Posted on 04/15/2006 12:37:12 PM PDT by redstateone
Absolutely! Thank God for men who stand and fight.
Journalism is an artificial reality. In that artificial reality, journalists - who do nothing but talk - are heroes and everyone who does actual work, taking risks that their work or investment might be ill-timed or not suited for actual conditions outside the lab, or (in the case of the military) personally fatal - are competitor for the title of hero and are targets to be denigrated to make the journalist look good.Why Are Socialist Tendencies So Evident in Journalism?And there is a revolving door between Democratic politics and journalism because liberals have no principle which stands in the way of pandering to journalism. Socialism is defined as "government ownership of the means of production," but the dirty little secret is that the planted axiom of socialism is that not only the means of production but what is produced - and at what cost - are taken as a priori givens.
That is, socialists - who love to prattle about their own "progressivism" - have as their entire system the seizure of credit for the work and risk by which the original entrepreneur created not merely the means of production but the actual product being produced. IOW, socialists can seize a petroleum operation but they could never invent one, because that had to be invented in conjunction with the development of the cars and trucks which provide the demand for gasoline &c. Socialists can seize automobile factories, but could never develop cars and trucks because there is no gasoline and oil to run them on.
That means that socialism is founded on second-guessing the successful entrepreneurs. Socialism is embarrassed at the idea of failure; all socialists want to talk about is the successes and how they were "inevitable." The fundamental flaw of socialism is that by arrogating to "society" - by which term socialists never mean anything other than government - the credit for all successful past innovation, socialism destroys the incentive for future innovation. And calling socialism "progressive" cannot change the fact that socialism is inimical to the possibility of rapid progress.
Let's look at history to understand what that means. Queen Victoria was born in 1819 and lived until 1901. In her time she was fabulously wealthy; the richest slave owning Southern planters were pikers compared to her wealth. And yet, less than two centuries later, goods and services and their production and delivery to the general populace have been advanced by entrepreneurs to the point where an American secretary would have to think long and hard about living in Queen Victoria's circumstances. Maybe you can give up the affordable global airline travel, and maybe you can give up the cars and the lights and other things that run on electricity - but can you give up the health care advances which mean that the American secretary's husband probably doesn't die at age 60, leaving her a depressed widow for the last two decades of her life. And her children don't die young, either.
Just in the past half-century, progress has been such that the "poor" American's material well-being is now equivalent to what the American middle class enjoyed in 1950. At any given time, the cost of socialism must include the loss of the prospect of continued economic advancement of society. I do not argue that all science would stop with the advent of socialism, but that advancement of the practical arts which brings fruits of scientific understanding to the market is what socialism destroys. Science proves the possibility of flight, and the most well-connected might be able to get to fly - but commercialization of the science of flight is what socialism would suppress.
Journalism is a very cartel-like activity, in the sense that the big media organs systematically avoid competition in the things that matter to their industry. And the only thing that journalists really care about in that sense is their reputation as members of the de facto guild of "objective journalists." Journalists flock together in herds, and the one thing they will not do is question the objectivity of any other member of their guild.Bob Schieffer says, speaking for all of journalism, that "accuracy is the answer to charges of bias" [in the media]. In reality, of course, accuracy is not a sufficient answer to that issue. It would be necessary, of course (I say "would," because a news organization which can trumpet the so-called "TANG memos" as incontrovertible truth has a long way to go in assuring that they are accurate). But although accuracy is necessary, it is not sufficient.
The other issue is, "accuracy about what? Because Winston Churchill was surely correct when he noted that "Half the truth can be a very big lie." The issue of "story selection" - what's the lead, what's inside the paper somewhere, and what isn't reported at all - is fatal to the conceit that journalism can ever be proved to be objective.
The fact is that in its story selection journalism doesn't even try to be objective. Journalism's first priority in its story selection is to attract the attention of the audience. Journalism has its rules to assure that. One is, "If it bleeds, it leads." Another is, "Man Bites Dog," not "Dog Bites Man." Those are perfectly sound rules for selecting stories which will be profitable, but an industry's profits are not a good definition of the public interest. And in the context of any other industry, journalists would be the first to point that out.
Bump
WOW! Thanks for an eye-opening reply.
LOL!
Interesting blast from the past.. DG was questioning Americas patience with the progress of the war ONE WEEK after it started!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/879190/posts
Our nation won the Cold War as the result of strong leadership from men like President Reagan and Secretary Weinberger.
It angers me that the MSM would take measures to warp their legacies.
There is some reciprocity going on. There are a good nbr of our military who despise the media.
I know at least a couple who certainly do, and they have more 1 on 1 close up experience with the media than I am ever likely to have.
Because they don't control it. Lenin hated the Russian Army, too, and began killing off the officers and ranks that objected to "The Party". The Russian Army had refused to kill civilians Lenin wanted to get rid of -- landowners and peasants. Lenin emptied the prisons of murderers, rapists and thieves to create his own army -- the secret police -- to do the slaughtering.
The American Left/liberals/Democrats hates the U.S. military because it can't be used to entrench their political party control of the country.
The quote in the above post is from a different article. I was trying to respond to a question here about why the liberals hate the U.S. military. Sorry.
""Readers searching for a deeper understanding of the war will end up no wiser" - true, if "deeper understanding" is code for validation of their own misconceptions. This is exactly the sort of book that people seeking a full understanding of the war should read - along with many others that deal with other specifics - and I'm curious as to why Publisher's Weekly seems so frightened by the prospect that they might. It's no surprise that the media will fixate on their own brief mention in this book, but those who actually read it will discover it's about heroes - not reporters."
Media bias bump.
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