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