Ping.
Very Good, thank you.
BTTT
In the blogsphere, look at how the pendulum is swinging back, c_I_C. Blogs share content almost along the same word-of-mouth model you described in your piece. Granted, most of the content is entertainment-driven, but that’s not to say that the content could never be news-driven as well.
^
Another great read cIc. Thank you. Bookmarked!
A well deserved bump.
Its becoming clear that MSM should be held accountable
Rush Limbaugh screens out calls about bias in the media, for the simple reason that if he didn't he would talk about nothing else.In a way, I do the same thing - I stopped subscribing to the AIM Report after a year or two, back in the late 1970s because I was convinced. It became a twice-told tale. Once you are familiar with gravity, one more apple falling off the tree is of no great interest. The question has always been not if "the media" was biased to the left, but why? And what could be done about it. In the three decades since the Carter Administration I have thought long and hard about those issues, and come to some conclusions:
- Fiction is just the story someone wants to tell. Certainly fiction has great potential for political implications - but unless you are willing to contemplate outright censorship there is little point in being exercised about political tendencies in fiction. So the proper concern to be addressed isn't "bias in the media," it is the political tendency of the reporting of the news.
- And even with respect to the reporting of the news, nobody thinks that a newspaper, still less a broadcast report, can report everything that happens. So editing is inevitable. And since "Half the truth is often a great lie" (Franklin), there is wide scope for tendentiousness in what the editor reports, and what he ignores. So to say "freedom of speech, and of the press" is to say that any given reporter/publication can be tendentious. The actual scandal is not that there is tendentiousness in journalism, it is that anyone thinks that journalism is objective. And the biggest scandal of all is the associated press.
The Associated Press was founded in the middle of Nineteenth Century. It is a news wire service and, obviously, could not have existed until the telegraph came into use - several decades after the framing of the Constitution and the First Amendment. In the pre-AP era newspapers were mostly small weeklies whose publishers didn't have sources of news not in principle available to the general public. The opinion of the printer was mostly what the newspaper was about, so there was little or no presumption of objectivity about such a newspaper. When the AP came into existence as an aggressive monopoly (ruled in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1945), the dangers of its centralized propaganda power were obvious. In response to that challenge to its legitimacy, the AP argued that it consisted of a club of fiercely independent and competitive newspapers, and that as such the AP was objective.
But far from the independence of the newspapers taming any tendentiousness in the AP, the cost and concomitant need to maximize the value of the AP to the newspapers created an overwhelming unifying and homogenizing effect on the newspapers. The only way for the AP to be considered "objective" was for its reporters to be considered to be objective. And by extension, all reporters had to be considered to be objective. And the inevitable result was, and is, groupthink. And what kind of "thought" would all those reporters naturally rally around? Why, the importance of reporting, of course. Businesses may provide us food, shelter, and clothing, and police and military organizations may provide us safety. But reporters do the really important work of criticizing and second guessing everyone else!
And the political implication of that tendency among journalists is leftism. Leftist politicians merely go along and get along with journalists as their first, last, and only priority. It's not that the government controls "the media" (but only when Democrats are in the government), journalism and its interests controls the Democratic Party.
The Conservative Case For Cars
Townhall.com ^ | JUNE 10, 2009 | Brent Bozell