The Media Wants A Scalp (They Need To Get Over It, We Won)

The media and their "journalists" have zero credibility with anyone interested in TRUTH. What complete integrity-free losers and liars. They will never be trusted again. Unfortunately, there are some who do trust them for "news". I find them to be an embarrassment to the First Amendment.

The First Amendment isn’t what is embarrassed; 1A is not predicated on the assumption that journalism is objective. It guarantees freedom - and freedom can be abused:
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others. - Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
Rather, it is the homogeneity among our presses that is the fundamental problem. The premise of 1A is free and independent presses - and we have that only on the Internet. Why is that the case?
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. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
Do journalists meet together? Certainly they can read each other’s output, and that ineluctably constitutes “meeting” of a sort. But the real explanation of the thoroughgoing homogeneity of the press (plural not implied) lies in the fact of wire services, especially the AP. The Associated Press is a continuous virtual meeting of all major journalism outlets. It dates back to 1848 - only four years after Morse’s 1844 demonstration of the Baltimore-Washington telegraph - and it has been going strong ever since.
The danger in such concentrated propaganda power should be obvious, and indeed it was noted in the Nineteenth Century. Back then, newspapers were fractiously independent and didn’t agree on much of anything. So the AP and its members put out the theory that since the AP membership was so variegated in opinion, the AP itself was - wait for it - objective. Wow, that didn’t last!
It is well known, even to reporters, that bad news sells, and the only two kinds of reports which are contained in newspapers are bad news - and advertisements. To claim that bad news is “objective” is to mark yourself as a cynic. Journalism is inherently cynical about society and (concomitantly, by implication of the Thomas Paine quote above) naive about government. Which the reader will recognize as a perfect description of a “liberal."

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