The media owes conservatives and the Tea Party an apology, but that will never happen.
“The media owes conservatives and the Tea Party an apology, but that will never happen.”
I read an interesting article on FR that posited that for 200 years Christian civilization has done the rational thing; whatever that was. We are still not in utopia. Therefore, doing the rational thing is the wrong thing. Liberals do exactly the opposite of the rational thing because THAT will lead us to utopia.
Let's start with the JOURNOLIST names and see how many of them know what to do.
As long as we can’t even name them clearly, we cannot hold them to account. We have to be able to stand up on our hind legs and bluntly say it: Journalism as we know it is a conspiracy against the public.Hillary spoke of a “vast right wing conspiracy,” without any facts or logic to back her up. I have just propounded a conspiracy theory of my own. Where is the evidence, where is the logic? Glad you asked. A well-known quotation from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations states,
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends . . . in some contrivance to raise prices.That is perhaps the only thing Smith said that “liberals” enthusiastically - even vehemently - agree with. But, Dear Reader, notice the ellipsis. We need to examine the quotation in full.
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.So if journalists meet together, even for merriment or diversion, there is likely to be a conspiracy against the public. Do journalists do that? From the early days of the Republic, communication among printers was actively encouraged by government subsidy of the mailing of newspapers among the various printers. That was directly counter to Adam Smith’s recommendation that “the law . . .ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies," but it didn’t seem to result in a great deal of conniving among journalists. Newspapers in the pre-Civil War era were notorious for not agreeing about much of anything. Yet now, conservatives complain that there is not a dime’s worth of difference between newspapers, or between broadcast journalists either - and they can cite example after example to support their point.Why should journalism now be, instead of a cacophony of competing voices, propaganda for a single political perspective? The telegraph. The telegraph, and the AP. Why would the AP homogenize journalism? Because the AP newswire is a virtual meeting of all major journalism outlets in America. One that has been in essentially continuous operation for well over 150 years. One need only refer to the formal name of the AP: the Associated Press.
All the major journalism outlets have been in bed together so long that cooperation among them is a reflex action. Journalists never question the virtues of “competing” journalists; in effect they operate as a mutual admiration society. Journalists are for journalists, and society in general is merely a mark to be manipulated. Politicians can either go along with journalism and get along, accepting positive labels such as “moderate” or “progressive” - or they can defend the public against the attacks of critics who buy ink by the carload, expecting nothing from journalism but critics who apply negative labels to them such as “right wing” or “conservative.”