I can't believe someone would even ask that question out loud. As if the freedom of the press only applies to a certain class of people, and not to the people generally!
I guess I can credit him with being honest, and saying out loud what a lot of modern journalists think privately, but still, that takes quite a bit of chutzpah.
Blogosphere Politics (Update 28/3/05)
(An Update to 'John Kerry and Foreign Policy')
2/21/05 US News World Report. Michael Barone writes a piece comparing the leftist and rightist blogs. On the left there is one large dominating blog, which is operated by a Democratic consultant who received money (which he disclosed) from the Dean campaign. The Democratic Internet constituency was and is motivated by one thing more than anything else: hatred of George W. Bush. <..> But the right blogosphere was different from the left. There was no one dominant website and no one orthodoxy. <..> The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is not Kerry or the Democrats but what these bloggers call Mainstream Media, or MSM. They argue, correctly in my view, that the New York Times, CBS News, and others distorted the news in an attempt to defeat Bush in 2004. I wonder if it is a coincidence that the blog structure seems to match ideology (top down versus bottom up)...
These blogs are playing an increasingly influential roll in elections. According to a recent poll: Reliance on the Internet for political news during presidential campaigns grew from 3 percent in 1996 to 18 percent in 2004. Although only 24% of those using the Internet for political news used blogs, this number is rapidly growing. James Miller from Tech Station writes in The coming War on Blogs that elements of the political elite and the media are likely to make attempts to use government to squash their competition and further their political agendas. There is already talk of applying the totally failed and unconstitutional Campaign Finance reform laws to the Internet.
It is easy to determine which side is being hurt by an increase in freedom of choice and the disintegration of the Mainstream Media monopoly. Here is Democratic Presidential Candidate John Kerry:
"We learned," Kerry said to the gathering, "that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning. But there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"
So the stupid American public need to be protected from influences outside the liberal mainstream press. What are you going to do about it Senator?
Maybe Kerry is upset because people like me will continue to call him out on his continuing contradictory and revisionist statements:
THEN
(9/30/04) (First Presidential Debate)
There's only 25 percent of the people in there. They can't have an election right now. The president's not getting the job done.
(10/8/04) (Second Presidential Debate)
There's chaos in Iraq. King Abdullah of Jordan said just yesterday or the day before you can't hold elections in Iraq with the chaos that's going on today.
(1/30/05 on Iraqi election day) (Meet the Press)
"It is hard to say that something is legitimate when whole portions of the country can't vote and doesn't vote," <..> "No one in the United States should try to overhype this election."
NOW
(3/16/05) (CNN)
JUDY WOODRUFF: Is the situation in Iraq better now than what you had predicted during the campaign, given on the recent elections there and moves toward democracy?
KERRY: No, I think it's what I said it would be. In fact, when I came back from Iraq about a month and a half ago before the elections, I said that that we ought to have the elections that the Iraqi people want a vote and they're going to turn out in significant numbers.
Or perhaps Kerry doesn't appreciate attention being brought to his Senate activities, such as his recent sponsorship of a statement honoring W.E.B. Du Bois, a former socialist presidential candidate who renounced his American citizenship and joined the communist party. Human Events reports: After the outbreak of the Korean War (in which 54,000 US troops died to liberate South Korea), Du Bois contended in 1950 that "the North Koreans are fighting exactly the things for which Americans fought in 1776." (in the past decade an estimated 12% of their population has died of starvation as the dictatorship built nuclear weapons) Three years later, he eulogized Stalin (the greatest mass murder and enslaver in the history of the world) as a "great" and "courageous" man, "attacked and slandered as few men of power have been." Not surprisingly, The Soviet Union awarded W.E.B. Du Bois the Lenin Peace Prize. Maoist China staged a national holiday in his honor in 1959. Du Bois was also (twice) kicked out of the NAACP (which he helped found) for advocating racial segregation and was critical of Martin Luther King's nonviolent approach to civil rights. The Maoist International Movement still celebrates Du Bois's birthday stating:
Shortly before death, Du Bois said, "Today my resentment at the doctrine of race superiority, as preached and practiced by the white world for the last 250 years, has been pointed to with sharp criticism and contrasted with the charity of Gandhi and of the colored minister [Dr. Martin Luther King] who led the recent boycott in Alabama. I am quite frank: I do not pretend to 'love' white people. I think that as a race they are the most selfish of any on earth. . . . I refer to the white world as a whole. We are come to a time when the sins and mistakes of the whole group must be considered and judged, not simply small localities or single individuals.
Or maybe Senator Kerry believes the Mainstream Media is right not to point our that what he constantly claimed was a "a dream based on illusion, but one which could have real and terrible consequences" (14), is no longer a 'dream' or an 'illusion' and could now have the 'terrible' consequence of protecting us from a North Korean nuclear missile attack. Kerry spent his career attacking missile defense on the absurd grounds that it would never work and/or fuel an arms race. He was wrong on both counts, and it is now operational:
U.S. 'can shoot down N. Korea missiles now'
3/16/05 World Net Daily: If nuclear missiles were suddenly fired at the United States from North Korea, the U.S. is ready to shoot them down. That's the opinion of Major Gen. John Holly, head of the missile-shield program for the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency. "If directed, we could provide a limited defense against an attack out of Northeast Asia," Holly told Alaska lawmakers, according to the Associated Press.
I guess the last thing Senator Kerry would want is to have any of these bothersome facts impacting the "decision-making ability of the American electorate"...
Chutzpah...coupled with an abject ignorance so common to the breed.