Posted on 05/09/2009 2:18:24 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
The shield legislation is "a solution in search of a problem," says Kyl. "There is no demonstrable need for this. It's not as if a big dagger is hanging over anybody's head."So why is the bill moving toward enactment? One reason is the major media have been lobbying furiously for the legislation, which has lingered in Congress since 2006. What's odd, though, is that the press has scarcely covered the progress of the measure, perhaps because it amounts to a special favor granted by politicians. Also, the White House decided an enhanced privilege would be a nice present for the press.
When the First Amendment was proposed and ratified, newspapers were mostly weeklies, and some had no deadline at all and just went to press when the printer was good and ready. That was because the newspapers of the day didn't have privileged access to a "newswire," so they were as much about the opinion of the newspapers' printers as anything. So the newspapers of the pre-Civil War period were famously opinionated, and the public was little given to assuming that any of them were objective.That changed with the advent of the telegraph and the aggressive monopoly distributer of news to newspapers, the Associated Press. Since the Civil War, newspapers have been dominated by "straight news," and the opinion portion was, nominally, relegated to the "editorial page" ghetto. But that did not eliminate any perspective from the news - it promoted the perspective that the bad news of the moment was more important than the 2000 year old good news of the gospel. Far from promoting freedom of the press, the AP is a borg, incorporating "presses" into itself and homogenizing them. A press can be free or it can be associated - not both.
And an "associated press" which promotes privileges for itself is not a friend of the liberty of the people.
The Facilitating Leaks Act
Weekly Standard | January 4, 2010 (print) | Fred Barnes
The plain fact is that "the press," which was famously a cacophony of independent voices before the Civil War, transformed itself into the notoriously homogeneous - and notoriously "liberal" - "media" of today. And I confess that I puzzled relatively fruitlessly over the timing and causes of that transformation for quite a long time. After decades of consideration of the matter, I happened upon a book about the use of the telegraph during the Civil War and, in the reading of it, was struck by a blinding flash of the obvious. The telegraph had a tremendous impact on journalism.I investigated, and learned that the telegraph really started to affect journalism with the founding of the Associated Press (initially the New York Associated Press) in 1848. Newspapers had routinely picked up stories from other newspapers before then - but the AP newswire systematically revolutionized the sharing of news among its members. Not to mention that the AP itself writes a lot of news itself, and always has.
In the transformed newspaper business, the players had to be in an expensive news service - and the AP worked very aggressively to assure that you had to be in the Associated Press news service. It aggressively pushed each new telegraph line to sign an exclusive deal with the AP for the transmission of news - to such an extent that in 1945 it was found by SCOTUS to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The members of the AP naturally had to maximize the value of their expensive AP newswire, and the value of the newswire depended on the credence which the public assigned to the AP stories which the members published. This motivated the members of the AP to promote the idea that journalists - not just their own reporters but all reporters - were objective.
The hegemony of the AP did not escape notice and criticism, but the AP argued that its members were famous for not agreeing on anything, and the AP was therefore - you guessed it - "objective." But believing yourself to be objective is the essence of subjectivity; the only way to attempt to actually be objective is to rigorously analyze the reasons why you might not be objective.
Claiming to be objective is the very opposite of making a serious effort to be objective, and is the mark of the propagandist. And yet belief in the objectivity of AP journalism - the result of a century and a half of unremitting propaganda - is endemic in America. And yet American "conservatives" - we are actually liberals according to the historical meaning of the term - have difficulty understanding why they find successful political argumentation against socialists to be difficult! The fact that we operate under a banner - "conservatism" - which is quite different from our actual liberal attitudes is illustrative of the larger phenomenon that we conduct our political discussions not in English but in American Newspeak which is imposed on us by AP journalism. I have my own Newspeak-English dictionary:
Associated Press journalism is conceited and jealous/hypercritical of anyone who works to a bottom line: the businessman, the military man, the policeman. The interest of Associated Press journalism is in promoting itself and in alternately flattering and frightening its audience in order to attract attention. That is why AP journalism assigns negative labels to businessmen, policemen, et al - and positive labels those who are critical of them.
- objective :
- reliably promoting the interests of Big Journalism. (usage: always applied to journalists who are members in good standing; never applied to anyone but a journalist)
- liberal :
- see "objective," except that the usage is reversed: (usage: never applied to any working journalist)
- progressive :
- see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").
- moderate:
- see "liberal." (usage: same as for "liberal").
- centrist :
- see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").
- conservative :
- rejecting the idea that journalism is a higher calling than providing food, shelter, clothing, fuel, and security; adhering to the dictum of Theodore Roosevelt that: "It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena (usage: applies to people who - unlike those labeled liberal/progressive/moderate/centrist, cannot become "objective" by getting a job as a journalist, and probably cannot even get a job as a journalist.)(antonym:"objective")
- right-wing :
- see, "conservative."
- public :
- government
The Associated Press has produced a hypertrophied journalism - and hypertrophied AP journalism has produced hypertrophied government.
Journalism and ObjectivityWhy the Associated Press is Pernicious to the Public Interest
The Market for Conservative-Based News
lbryce:Sounds like a question only a Democrat would ask.St_Thomas_AquinasOr a WSJ Collaborator.They're as bad as the NYT, now.
It was Obama that was willing to shut down payments to military and seniors if the house did not give him everything he demanded. How could the fail to make that point?
The question to ask Gerald Seib is, “Did President Reagan shut down the government? And if so, exactly how did he shut down the government back in the 1980s, and in what sense did Congress shut down the government this time?The answer is, of course, that people who are Democrats in fact (whether card-carrying or not) will blame the Republican party to any dispute with a Democrat party. The same is not true in reverse; Republicans will admit that “it takes two to make an argument,” and that a government shutdown is always the result of a confrontation between two opposing parties, each having control of a branch of government.
To the extent that “Reagan shut down the government” in the 1980s, and “the Republicans shut down the government” in 2013, the person or institution who is telling the story is taking the Democrat side of the argument for granted in both - generally in all - cases.
Yes, the WSJ is “as bad as the NYT” - but then, it always was, everywhere except the Editorial Page. And I assume that this piece, tho in fact an opinion piece, was not published on the editorial page. Because the “liberalism” endemic to all wire service journalism, including that of the WSJ, lead the editors outside the conservative redoubt of the official editorial page to create their own “shadow editorial page” from time to time. And that has historically had the moniker, “Politics and Policy” IIRC - whereas the editorial page itself is headed, “Review and Outlook.” And rest assured, I have seen this byline before in “Politics and Policy” more than once - but I do not recall seeing that byline on the op-ed to the “Review and Outlook” editorial page. And it does not appear there today - I looked. The writer is the WSJ Washington Bureau Chief - not a writer for the editorial page.
As to why our reporting is all left wing, I puzzled over that for decades before happening on a book,the mere title of which gave me a blinding flash of the obvious - the telegraph surely must have changed journalism, and was therefore a candidate for causing journalism to swerve firmly into leftism. A bit of reading about the AP:
- Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails:
- The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War
by Tom Wheelerbrought home the fact that the AP was aggressively monopolistic from its inception.
My own analysis is that all journalism has the tendency play "the critic” vs. “the man who is actually in the arena,” and that must always push reporters towards leftism. And wire services - the AP is the biggie, even if there are others - constitute a continuous virtual meeting of journalists. The one Adam Smith quote that “liberals” like is,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. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Book I, Ch 10)But if in the above quote you replace “people of the same trade,” with “journalists,” and if you recognize that they “meet together” via the wire services, you conclude that the wire services empower journalists to follow their own natural predilection without check by other journalists. And to the extent that journalists lust after stories which put journalists and journalism in a favorable light, it is only natural that their tendency is toward advocacy for the proposition that you and I need the protection of journalists from “the man who is actually in the arena” - from, that is, the producers of all the goods and services upon which we depend. Which is, IMHO, the defining characteristic of leftism (which in America has since the 1920s termed itself “liberalism”).Thus, my tagline:“Liberalism” is a conspiracy against the public by wire-service journalism.http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3080007/posts?page=75#75
Yes - but actually, it is insufficient in the age of mass communications. We need, we must have,a free pressfree and independent presses.In fact, SCOTUS is wrong in calling money “speech.” Talk is cheap - it is printing presses, ink, and paper which cost money. And don’t question the connection between freedom of the literal printing press of the founding era and freedom of the Internet and cable - yes, and over-the-airwaves broadcast - of today.
Article 1 Section 8.implies that the framers anticipated that printing press would be improved upon.The Congress shall have power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries . . .
Amendment 9 -This directly rebuts the notion that the First Amendment is a ceiling over our liberties - it is intended only as floor beneath them. The framers did provide a means of adjusting the unregulated advance of technology on the press, but it would be really hard to get an amendment to the First Amendment ratified.The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The reason we are troubled by “the media” is simple; Adam Smith condemned the source of the problem three generations before it arose:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public - Adam Smith, Wealth of NationsWire service journalism originated in 1848 with the founding of the New York Associated Press - soon renamed simply, “the Associated Press.” The members of the AP - any and all wire services are the same - are in a continual virtual meeting of “people of the same trade.” The AP newswire has been going for well over a century and a half, and the inevitable “conspiracy against the public” arose before it was a half a century old.The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires. - Adam Smith, Theory of Moral SentimentsThat motive operates on all journalists; it is their reason for existence. Thus they make the absurd claim of their own objectivity based on their mutual-admiration-society AP membership.The effect is that journalists are free to promote the idea which is the exact opposite of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous dictum, “It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . .” And what is the most pithy expression of the opposite of that dictum? Elizabeth Warren announced it, and Obama and Hillary! echo it:
You didn’t build that.Which is obviously cynicism - and socialist dogma.
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