Answering Jonathan Alter’s Challenge ("why Barack Obama has been such a bad president?")

Commentary ^ | 08.26.2011 | Peter Wehner

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I could give you several trillion reasons, but you would never understand, Jonathan.

[Fu-fu2]

No, I believe the intention and result were planned. Most of them come out of liberal schools of journalism. They are true believers, masquerading as neutral observers.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

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.

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.....

No, the problem is that

The 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 . . .

It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity,
and they very seldom teach it enough.   - Adam Smith

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:

"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 Smith

Wire 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.

The Reliable Unreliability of Journalism

[Peet]

From the article: “ATM machines”

I consider anyone who uses that phrase not worth listening to; just like “PIN number”. I don’t care how good this guy’s point is (and it *is* good) he comes across as illiterate.

Clear ether,
P.

[wintertime]

Obama deliberately shoved a thumb in the eye of patriotic Americans when he posted a crudely forged birth “document” and claimed that it was the real thing.