Posted on 12/27/2016 10:47:50 AM PST by blam
Why think so small? Go after the real problem - which is an 1850 tech giant, the Associated Press. The AP is a virtual meeting of all major newspapers. And as Adam Smith put it,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 NationsUnder the homogenizing influence of the AP, journalists think that because they are unified they have the ability, as they always had the desire, to control the government of the US. If you think you control something, you want that thing to be powerful. Thus the phenomenon of a journalism which is cynical about society and naive about government power.The AP was found to be in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act back in 1945. Two generations later, we have Wikileaks documentation of the fact that Journalism as a whole - pretty much coextensive with the AP - is joined at the hip with the Democrat Party. And we have the fact that technology has obsoleted the justifiable mission of the AP, which was to economize on scarce, expensive bandwidth in the nationwide transmission of the news. Every Tom, Dick, and Harriet can afford an Internet connection which provides as much bandwidth, I venture, as the entire AP used in 1945.
That's just hysteria - how is Google ever going to block FR from coming up when I type freerepublic.com in my browser address field?
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