[metesky]

The more one reads about him, the more one realizes that there were at least two Jeffersons, the public Jefferson who is today always quoted as a paragon of one thing or another and the private Jefferson who bought newspaper publishers to slander his opponents and sneakily put the knife into the backs of more than one of his fellow Founders.

[sig226]

But that makes me love the guy even more!

[LZ_Bayonet]

"The more one reads about him, the more one realizes that there were at least two Jeffersons, the public Jefferson who is today always quoted as a paragon of one thing or another and the private Jefferson who bought newspaper publishers to slander his opponents and sneakily put the knife into the backs of more than one of his fellow Founders."

But that would not be hypocrisy, would it? IMHO-Jefferson was advocating "partisan journalism", which everyone would understand was partisan and the content of which should be evaluated in light of other "partisan" views. Partisan journalists would be understood to be biased, and to engage in attacks that might be viewed as slander. But, as the article indicates, today we have self described "scientific journalists", who purport to be "scientific" but who, like everyone else, are incapable of producing unbiased content; and the vast majority of MSM are of the Left.

Unfortunately, many Americans buy the "scientific journalists" outright lie that they are, and are capable of, being "scientific".

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

the private Jefferson who bought newspaper publishers to slander his opponents and sneakily put the knife into the backs of more than one of his fellow Founders.

Hamilton and Jefferson went at it hammer and tongs, and it is not necessary to accord Hamilton the status of victim and not that of aggressor.

The lesson to be found in the political contest between the two, as they waged it in their newspapers, is that the First Amendment was written to protect a "press" which nobody at the time would have claimed was objective. In fact, you can look at the battling newspapers and see in them nascent political parties. The reason you don't see that today is that we have in the Associated Press a gigantic propaganda machine which is the Establishment, and it calls its own politics "objectivity."

And you and I absorbed that propaganda with our mothers' milk - that Establishment was founded a century and a half ago and has long since become part of our culture. Which makes it a redoubtable opponent - but no less of an invidious assault on democracy, and no less worthy of destruction by any possible legal means, because of its power.