Posted on 05/12/2008 5:31:32 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
I want . . Freedom of the press to be the right not to be lied to.
You are confused. So very seriously confused about the First Amendment, that you are not thinking any more clearly about it than I was before the mid-1990s, when I began to see through the system by which the "journalistic objectivity" con is perpetrated. And since I was already in my fifties by then, I have every reason to understand how you might see things the way you do.
Freedom of the press is much more like "the right to lie to you" than it is like "the right not to be lied to." And that is a good thing.
In the founding era, nobody claimed that a newspaper was objective - no more so than you would take me seriously if I claimed to be objective - or I, you. That was because the newspapers were actually independent of each other back then. Independent of each other, but not independent of the political factions of the day. For example, one paper was sponsored by Thomas Jefferson, to attack the politics of Alexander Hamilton - and to reply to the attacks on him by the newspaper sponsored by Hamilton himself. The idea of either of those newspapers ceding to the other respect for being "objective" - which after all implies wisdom - is laughable.
Why, then, does our culture have the idea that journalism should be, even could be, objective? Simple - the telegraph and the Associated Press transformed the newspaper business - and our culture - beginning back in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Prior to the advent of the telegraph, newspaper printers got their news about the same way that the other people in their towns got theirs - by word of mouth and by getting physical copies of other newspapers, delivered by sailboat and horse-drawn wagon. So in principle, any given local might easily have heard any given news item before the local newspaper printed it. Accordingly, most newspapers were not dailies, may were weeklies and some had no deadline at all and just printed when the printer was good and ready. Making it all the more likely that people would get news by word of mouth before the newspaper reported it to them.
Then along came the Associated Press. Suddenly the newspaper printer had a direct line to newspapers in all the other towns and cities of the country - and to reporters working directly for the AP who aggressively got the news from ships arriving from Europe before those ships even docked. The AP was an aggressive monopolizer of the use of the telegraph for transmission of the news; it cut exclusive deals with the telegraph lines which froze competitors out. That made the AP the target of criticism and challenge, since it was so obviously an unprecedented concentration of nationwide public influence. The AP proceeded to demonstrate that influence by deflecting those charges by asserting that since the Association was composed of member newspapers which famously did not agree on much of anything, the Association was - wait for it - "objective."
That was, is, and always will be absurd. First, of course, because thinking yourself to be objective is arguably the best possible definition of the word "subjectivity." And secondly, because the AP, and all of those "independent-thinking" papers which made up the AP, was selling something. The same thing - news, before you could get it from any other source. So the AP and every one of its members had the identical incentive to sell the idea that journalism - all journalism - was objective. How else to vouch for the news which suddenly was a pervasive, dominant theme of your newspaper which had not actually had that function before - when that news did not originate with your newspaper's own reporters but with those of a nominal competitor in a distant city? So with the AP, newspapers suddenly had not only the motive but the opportunity to claim objectivity as long as they did not compete with any other AP newspaper on the basis of objectivity claims. And the more opportunity they had to make that claim, the less compunction was necessary about taking care to vindicate the claim by actually being objective.
So what is the actual effect of the claim by all of journalism that all of journalism is objective? The actual effect of the claim of objectivity, running as it has for a century and a half, is to establish in custom the idea that journalists are a breed apart from we-the-people - more virtuous, more knowledgeable, and more civic-minded - and thus entitled not only to be listened to with respect by people who pay for the privilege but entitled to special privileges such as "shield" laws granting reporters the right to withhold the names of sources from courts of law which any citizen would be under legal compunction to yield up. And entitled to special rights to speak out about candidates for public office, to be denied, under McCain-Feingold, to we-the-people. Is there any real virtue in having our government officers selected by vote of the whole people on a date certain, when it would be far more manageable to simply read in the newspapers what the newspapers say is in the public interest? Or, for that matter, what the newspapers say the public thinks, based on "public opinion polls?" From the POV of the journalist - or anyone who thinks that journalists are more objective and hence wiser and more virtuous than the public at large - the answer would have to be, "No." What could be more patent than that the conceit of journalistic objectivity is profoundly subversive of democratic principle?
Before the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine and the rise of the Internet generally and FreeRepublic.com in particular, the public discourse was largely controlled by monolithic AP journalism. Journalism had extremely broad latitude to say whatever they wanted so say, and call that "objectivity." The most fundamental desire of journalism is to attract an attentive audience, and to be able to exploit that ability for fun and profit. The linchpin of the influence of AP journalism being perishable news - news that will soon no longer be new - journalism inexorably presses upon the public the idea that the news is important. The more important you think the news is, the less attention you will pay to things which change less, or not at all. That is why AP journalism is inherently anti conservative. Journalism also is maximally important when there is a crisis requiring public notice and action. But of course a putative crisis "requiring" government action implies that the powers-that-be have not already taken whatever action is needed, which is why the public should attend to the journalist and influence the politician accordingly. Again that makes the journalist anti conservative.
Another way of stating the above paragraph is to note that journalism's rules include "There's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper," and "If it bleeds, it leads." The former rule simply says that only what the public doesn't know yet matters, and the latter says that the bad news is most important. Journalism's rules also enjoin the editor that "Man Bites Dog" is news, and "Dog Bites Man" is not news. Which means that business-as-usual is not news, and if anything is reported in the newspaper it is probably not typical of what normally characterizes society. Most people never, in their entire lives, commit a murder or even know anyone who did commit a murder - but you will find plentiful stories about murders, and demands for the disarming of the general public, but rarely mention of how statistically rare murder actually is or how frequently the law-abiding use or, more commonly merely threaten to use, weapons to prevent crime. Likewise if our troops suffer casualties and deaths in Iraq that is news - even though the overwhelming majority of our troops return from Iraq without a scratch, and also with scant if any notice by journalism. All that comports with the rules of journalism - but the rules of journalism comport with the interest of journalism,. The rules of journalism purport to be about the public interest, but actually are only about interesting the public. And the two things are not only different, they are often in contradiction. So we see that journalism is anti conservative.
Since journalism not only has the inherent incentive to say what it wants to say, and since under the Associated Press regime journalism coheres as a single identifiable entity with identifiable interests and has a dominant position in the public discourse by which it is easily capable of stonewalling or otherwise dismissing contradiction, it is only natural to expect that journalism will promote those who scratch its back, and oppose those who do not. Conservatives are those who are least prone to scratch journalism's back. In this context the most satisfactory definition of American conservatism was implied in Theodore Roosevelt's famous speech at the Sorbonne in France in 1911:
"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . . who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds . . .That speech defines American conservatism - respect for those who take responsibility and work to a bottom line - and its opposite, which is criticism and second guessing of those who take responsibility to get things done. The latter is AP journalism's natural predilection, and it naturally tends to undercut the businessman and the policeman and the military man. There are others besides journalists who second guess the people who get things done, and journalists call them "liberals," or "progressives," or "moderates" - essentially any positive label but "objective." "Objective" is the label which journalists reserve to themselves but anyone who currently is labeled a "liberal" or a "progressive" can get a job as a journalist and instantly receive the "objective journalist" label without any change in his/her political perspective. George Stephanopolis is the outstanding example of the phenomenon; there is emphatically not any example of a conservative ever becoming recognized as an "objective" journalist.
It is interesting to note that American conservatives conserve a tradition which was started, not in the mists of time as in nations generally, but in a specific founding era in the second half of the Eighteenth Century. American constitutional norms do trace back to English antecedents, but they are codified as British and other nation's traditions have not been. The preamble to the US Constitution is a mission statement for America, and after all the specifics about providing for the common defense and so forth, it concludes with the nut of the matter, " . . . [to] secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity." American conservatives, therefore, conserve liberty - which, considering that liberty allows people to do things in different ways, and to do different things, than were done in the past, is such a unique form of "conservatism" that adherents to it have questioned whether that is even a proper term for it.
Indeed, the word which (anywhere outside the US, as recently as a decade ago) describes "American conservatism" is "liberalism." link Well one might ask, "how did the US acquire a definition of "liberalism" which is opposed to what is in America called "conservatism?" I make no pretense of specific knowledge of the event, but I have a hypothesis which I would defend against challenge until such time as more specific evidence is cited than has come to my attention. First, I would note that the term "socialism" would, on etymological grounds, be assumed to relate to support for organic societal decisions rather than - as we well know to be the actual case - relating to government control of things which in America are traditionally left to societal decisions made, perhaps most notably, in the marketplace. So I would argue that the term "socialism" was dishonestly coined by its proponents. And, everywhere outside the US, socialism was far more accepted by the public at large than it was in the US. We have had governments which were socialist in intent - FDR with his "New Deal" and LBJ and his "Great Society" perhaps most prominently - but at no time has a socialist run for POTUS openly advocating socialism as such, and won. Indeed there is exactly one avowedly Socialist senator - Bernie Sanders of Vermont - and he caucuses, surprise of surprises, with the senate Democrats. Essentially all of whom are readily classified as "liberals."
My inference is that since "socialism" was a failed brand name in the US but not elsewhere, people in the US who had the ability to rebrand socialist nostrums, and wanted to do so, seized upon the co-opting of the term for the political theory which already was popular. Associated Press journalism - especially in conjunction with academia, which as a group are critics and not doers just as reporters are - fits that bill exactly. It is a theory which seems to fit the facts as I know them perfectly - socialist-minded people had motive, in the US, and opportunity, to make the change. Certainly, or so it seems to me, it would have been impossible without at least the acquiescence, and probably the active support, of journalism. There would have been far less incentive for socialists in any other locale than the United States to make that change.
We see the process of the creation of a new word - a neologism - out of whole cloth springing out of the Democratic reaction to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign of 2004. In that case, the SBVT organization counted among its members the entire chain of command in Vietnam above John Kerry, and all his fellow officers on the other Swift Boats in Kerry's naval unit. If you wanted to ask anyone else but John Kerry and his subordinates on his boat, on the one hand, and the SBVT on the other, you would be embarrassed for want of anyone who could speak of about Kerry's performance on the basis of direct knowledge. You have to either believe one side or the other, and the SBVT group is far more numerous, and was more highly credentialed at the time and place in question, than Lt. John Kerry and his subordinates were. And their story was more consistent over time, and internally, than Kerry's story was - considering how certain Kerry was that he had been sent on a mission into Cambodia by a president who hadn't been inaugurated yet! Nevertheless, AP journalism and the rest of the Democratic smear machine has created, and imposed on the national dialog, the term "swiftboating" defined as the irresponsible and unjustified criticism of a Democrat.
So we have seen the imposition of a story line and a word meaning implemented before our very eyes, in real time. What reason is there to doubt that the same or similar things have been done in the past, when we didn't have the Internet and talk radio to help us keep our sanity when we thought that "objective" journalists were cooking the books! By the accounts of Ann Coulter and M. Stanton Evans, the coining of the word "McCarthyism" was done in exactly the same fashion, and with no more justification than the coining of "swiftboating" was done. And thus I have little doubt that the inversion of the meaning of the word "liberalism" was done the same way, by the same sort of people.
And "liberalism" is not the only word whose meaning has been inverted; the words "society" and "public" have received similar treatment. If you hear a "liberal" speak of "society" your very first impulse should be to question whether or not the speaker means anything other than government. Except in the absence of freedom, the two are not synonyms, but that is how the socialist "liberal" uses the word "society." And the socialist "liberal" uses the word "public" to exactly the same intent.
I made it about half way through before realizing I had no idea re the depth of character of T.R. Sadly, I haven't really been a student of history, but if by no other means, osmosis should have led me to some broader knowledge of Teddy Roosevelt. Based on this particular speech I gather "journalism" wasn't enamored with T.R and consequently his legacy never reached the level to which journalists felt he earned their admiration. Gotta wonder if like today, there wasn't an epidemic of TR derangement syndrome.
I gather "journalism" wasn't enamored with T.R and consequently his legacy never reached the level to which journalists felt he earned their admiration. Gotta wonder if like today, there wasn't an epidemic of TR derangement syndrome.
I dunno. Considering that TR's likeness is on Mount Rushmore, which was authorized by Congress on March 3, 1925, I doubt you could make that case.
Possible. BUT, and FWIW, I can even remember during my lifetime there existed Dimocrats who were actually practicing Americans, many from the great state of Texas. Not that long ago, really. On the other hand, if "journalists" had been polled for their opinion re TR??? In truth, I dunno either.
Outstanding. Thanks.
BTTT!
Bookmarked. We seem to live in a counterfeit world now....
*PING*
And it's going to get even more artificial as the first days of the Obama Administration get underway:
Remember the endless stories covering the plight of the Homeless from The New York Times and her Sob Sisters? You're probably not going to be reading or hearing as much about these folks from the MSM, although you'll see them out and about with their shabby clothing, stolen shopping carts, and cardboard signs.
And those unrepentant, greedy Corporate America CEOs? They too will vanish from the front pages and news wires. Only Republican Administrations produce these miscreants.
The crime rate? POOF! All gone. Everything and everybody's grooving.
...And on and on it will go. The only way to know what's really happening is to walk outside your door or tune in to Talk Radio.
Bump so I can find later in furtherance of my education. Thank you.
I agree with Rush's take on this - namely, that an attempt to revive the "fairness" doctrine is in fact coming at us - not only at talk radio but probably also at the internet - but that it will be called something other than the "fairness doctrine." That has already been run into the ground, and another euphemism for censorship will be employed - something along the lines of "community standards." My take on it is that we have no hope of winning in the court of public opinion if that is defined as whatever the MSM says it is. But we do have hope in SCOTUS as presently constituted, because it was O'Connor rather than Kennedy who provided the fifth vote in McConnell v. FEC to uphold McCain-Feingold, which essentially upholds the idea that "the press" "is" "objective."My approach would be, ironically, to avoid reference to the First Amendment but rather to argue that the Bill of Rights was understood by the framers of the Constitution to be included within the Constitution itself. And I would argue that there is under the Constitution no such thing as a "fourth estate," since under Section 9 of Article 1
"No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States,"and the strata of
- first estate, Lords Spiritual - the clergy in France and the heads of the church in Britain
- Lords Temporal, second estate - the nobility in France and the peerage in Britain
third estate, Commons - the common people
- fourth estate - the press, including journalists, newspaper writers, photographers
have no application here. Here, there is only "the governments" (of various jurisdictions, including the federal one) and "the people." I held back from discussing the First Amendment because the term "the press" has been distorted by those who claim that they have special rights not contemplated in the Constitution. "The freedom of . . . the press" is not a right only of those who own presses now, it is the right of the people to spend their own money to buy presses at their own pleasure. Indeed, those of us who own computers and printers, or photocopiers, may be said to own presses. So the claim that only journalists are "the press" is fatuous. Indeed, the newspapers of the founding era were distinctly different from those with which we are familiar - to such an extent that those who today style themselves as "the press" would not recognize any of the printers of the newspapers of the founding era as being members of their "press." Because implicit acceptance of the objectivity of all other journalists was not a staple of the Eighteenth Century newspaper. That is an artifact of the telegraph and the Associated Press (founded 1848), which probably no framer of the Constitution or Bill of Rights survived to see.
The claim that the framers of the Constitution did not foresee technologies such as the radio and the internet can be countered by reference to Article 1 Section 8 which explicitly provides that Congress has the authority
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 discoverieswhich certainly authorizes the reader of the Constitution to assert that in fact the framers did foresee and promote progress in technology "useful" for publicizing information and opinions. The fear of the Federalists who opposed the inclusion of a bill of rights in the Constitution was that it would not cover every right which was (they held) implied by the body of the Constitution - and that opponents of liberty would use the Bill of Rights not as a floor but a ceiling on the rights of the people. And when people suggest that liberty does not apply to the use of technologies not mentioned in the First Amendment that is precisely what they are doing. Hence, my point that an appeal to the First Amendment may ironically not be the best way to vindicate the right of the people to promote our opinions by use of post-Eighteenth Century technologies, to the limits of our own purses and predilections. And the collateral right of the people to attend to, or at their own pleasure to ignore, any such efforts.ACLJ ready to do battle against 'Fairness Doctrine'
And from my POV the problem we should be addressing is precisely how to get that issue before SCOTUS, and precisely what remedy we can seek in such action. It is not clear to me that waiting for some "fairness doctrine" assault to fully form is prudent. It seems to me that there should be torts to be found in any and all operations (and in some inactions) of the Federal Election Commission, for example. Because campaign finance regulation is censorship.
You are talking about McConnell v. FEC right? That was pre-Scalia and Roberts. But yes, a lot of hope is involved.“We hope. They did allow Campaign Finance Reform to stand.”
It was pre-Alito and Roberts (and, concommitantly, post O'Connor and Rhenquist). The loss of Rhenquist was the loss of a good vote on McConnell v. FEC, but the retirement of O'Connor eliminated a bad vote on it. Assuming that Roberts and Alito will be good on the issue and Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy go as they did before, that would be enough for a favorable 5-4 split to overturn the unfavorable 5-4 ruling in McConnell v. FEC.I would have a case brought against the FEC and the FCC along the following lines:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2188532/posts?page=16
- The First Amendment cannot be read narrowly because the framers of the unamended Constitution argued against the Bill of Rights only on the basis that future opponents of liberty (read, "liberals" and "objective journalists") would work to make a bill of rights a ceiling rather than a floor on our liberties. So the rights stipulated in the First Amendment are mere examples of our freedoms rather than an exhaustive list of our rights to public expression of our opinions. The fact that the First Amendment does not - as it could not have - mention the Internet and the radio is therefore of no import. The body of the Constitution must be interpreted as including the First Amendment, and that cannot be done in a way which excludes equality of the rights of the people to express opinions on the radio and the internet. No price, and no membership in a private organization, touches the rights of the people. Those rights pertain to each person whether or not he/she has as of yet purchased a printing press, and whether or not he or she has joined the Associated Press (an organization whose founding was two generations in the future when Washington was first elected POTUS).
- The plaints of the opponents of liberty are not directed at the radio as such but only at a particular programming format, "talk radio." That format has proven to have the virtue of being congenial to the arguments of philosophers and not to the blandishments of sophists. Philosophers, in the original (etymological) sense, are people who do not argue from any assumption of their own superior virtue but restrict their arguments to facts and logic. Sophists, OTOH, argue from the assumption of their own superior wisdom (in the literal meaning of "soph") - or, in the case of journalists styling themselves "the press," from the assumption of their own objectivity. And politicians who call themselves "liberal" or "progressive," agreeing perfectly with "objective journalists" and therefore sharing the vice inherent in journalists' presumptuous assumption of their own objectivity. And such politicians also argue from the assumption of their own superior compassion as well. It is not necessary for SCOTUS to agree with this point, only to agree that it would be wrong to reject it as a possibility - and wrong for SCOTUS to allow those who might be sophists to censor those who might be philosophers.
- Any rationale to exclude the radio and the Internet from the First Amendment on grounds of novelty would reach the telegraph, and certainly the TV. It is patently false to claim that the framers did not anticipate the radio and the internet, or any other technology. Article 1 Section 8 explicitly gives Congress the right "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" - and also the Article V right to propose constitutional amendments if developments (not excluding technological ones) reveal the necessity thereof.
- Any claim of a lack of diversity of radio programming can be answered by expanding the spectrum allocated to that function without reducing the ability of existing stations to air existing programming. Reducing the ability of existing stations to air existing programming is censorship, and requires amendment not only of the First Amendment but also of the body of the Constitution.
- Any restriction on the right of the people to spend their own money to promote their own political, or other, opinions requires a constitutional amendment. The FEC has no rightful authority, and such authority as it has wielded has been asymmetrically applied.
The First Amendment says that the government has no business controlling printing or speech. It does not mention broadcasting or the internet. Full stop. But then if it did say anything about those things, that would be proof that it was not written in the Eighteenth Century - just as the fact that the "Killian memos" were made using Microsoft Word proves that those documents were not made in the 1970s.But it is not true that the Constitution does not provide for such things. First, the Constitution (in Article 1 Section 8) explicitly gives Congress the authority
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. . . so it is patently not true that the Constitution does not contemplate the possibility of new means of expressing political opinion - or of doing anything else.Second, it is settled doctrine that the framers of the body of the Constitution did not include a bill of rights in it so that it would not constitute a ceiling on the rights of the people. On that basis many methods of expression - yea, unto the smearing of chocolate on nude bodies - have been accorded constitutional protection without being explicitly mentioned in the document. The right of freedom of the press is the right of the people to spend money on the use of technology to promote their political opinions. Not least, by buying the newspapers - or patronizing the products advertised on radio programs - which promote their beliefs and attitudes.
Congress - or any body such as the FEC or the FCC created by Congress - has no constitutional authority to prevent us from listening to political commentators under any pretext.
On a personal note, see my tag . . .
Nicely done. The question of the day is how to combat it.
The question of the day is how to combat it.
Did you read my #134?IMHO the FEC, and some extent the FCC, are unconstitutional and should be sued out of existence. There is not a moment to lose in dispatching McCain-Feingold, since IMHO that abomination helped assure that the Republican Party did not field a credible nominee last year (it has been credibly asserted that Ronald Reagan could not have run for POTUS if McCain-Feingold had existed in 1980).
Nicely done. The question of the day is how to combat it.
In addition to suing the FEC for its very existence and the FCC for its authority to silence conservative talk radio on whatever premise, we should sue the Associated Press for its Sherman Antitrust Act violations (of which SCOTUS found it guilty in 1945).And although Rush's attempt to reflect Obama's Alinsky Rule #12 attack on him and the Republican Party directly back on Obama is probably inherently futile because of Obama's lack of negatives to exacerbate, I do think that an effective target other than Obama does exist. George Soros is one possiblity, and - if properly conducted - a counterattack on a MSM journalist might succeed. Although journalists are big boys who buy ink by the barrel, they do have a glass jaw. They can debate very effectively, but only when they are shooting fish in a barrel.
Rush and the rest of talk radio could call out individual journalists over their inability to debate on neutral territory. If a journalist had to defend the claim of journalistic objectivity in a venue where he did not control the microphone he could be reduced to a quivering mass of jello trying to parry the unvarnished truth about their coverage of the merits of the case against the war record of Bush and against that of Kerry - as well as the relevance of those merits as compared to the political records of the two candidates in the three decades after Vietnam. And the conduct of journalism during election night of 2000, when journalism exaggerated the strength of Gore v. Bush by calling states for Bush slowly and calling states for Gore quickly - so quickly that they had to retract their call of Florida for Bush, which ultimately turned the election.
The name of such scandals in history is legion, for they are many, and journalism - especially print journalism - is in financial trouble at least partly because journalism has sold its credibility for the election of Obama. And IMHO the attack on Rush is partly an effort to undermine journalism's critics who are pointing out the vacancy at the center of journalism's business model where journalism's credibility used to be.
Thats what the fight has to be about fairness for all or nothing. Because if its about journalism then all talk show hosts should have to do is call their shows news programs.
Quite true - with the caveat that the "conservative talk show host" does not claim superior objectivity as the "objective journalist" does. And that is fundamental to their respective programs. "News" reporting which didn't claim objectivity, hence moral superiority over the "conservative talk show host," would be a different thing from journalism as we know it.And a talk show host who claimed objectivity would not be a "conservative" (I use scare quotes with "conservative" because the word does not do our philosophy justice since American conservatism is actually, in etymological terms, liberal and progressive - and favoring liberty and progress is not "conservative" in any other context than preserving the American tradition and Constitution. Anywhere else, those attitudes would not be "conservative." Destroying the freedom to progress by, for instance, developing our petroleum reserves, at what some call the hazard of climate change, is what would be conservative).
In reality the difference between the "objective journalist" and the "conservative talk show host" is the difference between a sophist and a philosopher (using the etymological definition of the latter term). I cannot undertake to pinpoint the difference between "objectivity" and "wisdom." Is there, after all, such a thing as "unwise objectivity?" And yet it would be risky for anyone to openly claim superior wisdom to a debating opponent because that is inherently arrogant:
sophist1542, earlier sophister (c.1380), from L. sophista, sophistes, from Gk. sophistes, from sophizesthai "to become wise or learned," from sophos "wise, clever," of unknown origin. Gk. sophistes came to mean "one who gives intellectual instruction for pay," and, contrasted with "philosopher," it became a term of contempt. Ancient sophists were famous for their clever, specious arguments.philosopherIt is a form of arrogance to claim to be above labels, above "left" and "right" - especially when the person who does so then labels his debate opponent "conservative" or "right wing" or, the now-obsolete favorite, a "right wing cold warrior." It is a form of humility to accept a label when it fits. Said differently, the only way to even attempt to be objective is to assume that you are inherently subjective, inherently not objective. Only then will you make full disclosure of what you want to be true before discussing what you believe to be true.O.E. philosophe, from L. philosophus, from Gk. philosophos "philosopher," lit. "lover of wisdom," from philos "loving" + sophos "wise, a sage.""Pythagoras was the first who called himself philosophos, instead of sophos, 'wise man,' since this latter term was suggestive of immodesty." [Klein]
Modern form with -r appears c.1325, from an Anglo-Fr. or O.Fr. variant of philosophe, with an agent-noun ending. . . .
I note all of the above to explain that there is no room in the "objective journalism" tent for a "conservative." Let a "conservative" claim to be a journalist, and there will be war. Because the journalist takes his own objectivity, and thus moral superiority, for granted as a birthright - a veritable "title of nobility" as the Constitution puts (and prohibits) it. And of course the journalist is supported in that claim by the "liberal," the "moderate" and the "progressive" (none of whom, after all, holds any principle above the motive of getting favorable publicity from the journalist - or the journalist would not award them that positive label).
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2201925/posts?q=1&;page=76#76
American democracy survived its first century without much in the way of the investigative and accountability journalism we associate with newspapers. That kind of journalism didn't start to spread until the end of the 19th century. When Thomas Jefferson said he preferred newspapers without government to government without newspapers, he wasn't referring to anything we'd recognize as our local paper, says Stephen Bates, professor of journalism at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and Slate contributor. The pre-modern press was captive of political parties, and their pages were filled with partisan fodder. What Jefferson was applauding was the newspapers' capacity as a forum for debate (and sometimes slander), not exposé.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2217641/posts
If newspapers really want to regain relevance, they will print news that is not so easily dismissed as liberal.
. . . but if the very definition of "news" prevents that, that creates an inherent problem.Conservatism counsels us to "count your blessings" and to concern yourself with things that do not change.
If the news is negative "If it bleeds, it leads," and superficial "There's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper," "news" is a close cousin to radicalism. Inherently.
Another inherent issue with "conservative" journalism is the claim of journalism to be objective. Because subjectivity is simply the assumption of one's own objectivity, any claim of one's own objectivity is self-falsifying. And yet commercial journalism lives and dies by that very claim.
I conclude that "conservative journalism" is an oxymoron.
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