The Right to Know

Free Republic | May 12, 2008 | conservatism_IS_compassion

[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.

[RaceBannon]

this is very good! I copied it and made it one of my notes on Facebook!

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Excellent!

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

BTW, Race, if you are pasting the article into your own page, I’d suggest a short rewrite at the end to incorporate my reply #30, which is a little more definitive about the transformation of the word “liberal.” It at least pins the time of the transformation of the word down to a decade based on some research at the library.

[Marine_Uncle]

Interesting and informative article. Thanks.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

If there is anything that has disgusted me over the past few years, it has been the way the media is merely an extension of the Democrat Party. It’s like living in the USSR.

Indeed; understanding that phenomenon has been my major interest for quite a long time.
My conclusions are:

• Nobody can safely take their own, or anyone else's, objectivity for granted. Indeed, taking one's own objectivity for granted is precisely what subjectivity is, and that's the opposite of objectivity.

• The only way to attempt objectivity is to eschew any claim of objectivity and to explicitly disclose any interest one may have in any case they discuss. This journalists never do; they are far too busy promoting themselves to ever do that.

• Yet journalists do have identifiable interests apart from the public interest:
  • promoting themselves,
  • raising alarums over the results of everyone else's decisions/actions - everyone who does not flatter journalists, that is, and
  • reciprocating the flattery of those who flatter journalists. This explains the relationship between journalists and those whom journalism labels "moderate" or "liberal" or "progressive".

• It follows that journalists, all protestations of dispassion notwithstanding, are not even trying to be objective.

• Journalism as a profession was not ideologically homogeneous in the founding era but it is ideologically homogeneous today - and has been for well over a century. The reason for the change is hiding in plain sight - News service journalism. The Associated Press (founded in 1848 as The New York Associated Press) is monopolistic, and it functions as a Borg which gives the journalist what he wants - an endless stream of news which the public hasn't heard yet, and the suppression of any competition over objectivity. All at the cost, not only of money, but the surrender of the independence to be able to question the objectivity of any other journalist.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2696817/posts?page=2

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

This proves that smarta$$ is not a journalist but a liberal propagandist, which means he is simply a very subtle, useful tool of left-wing propagandists, an "advance party" if you will.

I like your post.

But I have a quibble about language. You say, "smarta$$ is not a journalist," but then you say, "[he is] a liberal propagandist, which means he is simply a very subtle, useful tool of left-wing propagandists, an "advance party" if you will. "

My point is simply that the wire services in general and the Associated Press in particular united journalism around the self-interest of journalism itself. Journalism is just talk, and

the self interest of journalism is that its talk is taken to be more important than the action taken by others to provide food, clothing, shelter, security, energy, and so forth.

This explains why journalism is able to maintain the fatuous conceit of its own objectivity, despite the obvious realtity that journalism is at most part of the truth, and "Half the truth is often a great lie." You can print "both sides of the story" without necessarily getting at the truth of the matter, and that happens all the time. Because the perspective of the journalist defines what he thinks the two sides of the story are. Which may be irrelevant to what is actually going on. And the very fact that the journalist claims to be objective (or, what is the same thing, suffers others to claim it for him) proves that the journalist is not even trying to be objective.

Ironically, it is possible to attempt to be objective only by being open about any reasons why you might not be objective. And claiming to be objective is the very opposite of scrupulously examining your own motives and being open about how they (inevitably) influence your perspective. Therefore,

no "objective journalist" is even trying to actually be objective.

It would be wonderful if we could count on objective information for the mere price of a newspaper. Alas, it is impossible. There can be no substitute for exercising your own judgement. "Anyone who tells you anything else is selling something."

The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . .

It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity,
and they very seldom teach it enough.   - Adam Smith

Because the wire services unified journalism, journalism speaks with a single voice (I discount the editorial pages as being a peripheral issue, which function primarily to "position" the rest of the newspaper as being objective). Since journalism speaks with a single voice, there are natural propaganda advantages to agreeing with that unified journalistic voice. So if you don't have any principles other than your own self interest, the path of least resistance is to become a politician who promotes whatever the journalistic voice finds convenient. You can then count on that journalistic voice to give you favorable labels and give your opposition consistently unfavorable PR.

So when you say someone is a propagandist rather than a journalist, you give undue credit to journalism as a profession. Journalism is propaganda.

Journalism and Objectivity

Is Cain Able? (refreshingly honest about not knowing but..)
HeyMiller ^ | Monday June 6, 2011 | John Miller

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

The GOP is the victim (willing or unwilling) of collobrative efforts by the dems and the media far too often.

The GOP America is the victim of the propaganda campaign, ongoing since memory of living man runneth not to the contrary, to the effect that journalism is objective. Journalism has never been objective and, ironically, is least able to approach objectivity when it is most able to project the image of objectivity.

Note, when I say "journalism" there is a planted axiom in the construct - the idea that journalism is monolithic. That is, journalism has many facades but a single voice. The unity of journalism is the membership of the wire services, especially the Associated Press. The Associated Press was held by SCOTUS to be in violation of the Sherman AntiTrust Act back in 1945. And no wonder; the wire services homogenize journalism by claiming that journalists are objective in order to maximize the value of the wire service feed to its membership - and if all journalists are objective, they must share the perspective which journalism as a whole projects.

The rules of journalism - "Man Bites Dog, not Dog Bites Man," "If it bleeds, it leads," and "There's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper, (i.e., make your deadline)" are all rules, not of objectivity but of entertainment value. They are rules for making your newspaper profitable. IOW, the rules of journalism promote the self-interest of journalism. And the very last word which would actually describe someone who confuses their own selfish interest with objectivity is, well, "objective."

So we have a highly tendentious and self-interested journalism, falsely but effectively projecting an image of objectivity and public spiritedness. What would you expect politicians to do in that environment? You would certainly expect that a lot of politicians would go along to get along with that prevailing propaganda wind. And you would expect that journalism would award positive labels to such politicians - and would apply negative labels to their opponents:

• Moderation being a classical virtue, you might not be surprised to learn, for example, that journalism-favored politicians might be called "moderate" or "centrist" - and disfavored politicians might be called "out of the mainstream," "right wing," "extreme," or even "right wing extremist."

• "Liberty" being the watchword of the American founding generation, you might expect that journalist-favored politicians might be called "liberal" - and disfavored politicians would not be so designated.

• The possibility of progress being a defining characteristic of the Enlightenment (and the Constitution being a quintessential Enlightenment project), you might expect journalism-favored politicians to be called "progressive" - and disfavored politicians to be called "conservative."

. . . and you would be entirely correct.

The problem is not journalists selling out to socialists - the problem is that, in the wire service milieu, self-selected journalists are socialists.

The Associated Press was instituted in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, early in the era of electronic communication, and its natural function was to economize on telegraphy bandwidth by sharing the same feed over many newspapers. In the Internet era, that mission is obsolete. I should not wonder if Free Republic alone had more bandwidth capability now than the AP did in 1945. So what was "too big to fail" in 1945 should be vulnerable to serious antitrust challenge in 2011.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Isn’t it amazing what the media lets the left get away with!

It might be surprising - if there were any reason to suppose that journalism actually was objective, as it claims. But then, the very claim of objectivity is proof that journalists aren't even trying to be objective.

If they were trying to be objective they would be declaring their interests, not claiming not to have any interests.

If they were trying to be objective they would admit that they make their money less by informing the public and promoting virtue than by flattering the public in its ignorance, and pandering to the public in its vices.

If they were trying to be objective they would condemn the Democratic Party for pandering to the public's sloth and greed, rather than promoting the Democratic Party for acting on precisely the same impulses which now rule journalism.

[E.G.C.]

BTTT

[PGalt]

The problem is not journalists selling out to socialists - the problem is that, in the wire service milieu, self-selected journalists are socialists.

Thanks for the ping, c_I_c! Your OUTSTANDING analysis about "journalism" notwithstanding, your thought-provoking screen-name alone gives you "Presidential" cred in my book.

conservatism_IS_compassion for President!

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

PGalt for President!

(That's not quite as high an accolade as it used to be, tho.

I doubt that there are any FReepers who wouldn't be better than the incumbent . . . )

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

The behavior of journalism is explained by Adam Smith - partly in Wealth of Nations, and partly in Theory of Moral Sentiments. The applicable quote from the latter is

The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing.

The man whom we believe is necessarily, in the things concerning which we believe him, our leader and director, and we look up to him with a certain degree of esteem and respect.

That is the default assumption and perspective of the journalist, about the public at large. The public, journalists believe in their gut, is a bunch of boobs to be impressed and led by their betters. Namely, them:

But as from admiring other people we come to wish to be admired ourselves; so from being led and directed by other people we learn to wish to become ourselves leaders and directors. -  Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments

Journalists employ rank sophistry to position themselves as our betters; they engage in Monday morning quarterbacking on a grand scale to insinuate that anyone other than the specialists in a field could do a better job than the specialists in that field, if only they were as well-intentioned as the journalist is. Nobody would trust their own liver to the ministrations of a journalist in the operating room, but the journalist seeks to promote his own reputation above that of the surgeon by claiming that doctors do unnecessary operations to pad their own wallets. And if that sounds like something a “liberal” politician such as Obama might say - well, in Karl Marx’s formulation, that is no accident, comrades.

Journalists use claims of their own (or, what is the same thing, each others’) objectivity to precisely the same purpose and intent that the ancient Sophists used their claims of superior wisdom. If the Sophist is wise, or if the journalist is objective, the person who is not a Sophist or a journalist would seem to have no standing to question them. And appearances are what journalists are all about. In reality it is unwise for anyone to assume his own wisdom, and it is not objective of anyone to assume her own objectivity.

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 is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Book I, Ch 10)

It is said that “This problem, when solved, will be simple.” And so it is with the question as to why modern journalists never engage in ideological competition, as journalists of earlier times notoriously did. The answer is the telegraph - the telegraph and the wire services, notably the AP. For the AP is nothing other than a virtual meeting of all the major journalism outlets in America.

Adam Smith is correct - a meeting of “competitive” journalists which has been in continuous operation since before the Civil War, and which is not about “merriment or diversion” but precisely about business, could not have failed to produce “a conspiracy against the public.” A conspiracy which is not content merely to systematically omit mention of certain salient facts, but which will actually lie in furtherance of its own interest and against the public interest.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

At the time the Bill of Rights was verified, journalists were not credentialed in any serious way. - FredZarguna

They aren’t now, either. They have “Codes of Ethics,” it’s true - but they claim to be objective. Now claiming to try to be objective is entirely unobjectionable, even laudable if it is sincere. But claiming actually to be objective is sophistry. Why? Because “sophistry” comes from the term “Sophist” - Greek for “wise man.” The Ancient Sophists used claims of their own superior wisdom to suppress debate. Debates are pretty unsatisfactory if they go, “I am wise and you are not. Therefore I am right and you are wrong.” The classical response to this line of “argument” was to claim to love wisdom but to eschew claiming actually to be wise. That’s the source of the term “philosopher” - philo = "lover of," sophy = “wisdom."

The philosopher did not claim wisdom, only to love wisdom - accepting the existence of truth, and seeking after it. That is, the philosopher’s position was, “Spare me the ad hominem attacks and the arrogance, and let’s get down to the facts and logic as they relate to the issue at hand.” And that is the appropriate response to the journalist’s claim of objectivity, which is intended to suppress your willingness and ability to stand up for the truth when the journalist is (whether by commission or by omission). lying.

De facto, a claim of objectivity is no different from a claim of wisdom. Either one constitutes sophistry.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3113271/posts?page=9#9

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Great to see you in fine form, Swordmaker.

If you didn’t know anything else about AGW but the fact that advocates of the theory demand cessation of the use of coal in the US - but are mute about the frenetic rate of construction of coal-fired plants in China (and elsewhere in Asia) - you would know that it is a political ploy intended to damage liberalism.

By “liberalism” I of course mean what F.A. Hayek, writing in Britain during WWII, meant by the term. I.e., precisely the opposite of the fraudulent post-1930 American usage in which the term is a synonym for socialism.

Theodore Roosevelt was articulating liberalism, circa 1910, in his famous speech at the Sarbonne:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds

IMHO post-1930 “liberalism” is accurately defined by the perfect inversion of TR’s meaning:

It is the critic ; the man who points out how others could have done things better; who counts. The credit does not belong to the individual, who “didn’t do that,” and who falsely claims the credit implied in the status of ownership.

When put that way, it is should be obvious that the contempt which 1910 liberals (we) feel for “the MSM” derives from the fact that

It is journalists who “didn’t do that” - they have never even tried to, and can’t actually relate to anyone who ever actually even did try to, do anything. But what defines their nature - and what they therefore obsessively do - is criticize.

Having located the reason for the fact that journalism = socialism, we turn to the reason why the effect of the socialistic tendency inherent in journalism is and must be as homogenous and powerful as it 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. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

Hence we are reliably informed not only that the mere fact that journalists, as “people of the same trade," read each other’s output is a serious and fundamental problem for us, but that every organization of journalists must exacerbate that problem. All of which compounds the (as shown above, inherent) tendency of journalists to promote socialism. To promote, that is, an ideology whose inherent nature is a conspiracy against the (pre-1920 liberal) order which the Constitution defines as the public interest.

There are organizations, and then there are organizations. There is a “National Press Club,” and there is “The Committee to Protect Journalists,” and no doubt there are numerous other journalism organizations with high-sounding titles. But the true root of all organization of modern journalism is the wire service. Any and every wire service, without exception. But the granddaddy of them all is the Associated Press.

News Over the Wires:

The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897
by Menahem Blondheim

describes the aggressively monopolistic rise of the AP. And I have seen it credibly mentioned on the Internet that in 1945 the AP was found guilty of violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act by SCOTUS. But it wouldn’t matter if none of that were true - it is the mere fact that it is an organization of journalists - an intimate association capable of instantaneously communicating with all of major journalism, and of giving direction to them all in a “stylebook” as to how things are to be expressed, what expressions are taboo, and what makes a good story - which makes it a mortal threat to the order (everywhere but America, and in America as well before 1920, called liberalism) which is the public interest.

In 1945 when the AP was held in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, it was “too big to fail” due to the value then inherent in the conservation of transmission bandwidth, which was the legitimate mission of any wire service, in the communication of the news. But this is 2014, deep into the Internet era. This era is defined by technologies which practically eliminate the cost of the bandwidth which the transmission of the news requires - with or without the AP et. al.

It is one thing to speak, in frustration, of the homogeneous negativity of “the MSM,” and it is quite another to have the wit to finger “The Associated Press and its membership” as a single entity which is responsible for the industrial production of libel against any target it can “fix and freeze” as representative of the (pre-1920 liberal) order which is constitutionally mandated and which history has confirmed to be the public interest. IMHO the next person, or any recent person (e.g., George Zimmerman) or group (e.g., the Duke Lacrosse Team defendants) should launch a massive suit against "the Associated Press et. al” - alleging antitrust violation and RICO treble damages in the pattern of corrupt libel of themselves and of the constitutional order as a whole. And calling for damages sufficient to ruin the AP.

The Internet can disseminate the news, thank you very much. Claims of objectivity - not commendable efforts toward objectivity, but claims actually to be objective - are actually admissions of lack of objectivity about one’s own self. Such claims rebut themselves.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Maybe Gowdy or someone with oversight of the federal election laws can look into whether the operating budget of the major news organizations can be considered a contribution to the Democrat party. With coordination like we currently have, all the news is a PR release for the Democrats.

It’s simple . . . from the founding era up to the Civil War era, newspapers were about the opinions of their printers, as much or more than about the news. What changed in the Civil War era? The advent of the telegraph and the Associated Press. And any other wire service you can name, the AP is just the biggest and most monopolistic of the bunch. The legitimate mission of the wire service is to economically share news over expensive telegraph bandwidth. But the wire service concomitantly functions as a continuous virtual meeting of the newspapers which belong to it - and therein lies the rub:  

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

In plain sight, the wire services - basically, the AP - functions as “a conspiracy against the public” by journalists. A conspiracy to promote journalists above the public by creating the impression that journalists are superior beings who are objective. But what is the journalist? journalists are critics rather than doers. The wire service journalist is an ordinary citizen telling you what went wrong when people other than journalists (and their acolytes) were in charge. Back in 1910, before the meaning of the word “liberalism” was inverted (in the 1920s, according to Safire’s New Political Dictionary), Theodore Rooseveltfamously asserted that

"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 . . . 

In saying that, Roosevelt was articulating liberalism., as the word was then understood (and as it continued to be understood outside the US). The “liberalism” we are used to is the precise opposite of that; according to “liberalism,” the critic is the only one who counts, because nothing actually matters except PR. The perfect inversion of “the credit belongs to the man in the arena” is,

“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”

Political correctness, AKA “liberalism,” is the natural thought process of the journalist. Everything has to be wrong to the extent that it is controlled or executed by people who work to a bottom line in an effort to win credit by deeds rather than words. The long and the short of the matter is that freedom of the press is subverted by wire services. Because “the press” is homogenized into a single entity, and the newspapers are no longer about the divergent opinions of the printers but about wire service copy. In this milieu you don’t become a printer unless you are simpatico with wire service journalism. So we have the irony that “our free press” is not a defender of the First Amendment. In fact, “our free press” was the driving force behind “campaign finance reform” because it weakens the ability of others to compete with “our” unified “free” press in promoting or opposing candidates.

Back when Senator Bill Bradley was promoting “Campaign Finance Reform” on the grounds that “the poor man’s soap box” couldn’t compete with “the rich man’s wallet,” the Internet was in its infancy. But in reality, it is wire service journalism which is “the rich man’s wallet” - and it has been since memory of living man runneth not to the contrary. And it is the Internet which is now “the poor man’s soap box.” And even the ads by truly rich people like the Koch brothers can’t compete on level ground with wire service journalism backed up by FCC broadcasting licenses.

It is a joke to take campaign finance regulation seriously as constitutionally legitimate. Campaign finance regulation is inimical to freedom of speech and of the press.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

There is no such thing as a low risk, high reward strategy for a politician - except to be a “liberal." The reason for that is simple; there is a notional distinction only, and no difference, between a “liberal” and an “objective” journalist. Journalism is criticism; journalists never are responsible for getting anything done, all they do is report what went wrong when others had authority. Consequently journalists are the natural political enemies of the people who actually try to do things.

And journalists are the natural allies of anyone else whose forte is criticism. Therefore journalists assign to their fellow critics positive labels such as “moderate,” “progressive,” or “liberal” - labels which are actually descriptive of those whom they malign as “conservative”).

All major journalism outlets have behaved in this manner ever since the advent of the Associated Press in the mid-to-late Nineteenth Century. The wire services in general, and the AP in particular, transformed Nineteenth Century journalism from a cacophony of independent political voices into a politically homogenous left-wing institution. Which it has been, since memory of living man runneth not to the contrary.

All “Campaign Finance Reform” laws are based on the fatuous premise that journalism is objective. The Federal Election Commission is unconstitutional. Not only so, but since journalism is highly tendentious, and since there is no ideological diversity in wire service journalism, the promotion of journalism in broadcasting “in the public interest” is also unconstitutional.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3275754/posts?page=12#12