[conservatism_IS_compassion]

My analysis is that

• Journalism is about news. Bad news. Bad news which reflects poorly on society. The word “gospel” actually means good news - and the gospel is two thousand years old. Good things typically are openly planned; someone decides to build a house, and successfully completes it without much notice. Let that same house burn down, tho - and that is unplanned (and bad), and the public takes notice. On any given weekday, many scores of millions of Americans may get up in the morning with purpose, go to work and have their worth validated, and safely return home without public notice. The opposite - unemployment, dissatisfaction, labor strife - makes news.
• News which reflects poorly on society naturally suggests that “there oughta be a law.” It is inherently pro-big government, and thus inherently grist for socialist propaganda.
• The wire services created, and sustain, virtual meetings of all major US journalists. Back in 1776 Adam Smith noted that “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 follows that you have to be naive as a babe to assume that the entirety of major journalism can have been continually meeting, virtually, for a century and a half without having long since creating “a conspiracy against the public.” Journalism is dominated by a cartel.
• A conspiracy against the public by journalists would, logically, entail a self-serving propaganda campaign. You know, such as, “Journalists are objective.”
• “Journalists are objective” is a logical fallacy, in that objectivity is a laudable goal but not a state of being.
• Worse, “Journalists are objective” tells journalists not to venture into territory in which their objectivity would be likely to be challenged. And the way to assure that is to be certain that you are going along with all other journalists, and therefore will get along with all other journalists.
• Since “Journalists are objective”, is a fallacy, the propaganda campaign to that effect actually redefines the word “objective” to mean “in accord with the journalism cartel consensus.” Not only so, but the journalist cartel has also redefined other words to the same effect. A century ago “liberal” meant “in accord with the thinking of Jim Robinson, now it means the same as journalism’s ersatz definition of “objective.” The same can be said about “progressive,” “moderate,” “centrist” - just about any political virtue you can name.

  The only difference in the cartel-induced meaning of any of those words lies in their usage. “Objective” is to be applied, exclusively and always, to working journalists. Whereas any of the other virtue-signaling words can be applied to any non-journalist who goes along with and therefore gets along with the journalism cartel, but are never applied to any working journalist.

• In sum, journalists are “liberals” in everything but name, and they are united by the “conspiracy” naturally flowing from the wire services. Given the tremendous difference in the cost of telegraphy bandwidth from the Nineteenth Century to the Internet Age, and the fact that the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890 after the founding of the first wire services, if the wire services didn’t exist you couldn’t get permission from the government to create them. They should be sued into oblivion.

  Since journalists are “liberals” in everything but name, journalists never libel “liberals,” but they libel conservatives consistently and mercilessly. This means that the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision - which generally prevents government officials from suing for libel - actually prevents conservatives from suing for libel. Conservatives are forced to seek redress in the teeth of that unanimous Warren Court decision. Justice Scalia points the way:

  Scalia argued his view on “textualism” was the ultimate defense of the First Amendment. In March 2012, an Associated Press report said he told an audience at Wesleyan University that the Court’s early justices would be “astonished that the notion of the Constitution changes to mean whatever each successive generation would like it to mean. … In fact, it would be not much use to have a First Amendment, for example, if the freedom of speech included only what some future generation wanted it to include. That would guarantee nothing at all.”

  That opinion didn’t prevent Scalia from harsh criticism of what is widely viewed as one of the essential court rulings protecting free speech and a free press — the 1964 decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.

  At the Newseum in the Aspen Institute 2011 Washington Ideas Forum, Scalia said the landmark ruling meant “you can libel public figures without liability so long as you are relying on some statement from a reliable source, whether it’s true or not.

  “Now the old libel law used to be (that) you’re responsible, you say something false that harms somebody’s reputation, we don’t care if it was told to you by nine bishops, you are liable,” Scalia said. “New York Times v. Sullivan just cast that aside because the Court thought in modern society, it’d be a good idea if the press could say a lot of stuff about public figures without having to worry. And that may be correct, that may be right, but if it was right it should have been adopted by the people. It should have been debated in the New York Legislature and the New York Legislature could have said, ‘Yes, we’re going to change our libel law.’”

  But in Times v. Sullivan, Scalia said the Supreme Court, under Justice Earl Warren, “… simply decided, ‘Yes, it used to be that … George Washington could sue somebody that libeled him, but we don’t think that’s a good idea anymore.’”

  JUSTICE SCALIA: THE 45 WORDS — AND ORIGINAL MEANING — OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT

  Republicans should sue the journalism cartel for libel in direct defiance of Sullivan. It should be up to that cartel to prove that it actually is "a reliable source.” But evidence to the contrary abounds, and proving an absence of perspective - “bias” in their work is not a practical undertaking.

  And it must not be forgotten that the federal government - the FCC - is involved in the journalism business, and should be told by SCOTUS to butt out. So the FCC should be a defendant in the lawsuit.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

It is necessary - and possible IMHO - to sue the MSM into oblivion. And to sue to legally constrain the FCC and the FEC as well.

• Sue wire service journalism - wire services and members/subscribers - on grounds that the wire services have created an illegal cartel. Each wire service is a continual virtual meeting of its members/subscribers. And as Adam Smith noted in Wealth of Nations, “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.” Name the FCC and the FEC also, for putting the imprimatur of the government on the cartel’s functioning.

• Sue individual journalists, news organizations, and wire services for enormous damages for libel. Note that:
  1. The self-serving propaganda that “journalists are objective” could not possibly be true, in fact is not true because journalism is consciously about bad news reflecting poorly on society and well on government, and in fact has the effect of politically homogenizing all journalism.

  2. Pace the Warren Court’s unanimous 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision, the First Amendment does not modify libel law. At all.

     As Antonin Scalia explained, the Bill of Rights was carefully crafted to be a guarantee that no right of any American was, or would in future be, changed by the Constitution. The right to redress if libeled not excluded.

     Think: How else satisfy the requirement of the Antifederalists for a list of rights and the Federalists’ concern that listing some rights would denigrate others? The enumerated rights are not created, and not modified, by being enumerated. Instead they are enumerated because tyrants had historically denied them because of their political potency.

     Since the Bill of Rights had to be ratified to protect the political viability of the Constitution itself, the proposed BoR was not the place to promote changes in the rights of the people as then understood. Not when you were selling the proposition that the Constitution made no non-explicit changes in those rights. Specifically, the expression “the freedom . . . of the press” referred to freedom of the press as it then existed. Freedom limited by laws including that of libel.

“The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests.” ― Alexander Hamilton

For “men” read, “the journalism cartel.” The tyrannical impulses in American society are novel in the sense that they come not directly from a tyrant but from the media cartel acting on the people and inducing them to think they want tyranny. Prominent among the cartel's “arts” is the redefinition of terms:

1. ”objective” is a term by which the cartel means only “going along perfectly with the journalism cartel - and therefore getting along perfectly with the journalism cartel.” And the cartel allows it to be used only to describe journalists in good standing with the cartel.

2. all other adjectives which have positive nominal meanings in a political sense - e.g.,
   • ”liberal”
   • ”progressive”
   • ”moderate”
   • ”centrist”
   - also are redefined by the cartel to mean nothing other than “going along perfectly with the journalism cartel - and therefore getting along perfectly with the journalism cartel.” However, the journalism cartel will never permit the use of such terms to a working member of the cartel. That would blow their cover.

3. ”conservative” is the term which is applied to any and all who do not get along with the journalism cartel by going along the journalism cartel. “Conservative” was never a political virtue in America; so-called “conservatives” conserve liberty and in that sense promote change. So-called “conservatives” actually promote progress of, by, and for the people. Prominently including the use of “fossil” fuels or the careful use of nuclear fission energy (whereas, going by their record regarding natural gas, so-called “progressives” would oppose controlled fusion energy if it threatened to subvert their alarmism).

   A century ago there was an adjective which described Freepers accurately - but that word, then having a very positive nominal meaning in the political sense, was coopted into meaning essentially its opposite (in the 1920s, according to Safire’s New Political Dictionary). Astonishing but true, that word was “liberal."