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To: hoosiermama

Interesting, I didn’t know about the connection to Samaritan’s Purse, but I do think she’s an honest person, not driven by ideology but rather by a desire to present the truth. We need a lot more of that. And I suspect that Hillary’s handling of Benghazi has destroyed whatever Greta and her husband might have once thought of her.

I wouldn’t even care all that much if a journalist is a liberal in their personal life, as long as they do their job with objectivity and simply report the facts. But nearly two generations of journalists have been trained to put ideology before the truth, and are no more than public-relations pawns of the Democrat party at best.


34 posted on 04/28/2014 10:09:30 PM PDT by bigbob (The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly. Abraham Lincoln)
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To: bigbob
I wouldn’t even care all that much if a journalist is a liberal in their personal life, as long as they do their job with objectivity and simply report the facts.
That is a fine theory, but there is a fundamental flaw in it - the assumption that “the news” and “the facts” are the same thing. They are not. “The facts” would include everything that has happened since the beginning of time. Or at least, everything known to have happened, ever. Whereas “the news” is a very restricted subset of “the facts.” That subset excludes practically everything good that is known, and it excludes things that the audience has had a chance to learn from another source. Since in reality “Half the truth may be a great lie (Franklin), nothing prevents “the news” from being a true subset of “the facts” and, at one and the same time, highly tendentious.
But nearly two generations of journalists have been trained to put ideology before the truth, and are no more than public-relations pawns of the Democrat party at best.
The reality is that restricting your attention to the negative and the recent makes you cynical. And cynicism is what “liberalism” is about. I offer you Exhibit A:
”If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that."
Whatever else that is, it is sheer cynicism. It goes under the name “liberalism,” but - because the meaning of “liberalism” was essentially inverted in the the 1920s (the date is given in Safire’s New Political Dictionary) - in modern usage of the word belongs squarely inside scare quotes.

Liberalism, as understood outside the US and as understood in the US before 1920, responds to the cynicism of modern “liberalism” as follows:

From Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 speech at the Sarbonne:

There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.

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; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

We do not marvel that journalists assign the positive term “liberal” to those who agree with themselves, and smear those who do not. Journalists are in the perfect situation to be able to do that. And we do not marvel that journalists are cynical about the performance of people who work to a bottom line - because journalists don’t have to do that, they can take cheap shots at those who do.


50 posted on 04/29/2014 12:54:53 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion ("Liberalism” is a conspiracy against the public by wire-service journalism.)
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