|
"Print is dead... Get over it."-- John Squires, President, Sports Illustrated, Nov. 2004 quoted in the Washington Post 2-20-2005 "...the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto. Now it's pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things." -- Howard Fineman, "The 'Media Party' is over" MSNBC, 1-11-05 "...the mainstream media's monopoly on information is over." --Peggy Noonan, WSJ, Jan. 13, 2005 "Sept. 9, 2004, will be remembered as a paradigm-shifting day in media history. That was the day the 'blogosphere' took down CBS News" -- James Pinkerton, Newsday, Sept. 14, 2004 "The New York Times’ account of the [CNN chief] Eason Jordan resignation provides a general recap of the story they didn’t cover, along with a good dose of excuses and justifications ..." -- Lorie Byrd, Polipundit, 2-12-2005 "The New York Times, CBS and the BBC all had to fire lead personnel over the fact that they just damn well made stuff up out of whole cloth in service to an obviously partisan political agenda."-- New Sisyphus, 3-15-05 "The media can now wistfully reflect on their glory days of the 1970's when the majority of people actually bought into their bullshit."-- Laura K. Van Onymous "Newspapers do have a few things going for them....you can't line the bird cage with the Internet or wrap fish in a cable news channel." -- Neal Boortz |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
"Let the governmental camel stick its nose inside the broadcast tent, and the entire camel, foul smell and all, may follow." -- David Shaw .
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| . |
.
|
|
| MSM: Mainstream Media "Both The Elements of Journalism [by Kovach and Rosenstiel], and The News About the News [by Downie and Kaiser] take nourishment from something called The Committee of Concerned Journalists, an organization of 1,500 worried people chaired by ... Kovach and Rosenstiel. Elements, in fact, kicks off with the committee’s creation myth, which positively oozes with unconscious elitism. ... uniformity of opinion extends throughout the Concerned Journalists movement." -- Matt Welch "The gravest threat to freedom of the press is from the press itself--in its longing for a respectable place in the established political and economic order, in its fear of the reaction that boldness and independence will always evoke. Self-censorship silences as effectively as a government decree, and we have seen it far more often." -- Tom Wicker, On Press, 1978 "There's ... an overweening sense of self-importance in the Washington and national political press. A political reporter is never really an outsider. We used to be more of an outsider... When I graduated, I wanted a job somewhere, anywhere. Now they all want to work for The New York Times or The Washington Post. They've never worked for a paper that's part of a community ..." -- Charles W. Bailey, former Minneapolis Tribune editor and Washington bureau chief "The closeness between reporters and [their sources in Washington] is worse now than it's ever been. And I think that it's worse because it's hypocritical ....What's worse is the idea of being a part of the system. What you write, and what you don't write, [helps to] cultivate the kinds of sources that you want." -- Sam Fulwood III, Los Angeles Times Washington correspondent Mike Gartner, owner of The Daily Tribune in Ames, Iowa, and former president of NBC News, feels the relationships are too close: "Did you see the Bobby Ray Inman stuff? You and I were the only journalists in America who weren't calling Bobby Ray Inman every day to say, 'We're thinking of running this. What do you think?' Several people had made deals with him on covering the CIA. It's just too cozy. What happens is, you never turn over his rocks. "If you're always on the A party list and seated next to the Secretary of Defense, you never turn over his rocks. This group ingratiates themselves by feeding the press morsels. TV talk shows make it worse. You a call a politician for a morsel. He knows why you're calling. He drops a morsel and then you're in his debt." -- all from the First Amendment Center "The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists. When professional antagonists become after-hours drinking buddies, they are not likely to turn each other in." -- Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1973 Some feel that journalists and politicians get too palsy -- enjoying the same political game, going to the same parties, appearing on the same talk shows -- and that journalists are thus reluctant to write about and possibly burn their political pals. Reporters traveling with a candidate during an election campaign begin to identify with the candidate and realize their chances of moving up to the White House beat and stardom are greater if "their" candidate wins. Howard Kurtz wrote about that phenomenon during the Bill Clinton campaign, in his book Media Circus: The Trouble with America's Newspapers "Everybody denounces pack journalism, including the men who form the pack. After awhile, they begin to believe the same rumors, subscribe to the same theories, and write the same stories. It is the classic villain of every campaign year. Many reporters and journalism professors blame it for everything that is shallow, obvious, tawdry, misleading or dull in American campaign coverage. Campaign journalism is, by definition, pack journalism; to follow a candidate, you must join a pack of other reporters; even the most independent journalist cannot completely escape the pressures of the pack." -- Tim Crouse, The Boys On the Bus, 1972 "The presstitute is clearly on drugs." -- Squantos, June 5, 2005 |
| "The great irony is that the most fundamental right to individual sovereignty—private property—is the one most highly questioned. Property rights are usually construed narrowly to cover only things that can be exchanged, given away, or abandoned. But since a property right is the right to use and dispose of something, it actually has a far broader meaning. One begins with a right to one’s own person, including one’s body and energies. Indeed, this is that basic right that gives rise to the right to appropriate unowned objects from nature and to exchange peacefully acquired property with willing traders. In fact, without property rights there are no rights at all. "Consider the right to freedom of the press. Publishing a newspaper requires land, printing equipment, paper, ink, and numerous other material objects. Without property rights in those assets, how could anyone exercise freedom of the press?" |
"It's fairly common for commentators to adopt a breathless tone as they report entirely unremarkable facts. Rarely, however, do they actually say they're breathless, as the Washington Post's Colbert King does:
"Well, if about 50% of all reported violent crimes are against women, guess what percentage are against men? That's right, about 50%! Help, we can't breathe!" -- James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2002 |
|
| “Most journalists are so stupid, the fact that they are also catty, lazy, vengeful and humorless is often overlooked.” -- Ann Coulter | |
|
|
| "I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state ... I had to learn the facts, and despite one's inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one's mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were." -- William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich | |
|
So you think The New York Times distorts the news? Hah! See THIS diss'n of Michael Moore. |
| National Journal's Hotline Blogometer interviews Polipundit 6/16/2005: Q. How often, or do you ever, read a newspaper in its dead-tree (i.e. print) form? Q. How do you see the new media and old media affecting and influencing each other in the next five years? |
|
Sulzberger, Richard "Thwack" Sulzberger, Leonard "Spank" Sulzberger, and Harriet "Wedgie" Sulzberger-Smith. -- from "Scrappy Local Newspaper Struggles For Survival," HERE.. |