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To: NOBO2012

The “news” is merely propaganda, distortion, omission or, merely, complete BS. What a sad state of affairs. One cannot believe the “news” to be true. Quite the opposite. Integrity is a foreign concept to these purportedly neutral “reporters” of the “news”. One must believe the opposite.


2 posted on 12/10/2018 5:38:08 AM PST by hal ogen (First Amendment or Reeducation Camp?)
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To: hal ogen

The reason we are in this mess now is due to decades of media lies.


3 posted on 12/10/2018 5:56:48 AM PST by excalibur21
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To: hal ogen

Impeach don’t impeach it doesn’t matter. The Libs are no longer rational. We will get a steady diet of bad news until the Libs are in charge; then it will be nothing but Unicorns crapping skittles on every street corner.


7 posted on 12/10/2018 7:44:08 AM PST by CoastWatcher
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To: hal ogen
The “news” is merely propaganda
From the founding of the Republic, any given newspaper has reflected the politics of its printer. That was understood by the authors of the Constitution, and by those who ratified the First Amendment.

What changed is that now all the printers are politically simpatico. What caused the change, and when? IMHO (after more thought over a longer period of time than I like to admit) it is the fruit of the wire services, especially the AP. The telegraph was demo’ed by Samuel Morse in 1844 - and by 1848 the predecessor to the AP was forming.

By 1875 people were raising the alarm about the propaganda power of the AP. The AP responded that its members contributed most of its content, and its members were famous for not agreeing about much of anything (which, at the time and traditionally, was true) - so the AP itself was objective.

That argument held some water at the time, but - as we all know - it is far from true today, and hasn’t been true for a very long time. In his 1776 masterpiece Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith asserted that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The AP “wire” is a virtual meeting of all its member newspapers, and it doesn’t end at all. And is not about “merriment and diversion,” but precisely about business.

Anyone who considers that situation - and does not wish to be seen as utterly naive - would have to ask, “If journalists conspired against the public, what would be their objective and how would it manifest itself?” And Adam Smith has an answer to that, too: "The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires." - Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) Put that way, it is IMHO hard to question the fact that people go into journalism for precisely that reason.

And what would be better calculated to promote the influence of journalists than agreement among journalists

  1. not to question each others’ objectivity, and

  2. to (rhetorically) stone to death the career of anyone who, claiming to be a journalist, violates rule 1?
And is it not true that that constitutes practicing on the credulity of the public, and thus a conspiracy against it? The 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan SCOTUS decision famously made it extremely difficult for Democrat or Republican politicians to sue for libel or slander. If you read the decision, you learn that not only was it unanimous, and not only were the concurring decisions critical only that it didn’t go far enough, but you yourself will want to cheer the decision, given the facts before the Court at the time. The problem is not the First Amendment, is and not SCOTUS’s vindication of it in Sullivan. The problem is that wire service journalism is an Establishment. And, in point of fact, an anti-conservative Establishment.

There is not supposed to be an Establishment in America. There is only the people. Some few of the people are at any time in government - temporarily (other than a few judges), but otherwise there are people who presently own newspapers, and people who do not yet own newspapers. The First Amendment does not establish journalists as a separate category; it guarantees that anyone who will spend the money for it can buy a printing press. Journalism is neither a title of nobility nor an Established priesthood, both of which the Constitution forbids. It is not legitimately “the Fourth Estate” because there aren’t supposed to be any “Estates” here.

But nevertheless, wire service journalism does function as an Establishment. And the question that raises is, “What legal recourse might lie against it?”

I noted above that journalism is anti-conservative. The reason is that journalism is negative and, in claiming its own objectivity knowing that it is negative, it is cynical. Only a cynic thinks “negativity is objectivity.” And cynicism is the opposite of faith, and thus of conservatism.

9 posted on 12/10/2018 12:07:58 PM PST by conservatism_IS_compassion
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