving up the East Coast - and journalism is working overtime. Is their interest being accurate about the prospective consequences of the storm, or is their interest in projecting the worst case scenario, thereby gripping the attention of the public?The public interest lies in realistic information, whether that means there is a problem or not. The interest of the journalist is in crying "Wolf" - and then changing the subject when their worst case scenario fails to eventuate, and it generally does. That is child's play when you have the real "bully pulpit" of journalism unified behind you.
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