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To: All
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.


196 posted on 05/08/2014 4:56:41 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion ("Liberalism” is a conspiracy against the public by wire-service journalism.)
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To: All
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.


197 posted on 05/14/2014 11:00:11 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (The idea around which “liberalism" coheres is that NOTHING actually matters except PR.)
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