Posted on 11/14/2007 7:44:30 AM PST by conservatism_IS_compassion
Is there any such animal as "conservative-based news?" IMHO there is not. At least, not that goes under the banner of "news."
In the Founding Era, newspapers were different from what we are used to today. Technologically, their inputs were more expensive and their output was very slow and meager. And they were all addressing small, local markets. They were mostly weeklies, and some had no deadline at all - the printer just went to press when he was good and ready. And they did not have telegraphed news.
IOW, the newspapers of the founding era were pretty much like the local freebie advertising weeklies we see today - which don't do national/international newswire stories because the presumption is that the customer has seen all that on TV, heard it on the radio, or seen it on the Internet just as quickly as the local printer saw it.
The linchpin of the difference between the modern journalist and the newspaper printer of the eighteenth century is that the modern journalist has the AP newswire - that is, his stock in trade is what he "magically" knows with amazing 200-year old technology which you do not know until he tells you. But of course the "amazing" newswire cannot hold a candle to the Internet, so the niche of the Associated Press newswire is by now an anachronism.
The AP, founded in 1848 as The New York Associated Press, aggressively monopolized the use of the telegraph to transmit news. And that raised the serious question of whether such a concentration of propaganda power was not dangerous to the republic. . . . now where have I heard that issue before? Oh yes, I remember - it came up when radio transmission was licensed by the FCC. And what was the answer then? Oh yeah - "Don't worry about a thing - we don't have any axe to grind, we are all objective journalists here." Well, it turns out that that argument, such as it is, was precisely what was used to justify the monopolistic Associated Press news service.
The claim of objectivity actually is an assault on the very premise that the public is competent to govern its own affairs and, via the "fairness doctrine" and more recently via "campaign finance reform," on the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press of those not "in the know" by virtue of being privy to the newswire. The claim of objectivity is essentially indistinguishable, as far as I can see, from a claim of wisdom - and arguing from a claim of superior wisdom is the essence of sophistry ("soph" being Greek for "wisdom").
That being the case, we-the-people have the right and the duty to assign the burden of proof for anyone's claim of objectivity squarely on the shoulders of the claimant. That is, we should not be embarrassed by their begging the question but should demand that they prove their case. Even were their claim true, of course, that is an impossible case to prove - essentially an attempt to prove a negative - but that does not suffice as an argument to prove that it is true. It even leaves open the possibility that proof that it is untrue could exist.
Yet how can we know if a fresh report, hot off the wire, is or is not objective? We actually cannot - but there is no necessary reason why that should be the criterion which we choose for judging claimed objectivity. We can wait. We can judge the stories which once were "hot off the wire" in the light of history. We can apply the biblical standard for testing authority:
"When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him. Deuteronomy 18:22, New American Standard Bible (©1995)
By the standard of the light of history, whole books can be written on the fact that journalism is not objective. See, for example, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right by Ann Coulter. Also see, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case by Stuart Taylor , KC Johnson. Another classic case of journalism run amok is the fraudulent "Killian Memos" promoted by Dan Rather and CBS News and never outted as a blatant fraud by the rest of "objective" journalism, a mountain of damning evidence notwithstanding.
And that last point illustrates how Big Journalism - Associated Press journalism - manipulates the public discourse. The system is quite simple - if some fact is not congenial to the worldview of the journalist, Big Journalism systematically stonewalls that fact and/or raises the standard of proof for that fact to the unattainable level of metaphysical certainty. As long as Big Journalism is able to control the standard of proof, the fatuous conceit that Big Journalism is objective will be unassailable. The fact that it has no basis in fact is irrelevant.
The question is, "Is there any significant venue in which Big Journalism does not control the standard of proof?" There are two possible avenues. First, the Internet has been eroding the business model of the Associated Press. The logical conclusion of which is that Big Journalism no longer has any real niche of information unavailable to the rest of us. The Wizard of Oz is being exposed as a mere mortal behind a curtain. Besides FR and the rest of the Internet, there is Rush and the rest of Talk Radio. And ultimately, the composition of SCOTUS remaining unchanged or improving, there is hope of success in not merely turning back further impositions such as McCain-Feingold and the revival of the Fairness Doctrine but of overturning McCain itself.
In any court case touching on the objectivity of journalism, the issue of the Clarence Thomas - Anita Hill hearing and the objectivity of Justice Thomas could be raised. But to raise that question against Justice Thomas would be to turn the issue on its head. The question is not, or certainly not so much, whether Thomas can be objective seeing that he does not read the newspapers as it is whether any of the other justices can be objective seeing that the do read the newspapers. If SCOTUS can hear the issue fairly, there is no question that the First Amendment not only does not assure that journalism generally and Big Journalism as we know it specifically is objective. The First Amendment forbids the government to require journalism to be objective.
Another question which naturally arises is, "What is the alternative to the status quo of journalism?" The status quo is, as I have pointed out, that journalism is:
- motivated by a common interest - the interest of promoting talk, and their position at the peak of the propaganda power pyramid. That means that journalism naturally tends to denigrate action and promote criticism. When Theodore Roosevelt noted that "it is not the critic who counts," he could have been looking straight at the press gallery.
- unified. It is Big Journalism; its members are linked via the Associated Press and by their common agenda noted above. Questions could rightly be raised about conspiracy in restraint of trade.
- Prone to sophistry. The question is not, "Why should they" engage in sophistry; the question is why anyone would assume that they would not engage in it.
There is a classical reaction to the position the Sophist. "You claim to be wise, and presume to denigrate anyone whose supposedly inferior wisdom you can ridicule. But you cannot prove your own wisdom, and your claim is therefore arrogant. I do not claim to be wise, but I admit that there is such a thing as wisdom and truth, and I am open to facts and logic because I love wisdom." The Greek word for someone who loves wisdom is philo (brotherly love) soph (wisdom, again) - "philosopher."
Who then is the sophist, and who the philosopher? Anyone who uses an advantage of power to control the debate and keep certain facts off the table (in the style of the "objective" journalist) is a sophist. Anyone who eschews ad hominem attacks and other propagandistic techniques, and who is open to the facts and logic pointed out from any quarter, is a philosopher. Your average FReeper, lacking any ability to control the debate, must perforce be a philosopher.
Of course the moderators of FR, and Jim Robinson, are in a position to be able to control the debate on FR, and actually they do. But their control extends only to FR in particular, and not the Internet generally - let alone to any of the so-called "mainstream media." And FR succeeds as a forum because in fact the moderators are not interested in manipulating the discussion but in appealing to what is in America conventionally called a "conservative" audience. Likewise Rush Limbaugh and the rest are in a position to be able to be what Rush calls "a benevolent dictator" of what is said on their shows. And likewise, those shows succeed or fail as they exercise that power in such a way as to appeal to a wide audience, or fail to.
Rush calls his format "the long form," by which he obviously means that the format does not depend on hit and run tactics. "The News" by contrast is a very stylized, stilted view. You are basically given the word, whether you like it or not. Nothing is on the table for discussion. Rush on the other hand takes calls, and debates with callers. His listeners would hear it if he were being manipulative with his callers, and he succeeds because his listeners do not hear that. A talk show host who allows a wide range of views to be expressed, and who focuses that discussion on current affairs, is addressing the "market for conservative-based news."
Of course at one time the MSM prided themselves in objectivity. They have thrown that out the window.
The "MSM" actually is IMHO better characterized as "Big Journalism." Journalism, and not fictional movies or TV dramas, has an obligation to be objective.Of course it is nonsense to purport to be objective, but journalism has the obligation nonetheless because journalism is a monopoly. There are of course many "different" news outlets, some of which actually were strongly independent in the distant past - but in reality the telegraph and the Associated Press (1848) actually created journalism as we have known it all our lives.
There were of course newspapers in the Founding Era, but they had no sources which were not in principle available to the general public without reading a newspaper. Newspapers were highly opinionated; for example Hamilton and Jefferson waged their partisan battles by sponsoring newspapers to promote their own ideas and criticize each other's ideas. Some newspapers published weekly, and some had no deadline at all and went to press when the printer was good and ready.
That is mentioned diffidently in encyclopedias today with embarrassment, since it is not politically correct to recognize that no one is objective, and that applies to the Associated Press and the organs which it absorbed in the Nineteenth Century. The claim of journalistic objectivity traces back to the AP's response to criticism of the AP's role in monopolizing the use of the telegraph to transmit news. The AP systematically insinuated itself into the business model of any telegraph line, along with the telegraph's more fundamental role in providing command, control, and communication for the railroad as its first priority, in exchange for the railroad's provision of the right of way needed to run the wire.
Whereas in the Founding Era the newspapers were primarily ideosincratic, florid opinion journals which were independent of each other and in slow communication with each other, the Associated Press transformed the newspaper business into journalism - the reporting of local incidents (available to local citizenry independently) but also, and especially, the reporting of incidents from distant places of which the local citizenry could independently learn only after a long delay. Suddenly the local newspapers across the country were cooperating through the medium of the Associated Press, and carrying rewrites of each others' stories with little delay. Suddenly the newspapers needed each other - and the idea of substantive ideological competition between newspapers became a fiction. Suddenly newspapers had a gusher of stories on the AP wire, and you weren't a newspaper unless you published daily. Newspapers segregated their editorial opinions into explicit editorial pages, positioning the rest of the paper as being "objective." Whereas in prior times of actual competition individual newspapers would have ridiculed the idea that any other newspaper was objective, suddenly the business model of every paper depended on the perception that all newspapers were objective.
Obviously the fact that journalists have a need to convince us that journalism is objective, and the fact that they have, since the memory of living man runneth not to the contrary, had the opportunity to propagandize the public with the idea that journalism is objective, is a better argument that the claims of journalistic objectivity are propaganda rather than that journalists are or ever in the past actually have been objective. Very well - but if journalism is not objective, it should have an identifiable perspective - and it does.
The perspective of journalism is that journalism is more important than it actually is. Journalism inherently constitutes criticism and second guessing of those who actually do things. That is the planted axiom of the well-known dictum of journalism: If it bleeds, it leads. Journalists are on the lookout for bad news. They will therefore put a negative spin on whatever news comes across the transom - and that makes them functionally cynical about the people who are trying to get things done. And that has predictable political consequences:
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.Journalists systematically promote critics over people who commit to actual action; they are cynical about working to a bottom line. They are cynical about the police because the police have to decide to take action, risking charges of police brutality if they act or of laxness if they do not act in a particular situation. Ditto for the military. They are cynical about the businessman, criticizing him pollution if he produces, and for inadequate supply (high prices) if he does not produce enough - and sometimes for both simultaneously. In short the attitudes which are natural to the journalist are attitudes which are associated with the political left.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 . . . Theodore Roosevelt
The 'Recession' Is a Media Myth.
Fox News ^ | April 1, 2008 | John Lott
The left does not believe in the First Amendment. It is the left which promotes the fiction that journalism is "the press" - which is nothing more than the notion that you have to have access to the AP newswire to have the right to freedom of the press.The McCain-Feingold law was promoted by journalism, and for journalism - and for journalism's allies who join journalism in their self promotion via the criticism and second guessing of businessmen, the police, and the military. Anyone, that is, who takes concrete responsibility for concrete action.
When media stopped covering up all her blunders."Where did the Hillary Clinton campaign first go wrong?"
Obama's campaign wouldn't be doing so well either if media didn't keep stuffing the skeletons that keep falling out of his closet back in.
Gee, just imagine what Democrat fortunes would look like if media was actually unbiased, and journalists wrote real investigative journalism articles instead of biased op-eds?
Journalism is just talk, not action - and it follows that journalism has an inherent bias in favor of talkers at the expense of doers. Talkers can always second guess, and point out the hole in any doughnut. When a talker is proven wrong by the course of events, a talker will always change the subject.American "conservatism" is about gratitude, about giving credit to " the man who is actually in the arena . . . who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds."
As an engineer who believes in tech progress, it is a grief to me to recognize the disastrous consequences of the simple telegraph. Because, as a solution in search of a problem, the promoters of the telegraph promoted the idea of the importance of the news out of all proportion. In the real world the news is rarely something that we need to, or even can, take effective action on. But we have been sold the propaganda that that almighty "wire" of superficial, negative, unrepresentative stories from the Associated Press was of vital everyday importance.
Rush talks about the fact that if you miss one news outlet, there is always another one telling the same story . . . or some other story of equal irrelevance. And that is perfectly true because the AP newswire has homogenized the press and turned it into journalism. Newspapers used to be openly partisan affairs, notably fractious and contentious. The AP newswire was a faustian bargain - it gave each newspaper an unlimited supply of news, but it also gave the same news to all newspapers. With the result that the news is a national monopoly, and all those notably fractious and opinionated papers suddenly limited their ideological competitiveness to the editorial page.
Underneath it all is the shared need for the public to perceive that the Associated Press is objective - meaning that, far from acting as a check on each other, each newspaper committed itself to the proposition that all newspapers are objective. Whereas, of course, none of them is objective since all are selling the same exaggerated idea of the importance of the news in and of itself. So, exactly because newspapers took on a facade of objectivity, they became insidiously propagandistic. And that has been going on since the memory of living man runneth not to the contrary.
We can only hope that the Internet and the bandwidth revolution reverse, or at least effectively expose, that.
Where did the tables turn?
Politico ^ | 4/8/08 | ROGER SIMON
What is scary about that? The results will be pretty close to indistinguishable.It's scary to think of CBS outsourcing their news gathering to CNN. Not that it would change up their view that much, but consolidation of news gathering sounds like a step in a very bad direction.
Exactly. The reality is that if you've seen one network news broadcast, you've seen them all. And if you've seen one newspaper, you've pretty much seen them all, too. The reason is quite simple - the Associated Press.Before the advent of the telegraph and the Associated Press, newspapers didn't have news sources which the public at large did not have, at least in principle. Consequently newspapers were often weeklies, and some had no deadline at all and just went to press when the printer was good and ready. Without a source of news which was independent of the local scuttlebutt, newspapers were more openly political than anything we are used to except Radio talk shows and National Review. Political rivals Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton each sponsored a newspaper to compete politically with the other, and either of them would have laughed at the idea of "journalistic objectivity."
The telegraph and the AP transformed the newspaper business, and essentially created journalism as we know it. Since the AP was an aggressive monopoly, it had to defend itself against charges that it was a dangerous concentration of power. Its response was to note that its members included papers which didn't agree politically on anything - and that therefore the AP was objective.
The fallacy in that argument is that, even if it didn't change any paper's editorial page policy prescriptions, membership in the AP homogenized the newspapers in a very significant way. The AP made all member newspapers participants in the new business of selling news hot off the AP newswire from all over the country. And that required all newspapers to promote the conceit that all journalists everywhere were objective. An idea which in prior times every editor in the country would have laughed out of court. I propose a definition of "subjectivity" as belief in one's own objectivity.
The Flickering Light of the News Town Hall ^ | April 9, 2008 | Tony Blankley /a>
Isn’t Glenn Beck on CNN?
I guess I'm a liberal too. :-)a often capitalized : a movement in modern Protestantism emphasizing intellectual liberty and the spiritual and ethical content of Christianity b: a theory in economics emphasizing individual freedom from restraint and usually based on free competition, the self-regulating market, and the gold standard c: a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties
Sure - we all are. That's why "liberal" was such a useful label for socialists to adopt when "socialism" failed as a brand in America.Why were socialists able to adopt it? Because journalism's fundamental bias is that journalism - the frenetic reporting of all bad news - is important. And that implies that journalists - implicit or explicit critics of whoever has responsibility for getting things done - are important. The idea that the critic is more important than the doer is the fundamental tenent of socialism. That's why I consider
"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena - Theodore Rooseveltto be a fine definition of American "conservatism" (actually, in a literal sense, liberalism). Consequently socialists are simpatico with journalists, and journalists assign socialists whatever label the socialists want. Likewise, journalists assign to actual liberals, whom they despise, a term which actually applies to no or very few Americans - "conservative."Actual liberals - American so-called "conservatives" - have nothing in common with socialism, hence nothing in common with Communism and nothing in common with Fascism. The Fascist Party was founded by Benito Mussolini, who broke with Communism - but not with socialism - and was a working journalist when he seized control of the Italian government.
You will note the strong antipathy in this post towards journalism, and you will ask my opinion of the First Amendment. I think it is a fine idea, and I think we should try it again. At the time of the framing of the Constitution, newspapers were independent of each other and highly opinionated (a la Rush Limbaugh). For example, Hamilton sponsored a newspaper in which to attack Jefferson's politics - and to defend himself and his policies from attack by the newspaper Jefferson sponsored! The very last thing which the First Amendment implies is that any newspaper is or even should be objective. Clearly the First Amendment forbids the federal government to require that newspapers be objective - and it makes no reference to any distinction between the body of a paper and any "editorial page."
How did we get from the free press as I describe the founding era to the markedly tendentious so-called "objective" journalism of today? The answer lies in the telegraph - the telegraph and the Associated Press. The Associated Press was/is an aggressive monopoly on journalism. In fact, it essentially created journalism as we know it; the independent and highly opinionated newspapers which existed before the AP do not even qualify for the name "journalism" as we use it now because they did not have independent sources of news not in principle available to readers independently of reading the newspaper. In reality, of course, they still don't - if you are willing and disciplined enough to wait until other sources of information catch up with journalism's reports. And the intrinsic bias of Associated Press journalism is against your being patient and waiting for events to ripen and be digested. Associated Press journalism is about always having something fresh to tell you which you did not know until they told you.
The advent of the Associated Press monopoly did not go unchallenged; it was natural to question the reasonableness of having a single nationwide news source feeding all our newspapers. When that question was raised, the AP's answer was that it included newspapers of all shades of opinion - the AP was objective. The fallacy in that argument, in addition to the fact that nobody can prove their own objectivity, is that AP journalism transformed the business model of its constituent newspapers from opinion to putative "fact." And it made the newspapers reliant upon each other for the reliability of what they were printing. Consequently all members of the AP had a business reason to claim that not just their own newspaper, but newspapers in general, were "objective." The famously combative newspapers which didn't agree about anything suddenly had a compelling reason to agree on a lot.
So now, if a CBS News files a report claiming that Bush skipped out on his Texas Air National Guard commitments based on patently fraudulent source documents, and if CBS News then proceeds to circle the wagons and conduct an "independent investigation" for no other reason than to "learn" that CBS had acted "in good faith without political animus," no other part of journalism calls "BS!" Certainly not in the full-throated, take-no-prisoners style which is business as usual for all of journalism when fraud in any other business, or in the military or the police departments, is detected.
Agree totally.American "conservatism" (actually, in a literal sense, liberalism).
The academia and main stream media has done their propagandizing very well. It is nearly impossible to have a serious political discussion with even 'educated' people. They have been programmed to see they world in stereotypes, not philosophy.
Ping to this thread, which discusses these matters.When you mention "philosophy" I am put in mind of the etymology of the word: "philo" means brotherly love, and "soph" means wisdom. Hence, "philosophy" is the love of wisdom. In contradistinction to "sophistry," which traces to the Sophists who claimed to be wise and thereby talked down to anyone who challenged their "logic." IMHO the claim of objectivity made by journalists is unsupported by anything other than the propaganda barrage which journalists put up to prevent anyone from questioning it. And by my lights there is nothing to distinguish a claim of objectivity from a claim of wisdom - so that when we argue with "liberals" what we actually face is a deprogramming task. They have made the assumption that journalism is objective, and all else follows from that.
I actually felt that I made some headway with my son-in-law last time we spoke; he accepted my point that journalism as we know it either is objective or it is illegitimate because of the monopoly which the AP constitutes. If I can get him to accept that the AP cannot be objective because it exists to promote the idea that the news is important, I'll have him. I'm actually of two minds about really convincing him; he's a scientist and therefore would be on the outs with his professional group if he became thoroughly convinced that "liberalism" is a fraud.
An honest statement from the MSM at last!Stengel said. “But this notion that journalism is objective, or must be objective is something that has always bothered me – because the notion about objectivity is in some ways a fantasy. I don’t know that there is as such a thing as objectivity.”excellent ping, PGalt.
Caveat Emptor applies far more to Time Magazine than it does for Exxon.
True, as far as it goes. But the actual issue of objectivity arose only with the advent of the Associated Press, which was by design a monopoly on the transmission of news via telegraph. It systematically crowded out and smothered competitors - and, naturally enough, was challenged as an unprecedented concentration of public influence in a single organization. The AP responded that it included newspapers of all points of view, so it was objective.The first fallacy in that argument is of course that whoso takes his own objectivity for granted is by that very assumption the most subjective of men.
The second fallacy is that the famously independent voices of the various newspapers would or even could remain independent after they were associated. It was impossible for that to be true, because the AP transformed the business model of the newspaper business. In the founding era newspapers were openly partisan affairs, and - since in any event they had no news source which in principle their readers did not have independent access to, they typically went heavy on commentary and frank opinion - and most of them were weekly rather than daily affairs. That changed to a certain extent in the big cities which in about 1830 got high speed presses which were capable of very high volumes of production and therefore motivated newspapers to aim for a broader market than a highly idiosyncratic editorial perspective would be able to attract.
But the advent of the AP newswire put every AP newspaper in the business of reporting news which in principle their local public did not immediately have access to. That put every newspaper, and its readership, in the fog of breaking news. Say rather, the public had always been in a fog of very sparse information about the world outside the local area - and the newspapers suddenly had the ability to sell access to that outside world. But only on the terms of, not only the local newspaper itself, but of the Associated Press. If the AP didn't report a particular event, no newspaper remote from that event would even have the opportunity to report it. And even if the AP did report it, every newspaper was of course at liberty to either blare it out on a banner headline on the front page, bury it in the middle of the paper, or ignore it completely.
And lest there be any illusion that the AP was ever objective, the history of its relation with the Lincoln Administration puts paid to it. Because in the midst of the turmoil of the Civil War, the last thing the Lincoln Administration needed was the sort of journalism to which we have lately been so uncomfortably accustomed. It was all the administration could do to accomplish the mission in which it was immersed. To have simultaneously contended with the sort rolling PR assault which modern Republican presidents take as part of the territory - and which to his everlasting credit Ronald Reagan was able to overcome even as he whipped inflation, got the country going again, tamed the energy crisis, and transcended Communism - would have sunk the Union. Which was a near-run thing in any event, since General McClellan and his peace platform would have won the election of 1864 but for the Union battlefield successes of that year. Lincoln would not allow the Union to be sunk. So he coopted the AP, giving it favored access to the telegraph offices and to administration officials - in return for censorship, and self-censorship, of news inconvenient to the administration.
So the AP was scarcely out of its cradle when it was deeply enmeshed in the systematically tendentious reporting of the news. And the same sort of thing was endemic to the contemporaneous reporting of World War II. For example, the Roosevelt Administration censored the news of the fact that many hundreds of ships were lost to German U-boats in less than a year after Pearl Harbor - before the Navy had sunk a single U-boat. (None of which information was, of course, any secret to the Germans).
Certainly a case can be made in favor of the censorship which went on on both of those occasions - and, I doubt not, during WWI as well - but what is undeniable is that the same sort of self-censorship which occurred then is not in place now. It is not the bad news for the Bush Administration which is not reported, but the good news. Journalists have been falling all over themselves to emphasize the casualties of the Iraq occupation. Was it objective to emphasize the positive during "good" wars? If so, it cannot be objective to dote lovingly on Abu Graib and to emphasize the 1000th, the 2000th, the 3000th, and lately the 4000th death of US servicemen in Iraq.
Time is entirely within its rights to be an openly partisan magazine like National Review or The Nation. But it need not necessarily expect to have any more circulation than those publications, either. As to the general concept of journalistic objectivity, that is a patent fraud, and it could never be otherwise. But it is a fraud which has been supported by an unremitting propaganda campaign since the memory of living man runneth not to the contrary. Credence accorded to that fraudulent campaign against common sense amounts to a flaw in American culture.
The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . .Time Editor Defends Doctoring Iwo Jima Photo, Calls Objective Journalism 'Fantasy'It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity,
and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith
businessandmedia.org ^ | April 21, 2008 | Jeff Poor
"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.
There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
Source: Labor's Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, published by United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, NY, 1955/1979.
"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.
I can heartily agree with that line, but as to the rest of it I could not be sure without reading the context to learn exactly what he means byWe are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."Exactly who, and what perspective, does he claim are the secret evil suborners of perjury? If it is the Associated Press and the owners of the newspapers, he has a point. If it is advertisers, I hold the opinion that they are more victims of a protection racket than evil preventers of the publication of the truth. Look at the infamous exploding truck on, I believe, ABC. The producers of the "documentary" torched the gas tank to cause the fuel to flare up - and even then, they ended on a freeze-frame when the flame was at its maximum dramatic appearance, before the fire went out without consuming the truck.
My reading of it indicates that those are EXACTLY who he is talking about - the signers of the pay checks - but I could be wrong.
The trouble is not that the MSM is tendentious. The real trouble is that Americans have been indoctrinated to believe the MSM for so long (a century and a half) that memory of living man runneth not to the contrary. By now it is integrated into our culture, and people seriously assume that you are a kook if you express the slightest skepticism about it. To attack that cultural problem it is necessary to identify its source. That source does not lie in the founding era, but much later.In a discussion with a "media bias denier," the first question to ask is whether it was the newspaper sponsored by Alexander Hamilton or the bitterly opposed newspaper sponsored by Thomas Jefferson which was objective back then. The answer is that neither of them claimed to be objective; everyone would have laughed them to scorn if they had tried that. They were openly partisan, and everyone understood that it was up to the reader to decide which of them was in the right, about what. Pretty much like National Review and The Nation today.
So much for the theory that the First Amendment has something to do with "objectivity." Where did the theory of "journalistic objectivity" come from? "Newspapers," as they were already called back then, did not actually have a technological advantage over the general public at gathering news - in principle the owner of the local tavern probably heard everything that the printer heard, and therefore learned but little in the way of "news" from the "newspaper." So newspapers had a different function, which was more of an opinion expressing function to disseminate the opinions favored by the printers of the various papers. As well as commercial advertising, which does attract readers. The printing presses were relatively primitive, and the press runs were perforce small. And without a cornucopia of fresh news which would be news to the reader, there was little reason to print daily, and typically they were weeklies - and some had no deadline and just printed whenever the printer was good and ready.
Two Nineteenth Century developments changed that. First, in about 1830, the high speed press came into use. With a higher capacity available, the printer in a large market had a motive to appeal to a wider audience and therefore to not be politically specialized. But the transformational technology was the telegraph, and the organization which implemented the transformation was the Associated Press (founded 1848 as the "New York Associated Press." Suddenly AP members had "the wire." There was no longer any question of not having anything to say that readers hadn't already heard. The Associated Press was interested in incorporating all newspapers into it, and it was therefore aggressive about monopolizing the transmission of news by telegraph.
So here we had a novel situation - a single organization with nationwide influence over the public. Naturally, that raised eyebrows. But the AP had an answer to the questioning of their monopolistic status - "We have newspapers of all stripes of opinion in our association. We aren't partisan, we are objective."
So there you have it. The claim of journalistic objectivity is an artifact of the coordination of all the newspapers via the telegraph. Through an identifiable organization, the Associated Press.
There are two salient problems with the AP's argument. First, anyone who assumes that he is objective makes himself subjective by that very assumption. Secondly, the famous fractiousness of the AP's members is mooted by the transformation of the newspaper business implied in the AP newswire. The newspaper business hadn't actually been a true "news" business in the same way before the founding of the AP as it was after it. The AP didn't make the political opinions of editors coincide, but it did unite the newspapers around the proposition that news reporting was objective. Not because it is a fact - it certainly is not - but because acceptance of that belief by the public is central to the business model of the newspaper (and now also, of course, the broadcast journalist).
That was not the case before the advent of the Associated Press, but it has been for the past century and a half. And the applicability of O’Sullivan’s First Law - first to newspapers, then to the rest of society through the influence of journalism - follows from that.
O'Sullivan's First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.United around the importance of journalism, journalists promote the reporting of superficial bad news, whose importance typically resides only in the fact that the journalist knows it before the public does, and can be the first to tell it. And that is in the promotion of criticism over performance - exactly what Theodore Roosevelt"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena -warned against. The promotion of criticism over performance is the essence of leftism. The existing fee-for-service and private insurance model "isn't good enough" because it isn't perfect. And so we must institute control over the system by people who are utterly unqualified to provide the service, but who promote the idea of their own moral superiority over those who actually do. And who promote their own wisdom over the judgement of the actual patient as to the relative value of money and the physician's and the pharmacist's services. It is all a bunch of cheap talk.The Real Joe McCarthy
The Wall Street Journal ^ | April 22, 2008 | RONALD KESSLER
Exactly who, and what perspective, does he claim are the secret evil suborners of perjury? If it is the Associated Press and the owners of the newspapers, he has a point. My reading of it indicates that those are EXACTLY who he is talking about - the signers of the pay checks - but I could be wrong.
I think that much is clear - but the issue is whether he was claiming that advertisers were calling the calling the tune or whether he was admitting that the very claim of the importance of journalism itself was at fault. The latter is the truth, but my money is on the former as the animus of the quotation.
Hmmm? Never considered that. You could be right but I don't know that it would be possible to learn that from this source material alone.
What I can tell you, from first hand knowledge, is that no matter how well done the story WILL NOT run if the publisher doesn't like it regardless of advertisers.
Elimination of the "fairness doctrine" was a step forward - say rather, a step BACK to respecting the freedom of the press - and accordingly I view any step toward a resumption of the "Fairness Doctrine as an infringement of my rights.The First Amendment teaches that creatures of the government such as the FCC are not authorized to judge "fairness" or "objectivity." History shows that creatures of the government will not be competent to do so in a way that secures the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. And that they cannot be trusted to even make a good-faith effort to do so.
Members of the founding generation Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson sponsored newspapers in which they waged partisan battles with each other. And in the era preceding the institution of the Associated Press, newspapers generally were highly opinionated, and relatively low circulation affairs which did not have a boundless supply of anecdotes with which to charm the public and which usually were not dailies and sometimes had no fixed deadline at all. And if our newspapers and our radio and television programming were run on that same basis today, there would obviously be no real case to be made against them under the First Amendment whose meaning, quite obviously, the founders had been entirely competent to judge.
It was the Associated Press which, attacked as the aggressive monopoly which it was, first had the motive and opportunity to claim that journalism was objective. The fact that it had self-interested motive to do so makes its arguments to that effect suspect. The fact that it had opportunity - that under its regime the business models of all major newspapers required that journalism be considered by the public to be objective, and therefore no major newspapers rebutted the AP's claim - actually demonstrates why that claim should be rejected out of hand.
The only justification the AP adduced to support the notion that the AP was objective was the fact that the association included members of all political stripes and factions. But, from inside the association, those famously fractious presses had a motive for unanimous agreement on the idea that telegraph-transmitted journalism was objective and a vital public service. And that they all were objective. Which makes the argument from the assumption of the fractious independence of the individual members a nullity. Independent opinion-page writing does not suffice to make the members of the AP independent. Independent opinion-page writing is a mere ornament in comparison to the unification of the news pages which the AP implies.
If the demise of newspapers meant that people will now be better informed, who could be against it? But that premise is untrue.
The population, especially the young, today is very poorly informed on all matters, especially national and international matters. They don't read much of anything except their call screens.
The “new media” is not utilized, for the most part, for enlightenment. Rather, it is utilized for entertainment and personal applications.
. . . the papers were generally well-written, and that the readers were generally pretty well-informed about what was happening in the world.
I agree that the demise of newspapers will not increase the likelihood of people being "pretty well-informed about what is happening in the world." My critique is more radical than that; my complaint is exactly that it is possible to be so fixated on "what is happening in the world" that you lose your perspective and are lost in the fog of breaking news (of which "the fog of war" is a special case).Journalism as we know it didn't even exist when the First Amendment was ratified; without the telegraph the newspapers didn't have unique access to "what is happening in the world," and consequently were not in the business of selling extremely perishable news. That is why so many "newspapers" of the day were weeklies rather than dailies; some didn't even have a deadline at all and just printed when the printer was good and ready. Newspapers were written in a completely different style then than they have been for the past century - they were openly partisan and didn't claim to be objective. So a Thomas Jefferson and an Alexander Hamilton could, without raising an eyebrow, each openly sponsor a newspaper to attack the politics of the other.
All that changed, over a period of time, after the advent of the telegraph and (1848) the Associated Press. The AP was an aggressive monopolizer of the business of sharing news among newspapers, and it was rightly challenged on the basis that that was an undue concentration of public influence. The AP's defense was that, since the newspapers in its association were famously fractious and represented any point of view that you could name, the AP represented no viewpoint but was objective.
That might sound good in theory, but the argument is nonsense because, de facto, the AP had co-opted those various viewpoints. The newspapers remained "independent," and at loggerheads on the editorial pages - but the editorial pages were no longer the main course of the newspapers. Because, suddenly, the newspapers were in the business of printing "what was happening in the world." And that meant that the various newspapers shared content. Now all of a sudden, it was possible to claim with a straight face that your newspaper was objective - not because it was so in reality, but because all the other newspapers were claiming the same thing - that "journalists" - in general - "are objective." So, far from effectively being at loggerheads due to differing policy prescription preferences, journalists have been effectively been in lockstep since the advent of the AP.
When Eisenhower was forming his cabinet in 1953, he named General Motors CEO Charles E. Wilson to be SecDef:
Wilson's nomination sparked a major controversy during his confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, specifically over his large stockholdings in General Motors. Reluctant to sell the stock, valued at more than $2.5 million, Wilson agreed to do so under committee pressure. During the hearings, when asked if as secretary of defense he could make a decision adverse to the interests of General Motors, Wilson answered affirmatively but added that he could not conceive of such a situation "because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa." Later this statement was often garbled when quoted, suggesting that Wilson had said simply, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." Although finally approved by a Senate vote of 77 to 6, Wilson began his duties in the Pentagon with his standing somewhat diminished by the confirmation debate.The picture journalists painted of Wilson - that he thought that "What's good for General Motors is good for the country" - is precisely my opinion of Big Journalism under the aegis of the Associated Press. They think that whatever is good for them is good for the country. And while in 1953 there was something to be said for the fact that GM was such a bellwether of the US economy that what was good for GM would be reflected in the general prosperity of the country, that simply is not, and could never be, the case with journalism. That could never be the case, because "No news is good news" - which implies that bad news for the country is good for the journalism business. As witness, the flurry of journalistic activity - and readership/viewership - which accompanies a war or natural disaster.And, of course, we are all familiar with the tendency of journalism to find fault with businessmen, the military, and the police - the more we need to be able to trust an institution, the more of a target that institution becomes to journalism. Journalism promotes itself by tearing down others. Journalistic criticism does not face a bottom line; if the things journalism promotes for others to do turn out to be disasters, journalism simply changes the subject. And invites us further into the fog of breaking news, and away from the clarity of retrospectives which would, for example, show that journalism was insistently, determinedly, fanatically wrong about Ronald Wilson Reagan.
"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena - Theodore RooseveltWhen Madison was saying that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . ." the content of "the press" of the day resembled the Rush Limbaugh Show of today far more than it did that of The New York Times of today. And that is why I can be entirely sanguine about the troubles of Big Journalism today even as I assert that we today need more, rather than less, adherence to the First Amendment.Venerable Newspapers Face Extinction
The Economist ^ | May 1, 2008 | Staff
Steve Boriss writes:
45To: conservatism_IS_compassionAllow me to share Boriss' succinct history of the AP:Almost from the very beginning, the Associated Press (AP) has been a greedy deal among newspapers at the expense of their readers. It started innocently enough as a group of New York newspapers pooling their resources to get news from Europe faster. But soon, it degenerated into an anti-competitive scheme resembling a cartel, with AP member newspapers at times banding together to snuff-out would be competitors by denying them membership. Worse still, it created an unhealthy culture in which newspapers viewed themselves as collaborators, not competitors. It’s not a daily miracle that virtually every mainstream outlet covers essentially the same news items – it’s an AP-created culture in which papers refuse to compete for readers by offering different stories.
45 posted on 05/02/2008 6:52:27 PM PDT by Milhous (Gn 22:17 your descendants shall take possession of the gates of their enemies)
46The New York Times and the Washington Post took de facto collaboration one step further.As part of a secret arrangement formed more than 10 years ago, the Post and Times send each other copies of their next day's front pages every night. The formal sharing began as a courtesy between Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. and former Times Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld in the early 1990s and has continued ever since.
(Thought that might interest you, Larry).The vision presented here is quite different from much of the current thinking. Its foundation is research and analysis I conduct for the class “The Future of News” that I teach at Washington University in St. Louis.
Very good. Thanks.
LS
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