Posted on 05/19/2005 7:24:17 PM PDT by Asphalt
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
I am shocked....shocked I tell you...by none of this.
I hate to say it, but back in days of the Vietnam War protests, with the exception of a few nut cases like John F. Kerry and Jane Fonda most of the protesters were young, irresponsible college-age kids, many of them high on drugs and many of them anxious to dodge the draft.
In contrast, today you have many, many older people in positions of power and influence, not to say privilege, who are behaving in much the same way. Pinch Sulzberger evidently hasn't grown up one wit from the days when he was a hippie war protester. Bill Keller is behaving no better than one of those druggies in Haight Ashbury. Evan Thomas is no more responsible than a crazed Weatherman or SDS leader.
It truly is disgusting. There's no excuse for it.
The Old Media is for all practical purposes above the law.
Aside from the relatively new ability of the private citizen to publicly bust them in a demonstrable lie (as we here did in Memogate), they cannot be policed from the outside. This new private ability is of as yet uncertain potency. For the time being, the Old Media continues able to escape serious financial and legal ruination as consequence of misdeeds of scale and import sufficient to land anyone else in jail or in the morgue.
Unless and until that changes, or they are given compelling motive to honestly and effectively police themselves from the inside, they will continue to do as Newsweek and CBS have done.
It is not sloppiness: It is the ARROGANCE of the Untouchably Safe, playing power games without risk of consequences to themselves.
is it bump my thread day? seems everywhere I look I see you. hehe.
our clones are everywhere
The mentality behind the MSM? Selfishness, pure and simple. Selfishness and cowardice.Cheap talk about how bad everyone is who has to make decisions and live with the results - who have to work to a bottom line - makes journalists feel superior to the people who make the country work. That is pure selfishness.
The MSM coheres in the idea that nothing actually matters except PR, and each individual component of the MSM gets good PR from all the others. Provided, of course, that the favor remains mutual. But the moment any person or institution ceases to support the pretensions of any of the others, all of the others will turn on him and drum him out of "objective journalism."
So the MSM is at bottom a mutual admiration society and a non-aggression pact which makes the MSM cohere in selfishness and fear. It is united for the purpose of picking on people who are natural Republicans - people who have responsibilities and who naturally make mistakes because they actually do things.
The result is that the MSM is hyper partisan under its facade of "objectivity"; liberal politicians do not so much lead and direct the MSM as they follow it, and operate in symbiosis with it.
Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate
That such a theory can be plausibly posed says a great deal about the credibility of the MSM.
You use the media as your focus but you are basically describing human nature, or at least a particular embodiment of it.
Don't dismiss sheer incompetence just yet. I was forced to dump Newsweek in 1964 (thereabouts). The trend was there and the last straw was a story on how people living on social security were "starving" because they could only spare $26 per week on food. I felt sorry for a few minutes. Then I realized my wife and I were spending less than half that rate on food and eating very "high on the hog": Filet Mignon cookouts at least once a week, and lots of other (relatively) expensive foods. Had we needed to scrimp by we could have gotten by on $5 per week. So Newsweek's story was completely bogus and meant only to propagandize about Social Security.
I claim they are biased because they are both poorly educated and poorly informed.
normally, I'd bank on dumb, but the coverups and stonewalling after the "errors" suggest a less innocent cause.
It has been my objective to explain the MSM without resort to tinfoil hat conspiracy theories. Your comment gives hope that I might be getting close.
Let me shift my tinfoil so I can scratch my head on that one.
Nah, I understand and thanks for letting me know we are on the same page.
You effort has to be difficult at times in that you have to assume certain people (MSM) are acting in good faith, though misguided or misinformed, when you know they aren't.
The main difficulty I perceive is credulousness - falling into the hayseed mode and assuming that the MSM are acting in good faith. We've grown up being bombarded with a fantastic barrage of propaganda to the effect that journalism is objective, and I find I have to constantly remind myself that the conceit of journalistic objectivity is a degree foolishness which makes buying the Brooklyn Bridge from a seedy character on the street look like "due diligence." As Adam Smith put it, "It is age and experience alone that teaches incredulity. And they seldom teach it enough."We should all strive for virtue, yet one of the virtues we should strive for is humility. And what does humility consist of but restraining ourselves from boasting of the virtues to which we aspire. The trouble, for those who work in journalism, is that there's no money in humility. Journalists are a bunch of carnival barkers. And the freak show that they are selling is the length to which they will go to hype bogeymen. They strain at gnats and swallow camels in order to sustain the pretense that we should trust them rather than the businesses and other institutions on which we do and must depend.
Rush parodies journalists beautifully when he boasts of "talent on loan from God" - which is actually humility pretending to be arrogance - and rants about how perfect he is. But the crucial point is that he doesn't con anyone that he is objective, he is openly conservative. And although the old Fairness Doctrine and the only-too-new Bush-McCain-Feingold "Campaign Finance Reform" horse hockey put a premium on the pretense of objectivity - actually denigrated humility - Rush and the other openly conservative commentators are consistently more reliable sources of information than "objective journalism."
What is the standard by which a source of information should be judged? Well, the Old Testament says that if someone declares themself to be a prophet and says that God will do something, then if the prophesy doesn't come true the speaker was a false prophet (and must be executed). These days we don't execute commentors (or, more's the pity </hyperbole>, reporters) whose words consistently fail to hold up in the light of time and experience. But we can and must do the virtual equivalent, with our remotes. CBS, Newsweek, et al are on notice.
Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate
Media bias bump.
"...most of the protesters were young, irresponsible college-age kids, many of them high on drugs and many of them anxious to dodge the draft...today you have many, many older people in positions of power and influence, not to say privilege, who are behaving in much the same way."
Same group.
bttt
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