"The mainstream media" is an unnecessary circumlocution - it's Big Journalism, and fellow travelers thereof. Big Journalism consists of a number of corporations, just as Major League Baseball consists of many nominally competitive teams. But MLB baseball is an entity which promotes interest in its games, and just so Big Journalism promotes its talk divorced from action and therefore from consequences and accountability."Take the dirty money out of politics"Big Journalism is naturally socialist because, since it does nothing but talk, it is best able to gain attention/importance by criticizing people who do things and therefore are vulnerable to the second guess. And socialism is nothing else but criticism and second guessing of those who do significant things. Socialists criticize not only those who provide our food, clothing, shelter, and fuel/transportation, but also those who provide security - notwithstanding the fact that police and the military are an essential part of the government so beloved of socialists.
This conceit is offensive because while it condemns the political contributions of non-journalists, it takes for granted that the money Big Journalism spends is pure as the wind-driven snow. There is no justification for that assumption, and there is no justification for the assumption that journalists are objective. The First Amendment doesn't say journalists are objective, it says journalists don't have to be objective."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 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 and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for 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 he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.""Citizenship in a Republic,"
Theodore Roosevelt,
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
BTTT
Outstanding article by Rabbi Aryeh Spero. Thanks for posting.
Thanks for the pic c_I_c, and your terrific input.
BTTT!