It is natural to claim objectivity if you can get away with it. Conservatives would do so if they dominated journalism. But to claim objectivity is to undercut you own argument, since if your argument depend on the assumption of your objectivity - and your objectivity cannot be proven - your argument is rotten at its core.And your objectivity - or journalism's - can never be proven because nobody can state the whole truth. And half the truth can be a very big lie. Thus it is impossible to prove objectivity. Journalism's "objectivity" is especially difficult to prove because of the rules which make journalism commercially successful:
Journalism promotes the bad news from Iraq because it sells newspapers. Far from making the bad news from Iraq representative and unbiased, that fact makes journalism tendentious in a predictably anticonservative way.
- "Man Bites Dog" rather than "Dog Bites Man" makes journalism unrepresentative.
- If it bleeeds it leads (and the unspoken, if it's good, it will appear in an ad or not at all) makes journalism negative.
- There's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper makes journalism superficial.
The interests of journalism define liberalism, because liberal politicians act on the belief that NOTHING actually matters except PR. It is scarcely to be marveled at that a political philosophy based on superficiality, negativity, and unrepresentativeness cannot stand up to polonged and focused logical critique.
Only if you're intellectually dishonest, which is the case for the entire enterprise of schools of journalism.
I disagree. Conservatives like Rush don't claim objectivity. What they do claim and insist upon, I might add, is rationality.
That's the essence of the article. A conservative argument is more rational than a liberal argument. Hence Rush's success in a format that demonstrates rationality and exposes irrationality.