Posted on 04/21/2008 3:36:31 PM PDT by Rufus2007
Time magazine continued to defend its manipulation of the classic Iwo Jima flag-raising photo – calling it a “point of view.” Managing Editor Richard Stengel said the cover art was part of the publication’s global warming advocacy and a way of forcing readers to “pay attention.”
Stengel defied the traditional notion that journalists should be unbiased. “I didn’t go to journalism school,” Stengel said. “But this notion that journalism is objective, or must be objective is something that has always bothered me – because the notion about objectivity is in some ways a fantasy. I don’t know that there is as such a thing as objectivity.”
Stengel supported his claim by stating the role of journalists is not to ask questions, but answer them.
“[F]rom the time I came back, I have felt that we have to actually say, ‘We have a point of view about something and we feel strongly about it, we just have to be assertive about it and say it positively,’” Stengel said. “I don’t think people are looking for us to ask questions, I think they’re looking for us to answer questions.”
(Excerpt) Read more at businessandmedia.org ...
He could make the top five list of “Guys who look like old lesbians.”
and I will continue to hide it beneath the other family oriented magazines at the dentist or doctors office.
“Stengel”, sounds like a Nazi name to me. Wasn’t this puke’s dad on the other side or something?
Those heroic Marines in that photo were fighting for freedom. The fraudulent enviromental movement is a front for the Watermelon (green outside, red inside) Marxists who would use this hoax to impose bureaucratic tyranny and depotism upon us.
PING!
An honest statement from the MSM at last!
Caveat Emptor applies far more to Time Magazine than it does for Exxon.
An honest statement from the MSM at last!Stengel said. “But this notion that journalism is objective, or must be objective is something that has always bothered me – because the notion about objectivity is in some ways a fantasy. I don’t know that there is as such a thing as objectivity.”excellent ping, PGalt.
Caveat Emptor applies far more to Time Magazine than it does for Exxon.
True, as far as it goes. But the actual issue of objectivity arose only with the advent of the Associated Press, which was by design a monopoly on the transmission of news via telegraph. It systematically crowded out and smothered competitors - and, naturally enough, was challenged as an unprecedented concentration of public influence in a single organization. The AP responded that it included newspapers of all points of view, so it was objective.The first fallacy in that argument is of course that whoso takes his own objectivity for granted is by that very assumption the most subjective of men.
The second fallacy is that the famously independent voices of the various newspapers would or even could remain independent after they were associated. It was impossible for that to be true, because the AP transformed the business model of the newspaper business. In the founding era newspapers were openly partisan affairs, and - since in any event they had no news source which in principle their readers did not have independent access to, they typically went heavy on commentary and frank opinion - and most of them were weekly rather than daily affairs. That changed to a certain extent in the big cities which in about 1830 got high speed presses which were capable of very high volumes of production and therefore motivated newspapers to aim for a broader market than a highly idiosyncratic editorial perspective would be able to attract.
But the advent of the AP newswire put every AP newspaper in the business of reporting news which in principle their local public did not immediately have access to. That put every newspaper, and its readership, in the fog of breaking news. Say rather, the public had always been in a fog of very sparse information about the world outside the local area - and the newspapers suddenly had the ability to sell access to that outside world. But only on the terms of, not only the local newspaper itself, but of the Associated Press. If the AP didn't report a particular event, no newspaper remote from that event would even have the opportunity to report it. And even if the AP did report it, every newspaper was of course at liberty to either blare it out on a banner headline on the front page, bury it in the middle of the paper, or ignore it completely.
And lest there be any illusion that the AP was ever objective, the history of its relation with the Lincoln Administration puts paid to it. Because in the midst of the turmoil of the Civil War, the last thing the Lincoln Administration needed was the sort of journalism to which we have lately been so uncomfortably accustomed. It was all the administration could do to accomplish the mission in which it was immersed. To have simultaneously contended with the sort rolling PR assault which modern Republican presidents take as part of the territory - and which to his everlasting credit Ronald Reagan was able to overcome even as he whipped inflation, got the country going again, tamed the energy crisis, and transcended Communism - would have sunk the Union. Which was a near-run thing in any event, since General McClellan and his peace platform would have won the election of 1864 but for the Union battlefield successes of that year. Lincoln would not allow the Union to be sunk. So he coopted the AP, giving it favored access to the telegraph offices and to administration officials - in return for censorship, and self-censorship, of news inconvenient to the administration.
So the AP was scarcely out of its cradle when it was deeply enmeshed in the systematically tendentious reporting of the news. And the same sort of thing was endemic to the contemporaneous reporting of World War II. For example, the Roosevelt Administration censored the news of the fact that many hundreds of ships were lost to German U-boats in less than a year after Pearl Harbor - before the Navy had sunk a single U-boat. (None of which information was, of course, any secret to the Germans).
Certainly a case can be made in favor of the censorship which went on on both of those occasions - and, I doubt not, during WWI as well - but what is undeniable is that the same sort of self-censorship which occurred then is not in place now. It is not the bad news for the Bush Administration which is not reported, but the good news. Journalists have been falling all over themselves to emphasize the casualties of the Iraq occupation. Was it objective to emphasize the positive during "good" wars? If so, it cannot be objective to dote lovingly on Abu Graib and to emphasize the 1000th, the 2000th, the 3000th, and lately the 4000th death of US servicemen in Iraq.
Time is entirely within its rights to be an openly partisan magazine like National Review or The Nation. But it need not necessarily expect to have any more circulation than those publications, either. As to the general concept of journalistic objectivity, that is a patent fraud, and it could never be otherwise. But it is a fraud which has been supported by an unremitting propaganda campaign since the memory of living man runneth not to the contrary. Credence accorded to that fraudulent campaign against common sense amounts to a flaw in American culture.
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 . . .The Market for Conservative-Based NewsIt is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity,
and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith
BTTT
And so it is with Liberals. They will make endless excuses and will cite endless forms of misdirection, but in the end, it is the same. They have no regard for decency. They have absolutely no grasp of what duty, honor and country means.
Liberals do not esteem America, therefore they deal with her carelessly and recklessly, and it clearly shows. Patriots and those who just love this country instantly see their contempt while their own disdain for America blinds them to their own callous acts.
Good post.
Excellent!
I will join in that effort as well!
I hope a great many will take the time to read it!
At least he is honest about it.
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