Posted on 08/22/2012 8:20:55 PM PDT by Borges
“The nazi types and skinheads are a boogeyman, a corpse that the left props up and pretends it’s breathing to keep the lie alive that whites are oppressing blacks everyday and everywhere.”
I think they’ve bred enough cynicism that this nonsense doesn’t work much anymore. Blacks may believe it because it is better/easier to blame The Man (rather than themselves) for their shortcomings, but most whites (and ALL foreigners) know better. I live next to the Newark Welfare Reservation in NJ, and white guilt (if it ever existed) died when the whites in the suburbs were forced out of Newark 50 years ago. Some of those original refugees, and many of their children/grandchildren, still occupy those suburbs, and look at Newark as if it were Mordor. Nobody goes there unless to work, and they leave before sundown; if they see any of “them” on your suburban street, they immediately call the police - they are up to no good 99% of the time.
”Journalism,” as you intend the term, has not existed in living memory. Newsmen have always wanted influence, otherwise what’s the point? Given that fact and the concomitant fact that newsmen want to attract attention to each edition of their reporting, you have a synopsis of the self-interest of the journalist. Not that anyone should have need of a deep analysis to be able to say that journalists are like everyone else in the fact that everyone has interests which prevent them from being inherently objective or even of being capable of knowing that they are objective or not.But the obvious fact of common interest among journalists explains why, if journalists were free from competition, and thus free to express their common interest, they would naturally tend to superficially entertaining stories, of tendentious second-guessing criticism of those whose leadership in the economy produces things the public needs and also the validation (“jobs”) people need, and to self-promoting flattery of those who translate the journalist’s criticism into government regulation and taxes.
And journalism was homogenized - incorporated into an essential group with an obvious utilitarian purpose which also had the effect of destroying internal ideological competition - starting in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. The Associated Press did it. The AP was founded as a monopolistic entity, indeed was found to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1945 (if a very credible-appearing web site is to be believed), but even that is not the point. Because the internal logic of any wire services, even in the presence of real competition among services, is to promote the perception of “objectivity” of all journalists. When the newspaper’s editor wants to sell his readership a story off a newswire, he needs the readership to assume that the story represents reality. And yet the editor doesn’t even know the guy who wrote the story, much less employ him. So what is the editor to do, but to assure his readership that reporters can be relied upon? Even if there were major wire service competition for the AP, competing with the AP on the basis that the AP reporters weren’t as objective as those in your network wouldn’t be a good idea. It would put you at dagger’s point with all other wire services, who all need the credulity of the public, and every reporter not in your network would be out to undermine you.
So it is the wire service as such which produces the “objective” reporting. “Objective” belongs in scare quotes because, as we have seen, no journalist actually even knows that he is really objective. But the crucial fact is that you cannot even attempt to be objective without first being open about your own interests - and yet you cannot be open about what your own interests are when you are claiming that you do not have any interest. Which is what you are doing when you join an organization which claims that all of its members are objective. Arguing from the unwarranted assumption of your own superiority is sophistry.
Before the advent of the wire services, newsmen were flamboyant and notoriously didn’t agree about anything. Now newsmen unctuously promote the conceit that all are objective, which only means that they are all on the same page. All businessmen themselves, but all attacking any successful businessman who is not in their business. And all flattering socialist politicians that they are “liberal” and “progressive.” All cheap shot artists, unified by the fact that they are afraid to attack each other.
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