The Market for Conservative-Based News

"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."

This is changing; yet it has not entirely changed. We have gone from the Huntley-Brinkley-Cronkite-are-gods view of "news" to a much more cynical, suspicious view. People know the "news" is not news. They know it's tainted and biased. So that is a monumental victory, but an incomplete one, because they have not yet (for the most part) figured out how to compensate, how to acquire, quickly and efficiently, the information they can trust or rely on.

For example, many people still think of Rush or Boortz or whoever as "entertainment" first and foremost. I don't. I see them as news analysts.

What we are left with is a public that still is at the mercy of the general agenda of the drive-bys ("global warming," the homosexual agenda, the "can't-we-all-get-along"-ism), but on specifics they depart substantially, usually when it affects them. "Well, I KNOW that's not true because . . . ." But for the rest of it, they just swim along. It's not that they actively accept the socialism and one-worldism preached by the drive-bys, but rather they have to some degree internalized these messages, especially that of "tolerance" and "environmentalism," the drive-bys two biggest successes.

Thus there is a sharp disconnect between individual "news items" that people challenge and distrust, and the drive-by agenda that they passively digest. Changing the latter is immensely difficult.

Finally, on the control of advertisers, many of these marxist notions are obviously silly. Advertisers engage in massive amounts of surveying, focus grouping, and so on trying to see what messages appeal to their customers. These fluctuate wildly depending on the product. (Some people buying cars want freedom and power, some want style, some want "Green.") In other words, finding a political agenda for advertisers is a fool's errand. But even saying they have a "money" agenda misunderstands the fact that they are driven by so many different consumer desires that there is no ONE political message to support.

Therefore, many advertisers/companies jump on the perceived bandwagon of the day. Now it's "green." Young, "hip" products, like clothing stores/lines are tapping into "tolerance" or homosexual themes. (Yes, it doesn't hurt that behind the scenes they have lots of people in power in their industry who are homosexuals). But a study of rock music in the 1960s/early 1970s is instructive. The authors found rock music was pro-Vietnam war or neutral prior to the shifts in public opinion, and only then were anti-war songs aired. In other words, the music industry---even rock music---was a follower, not a leader.

This gets back to the subtle shaping of American attitudes as opposed to the harder "news" that they often question or reject, which is precisely why we have John McCain as a candidate. To the large number of "middle-of-the-road" Republicans who have been influenced by this drive-by culture, they don't agree with many of his positions but completely identify with his "can't we get along" attitudes; they want a war hero, but not a belligerent one; they want a deficit hawk, but don't trust supply-side, despite the evidence ("just don't sound right, cutting taxes=more money for government"); and they want a national health care "plan" but recoil at any trappings of "socialism." They want cheap gas, but are terrified of being viewed as "anti-environment." They want conservative judges, but hate the political bloodshed that must accompany their nomination.

In sum, the "new media" has exposed the drive-bys as biased in their specific coverage and facts; but has yet to destroy their "cultural credibility" that so influences the electorate.

Somewhat pertinent to the topic:

http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3629344

Degrees in the Past

By Vin Crosbie, The ClickZ Network, May 2, 2008
Articles | Contact Vin | Subscribe

For the past year, I’ve been taking a professional sabbatical. After 12 years of consulting full-time about new media with news industry executives, I accepted a one-year assignment to teach graduate school courses about new media business and experimental new media.

The reason I accepted the teaching assignment was certainly not for the money but because the majority of media company executives I’ve encountered during the past 12 years seemed incapable of grasping the fundamental changes underway in media. Even the newer ones, fresh out of school, seemed largely incapable of dealing with the changes underway. I wanted to travel upstream in their career path to see what could be done to train a new generation of media executives capable of comprehending and leading the future.

I expected to find university media school faculties to be full of people who want to upgrade their curricula for the 21st century; professors who needed some consulting help, much as media executives do. I expected to find university students who were avid users of new media and were confident of their mastery of those technologies.

What I found were faculties resistant to change and students whose insights and mastery of new media were being eroded by the authoritative resistance to change of so many professors.

snip

This gets back to the subtle shaping of American attitudes as opposed to the harder "news" that they often question or reject, which is precisely why we have John McCain as a candidate. To the large number of "middle-of-the-road" Republicans who have been influenced by this drive-by culture, they don't agree with many of his positions but completely identify with his "can't we get along" attitudes; they want a war hero, but not a belligerent one; they want a deficit hawk, but don't trust supply-side, despite the evidence ("just don't sound right, cutting taxes=more money for government"); and they want a national health care "plan" but recoil at any trappings of "socialism." They want cheap gas, but are terrified of being viewed as "anti-environment." They want conservative judges, but hate the political bloodshed that must accompany their nomination.

Yes. But there is, frankly, another reason why we have John McCain - we didn't have anyone else upon whom conservatives could readily agree. It's not as if McCain was sweeping with majorities in the primaries, before the last serious opponent, Romney, bowed out.

In sum, the "new media" has exposed the drive-bys as biased in their specific coverage and facts; but has yet to destroy their "cultural credibility" that so influences the electorate.

E. W. Scripps, creator of the first chain of newspapers, said that the AP is a “monopoly pure and simple” that made it “impossible for any new paper to be started in any of the cities where there were AP members.” Scripps also commented, “I regard my life’s greatest service to the people of this country to be the creation of the United Press, to compete with a monopoly that determined what news was provided to the public.” The U.S. Supreme Court in 1945 seemed to share his sentiments, when it found the AP in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act — a decision that allowed the Chicago Sun to remain in business.
The continuing anti-competitive effects of the AP are still with us today, limiting the number of newspapers and the number of voices. Steve Boriss
I had been aware that the Associated Press was an aggressive monopoly - I just wasn't aware that the Supreme Court had ever found in favor of that proposition. It seems to me that that is a fact which not only a legal challenge to McCain-Feingold (which seems to take as a planted axiom that members of the Associated Press are more equal than you and me) but also should be useful as a lever by the new media against Big Journalism.

Didn't know that either. But AP isn't the only news source---you make it sound like only it is distributing news to the drive-bys.

The critique of the AP goes far beyond the issue of whether there are at this late date other sources of news. The real nut of the issue is that, while journalists call themselves "the press" - implying, really prejudicing the issue of, the meaning of that term as meaning themselves, and themselves only - journalism as we know it did not even exist at the time of the adoption of the First Amendment. And the thing that, more than any other, created modern journalism was a single, identifiable, still-extant institution. The Associated Press.
It is as if, to make an overblown analogy, there were still extant a company which was responsible for the importation of all the slaves into America from Africa. And now it doesn't have a monopoly, but it is still in the same business. You will call that extreme, of course - but consider the kind of catastrophic effect that egregious public policy blunders can have on the nation and the world. Things like WWI, the Great Depression, WWII. It is my impression that, over the course of its history, the influence of the Associated Press - yes, along with its competitors - has caused as much human misery as that hypothetical slave-trading business.
You are probably still unconvinced. But if you look at post-WWII history with the Cold War (including Korea and Vietnam) and the Great Society, that was mostly only made possible by journalism's inherent tendency to promote socialism. Without which, China wouldn't have fallen to the Communists, and therefore there wouldn't have been a Great Leap Forward and thus tens of millions fewer people would have been killed there. I just believe that Big Journalism has over its 1-1/2 century career been a disastrous engine of "knowledge" of things that were not actually so.

Still, even without Huck, I'm not sure Romney could have won. He's in the same boat as Obama: lots of people won't say so openly, but they won't vote for a (fill in the blank, black, Mormon, Scientologist).

I think that is incontrovertible. If Obama is on the ticket - and even if he isn't - I favor the nomination of a black VP. Thus, my tagline. I know that Sowell himself isn't a realistic possibility because of his age and his history of criticism of McCain - but Bob Dole blundered by picking Kemp instead of Sowell. There is of course no one like Sowell who is not Sowell. But in any case the fact that an Obama, who has raised his children to hate (or at least have contempt for) you and me, cries out for a rebuttal by the Republican Party. And the only real rebuttal of that would be to show the country a black who does not accept that sort of thing. Unfortunately Bill Cosby doesn't qualify; he supported the Twana Brawley hoax along with Al Sharpton.
But can you imagine a POTUS who, on principle, would exclude white people from his administration! Even just on quality grounds, that would be a disaster considering how hard it was to find a woman for Attorney General in 1993. Without even considering the malice implied in that principle. The Democrats wouldn't nominate a black who would walk out of a Reverend Wright sermon, and the Republicans wouldn't nominate one who wouldn't. But if McCain were to nominate a black, the Democrats would have to do likewise - and the contrast between the two would IMHO leave 60% of the pubic with no choice but to vote Republican.
Of course, many would dislike the choice of an Affirmative Action VP - but in fact, the Constitution incentivizes Affirmative Action for the VP slot. There is a qualification other than competence for VP, in that McCain's VP nominee can't win the votes of his home state unless his home state is different from McCain's home state.

I have to strongly disagree that the press was "socialist" in its post-WW II composition, at least until 1960 or 63---the date remains to be determined. Our research is showing a strongly conservative, patriotic, and capitalist press in 1958-59. Yes, there are some disturbing tendencies---the Hitchens report of 1946, that said the press overdid it in its patriotic coverage of WW II. But for the most part the press was still in the same camp in the Korean War.

Yes, there were influential dissenters, like Lippmann and Murrow. But part of the journalism "myth" has been to build up their influence, much like the KGB over-stated its influence in the Cold War.

Again, you are way too hung up on AP, and not on all the myriad of other factors shaping journalism. I don't think there is a major scholar of journalism, including conservatives like Kuypers and Olasky, who would agree with your take on AP's influence. Somehow you got this AP bug under your bonnet, but the picture is much, much larger, and AP's influence much smaller than you suggest.

I have to challenge that analysis, Larry. My POV is that we have Newspeak characteristics in our political discourse which are IMHO inexplicable if you do not understand that our journalism has been complicit in implementing them. And that I can readily trace at least one of these back at least as far as the FDR administration, and apparently earlier than that.
FDR applied the term "liberal" to himself quite unselfconsciously, and yet we know that during WWII F A Hayek, writing The Road to Serfdom to a British audience, unselfconsciously used the same word to mean "pretty much the opposite" of FDR's meaning (as Hayek himself ruefully noted in a later American edition). Indeed, my daughter made the point to me as recently as ten years ago that in her experience abroad the term "liberal" applies to exactly my own perspective, and noted the irony in my own use of that very term as a pejorative. I take that to mean that American political discourse had inverted the meaning of the word well before WWII. And I question whether there can be any other explanation than that journalism was in on it. Which implies that journalism was monolithic enough, that long ago, to have accomplished it without a controversy which would have left fingerprints.
In addition, Larry, I accept the M. Stanton Evans perspective on the Army-McCarthy hearings and the production of the term "McCarthyism" as a smear on McCarthy himself as well as on anyone to whom journalists and other leftists apply the term. That is a prototype for the current neologism, "swiftboating" - meaning (in plain English) "to tell the unvarnished truth about a Democrat," but meaning (in Newspeak) "to smear a Democrat." So we see that "swiftboating" and "McCarthyism" are near synonyms. I simply don't see how the case is made that the process which has produced "swiftboating" as a verb is any different, or requires any more cooperation from Big Journalism, than the process which produced "McCarthyism" as a noun. Nor, if such be the case, how it can actually be that 1950s Big Journalism, free as it was from the check of the New Media (and backed up by the Fairness Doctrine - now there's a Newspeak label for you) was less unified or less tendentious than the 21st Century version is. The closest thing to the New Media back then was The Reader's Digest (which published, indeed featured, The Road to Serfdom in a condensed version in its April 1945 edition).
My view of what was going on in the "McCarthy Era" is nicely encapsulated on p. 93 of Coulter's Treason:
In 1954, critic Leslie Fiedler captured the essence of "McCarthyism": "From one end of the country to another rings the cry, 'I am cowed! I am afraid to speak out!', and the even louder response, "Look, he is cowed! He is afraid to speak out.''
IOW, a great hue and cry where, if anyone actually believed what was being said, he would expect to hear only the silence of the intimidated. The opposite case, but the same principle, as "the dog that didn't bark."
I would want to scrutinize the methodology of any research tending to show the existence of non-leftist journalism at any time after the AP became entrenched. Explicit editorial page writing excepted, of course.
4 Advances that Set News Back is very interesting, and written by Steve Boriss, who teaches at Washington U. in St. Louis.

It would help if Republicans who appeared in the MSM took a more active role in calling the media out for their blatant bias. Some people already do this (Newt, John Sunnunu, etc.) but the mere fact that the four debate moderators are all far-left fanatics is an indication that the GOP is actively allowing this to continue. The media supports the Left and we allow it.

O'Sullivan's First Law:

All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. . . . The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over — and the rest follows.

IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY:
First defined by German sociologist Robert Michels (1876-1936), this refers to the inherent tendency of all complex organizations, including radical or socialist political parties and labour unions, to develop a ruling clique of leaders with interests in the organization itself rather than in its official aims. These leaders, Michels argued, came to desire leadership and its status and rewards more than any commitment to goals. Inevitably, their influence was conservative, seeking to preserve and enhance the organization and not to endanger it by any radical action. Michels based his argument on the simple observation that day-to-day running of a complex organization by its mass membership was impossible. Therefore, professional full-time leadership and direction was required. In theory the leaders of the organization were subject to control by the mass membership, through delegate conferences and membership voting, but, in reality, the leaders were in the dominant position. They possessed the experience and expertise in running the organization, they came to control the means of communication within the organization and they monopolized the public status of representing the organization. It became difficult for the mass membership to provide any effective counterweight to this professional, entrenched, leadership. Michels also argued that these inherent organizational tendencies were strengthened by a mass psychology of leadership dependency, he felt that people had a basic psychological need to be led.

Yes, Fox just pretended to be centrist and blew the others away. An actual right of center network would force everyone else to the right. - freedomfiter2

You must understand, there is a reason why journalists tend “liberal” - and why journalists flock together. Fundamentally, journalists are critics rather than doers. Once fit into that mold, and you resent the dictum that “It is not the critic who counts . . .” - and you go after “the man who is actually in the arena . . .”
Throw in O’Sullivan’s First Law
All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.
and the fact that journalists all belong to the mutual admiration society known as the Associated Press, and you have a recipe for “the MSM.”
There two possible approaches to objectivity:

You can try to be objective. In order to do this, you must resist the natural tendency to take for granted that your own perspective must be right, or it would not be your perspective. Instead, you must seriously confront the possibility that your own interests may not be absolutely congruent with the public interest. To do this requires humility, and even after you have undertaken that effort you cannot be certain that no element of self-deception remains in your thought. So you cannot expect to attain a position which justifies an authoritative statement that you actually are objective. You can legitimately claim only that you have put in a serious good-faith effort.

You can claim that you are objective. Such a claim inherently limits my reason to suppose that you are even trying actually to be objective, for your clam betrays the fact that you do not accept that you even have to try in order to attain objectivity. And the implications of such claim are the same whether made by yourself or by anyone else with whom you are associated; if made by another you would have to disavow it to avoid the conclusion that you accept the principle.
“Journalism,” as we are familiar with it, is characterized by the second approach to objectivity: claim not to have a perspective of your own. An "actual right of center network” would be one which did not position itself as “Fair and Balanced” but unapologetically as a conservative network. IOW, Rush Limbaugh. As compared with journalism’s claims of actual objectivity, that is actually humility, It is entirely compatible with a claim to be trying to be objective. But if Fox News Channel thinks it is treated as illegitimate by "the MSM for claiming to be ‘Fair and Balanced,'” they ain’t seen nothing compared to the way a Rush Limbaugh News Channel would be treated.
In the presence of a “Limbaugh News Network, FNC would be forced to decide whether to defend its turf on the right or to join the pack on the left. And, on present track record, I would expect FNC to peel off to the “center” - i.e., the left.

highly competitive social market economy

Such a construct is on its face oxymoronic.

As Thomas Sowell once put it, when people use the word “social” as a modifier, it actually negates what it modifies. “Social justice” is injustice, and a “highly competitive social market economy” is, as you suggest, governmental cronyism.
A larger issue is that the term “society” generally has been hijacked, and the effort to do so not only is not new, it was already recognizable in 1776:
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil . . . - Thomas Paine, Common Sense
I, Pencil is an article written in 1958 by Leonard E. Read, the burden of which is that not only does the government not provide society with pencils, no company and certainly no individual can do it, either. For that, society wants people to mine graphite - using machinery which society wanted someone else to design and construct - and so on for the wood, the enamel, the ferule which hold the eraser, the eraser. Not only so, but the people who do all those jobs require food, water, clothing, shelter, and so forth.
The bottom line is that society makes the pencil. It is the grossest of distortions to conflate “society” with government. “Society,” as I have shown, is a perfectly serviceable word for “conservatives” - but it is coopted by people who actually despise the individual components of society and desire to rule them. So, “conservatives” never use the word as they should - and we check our wallets when anyone else uses it.
To make an even larger point, the example of “society” vs. “government” is not the only such case. “Liberal” is another classic. If you read The Road to Serfdom (Reader’’s Digest Condensed Version here), you will see that FA Hayek used the term “liberal” to denote people who today would be called “conservatives” in America. That is because Hayek, an Austrian, learned English in America before the meaning of “liberal” was essentially inverted, according to Safire's New Political Dictionary, in the 1920s. And the meaning of “liberal” was not changed in Britain, where Hayek wrote Serfdom during WWII.
The fact that the American socialists have acquired a word to exploit is bad enough; the real disaster is that we do not now have a word which truly descriptive of our own political perspective. We only have the smear words which the socialists have assigned to us.
And make no mistake, in America "conservative" is inherently a negative connotation - we know that just as surely as we know that every American marketer loves to boldly proclaim that whatever product he is flogging is NEW! A belief in progress is the planted axiom of the American “Great Experiment;” in the Constitution it is explicit in the explicit grant of authority to Congress
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries . . .
There is a systematic thrust of our publicity Establishment toward a Newspeak version of English in which all good words are pro-socialist, and all bad words are anti-socialist.

Just be clear: ”Conservative” “objective” journalism is impossible.
I put scare quotes around “conservative” because American “conservatives” want to conserve liberty - and liberty is not itself conservative. In the 1920s, socialists took over the “liberal” brand; before that time liberalism described us. Our political language has been constructed by socialists, and consequently has a distinct Newspeak quality to it.
The reason you cannot be “conservative” and claim objectivity is the same reason everyone should scorn “liberals” who claim objectivity: it is arrogant to claim a virtue. It is not arrogant to try to attain a virtue, and it is even OK to claim to be trying to attain a virtue (if indeed you are trying).
But there is a fundamental limitation to commercial journalism: you have to make money to survive in business, and you have to attract attention in order to make money. In consequence, you have a strong motive to select and emphasize stories according to the tendency of the public to be unable to ignore them, and not buy your newspaper. And unfortunately what is in the public interest and what interests the public not necessarily, or even usually, the same thing. And you have to interest the public every day.
The need to interest the public motivates rules of journalism, including “Always make your deadline” (with a story, even if in cosmic terms it does not amount to a hill of beans), “‘Man Bites Dog,’ not ‘Dog Bites Man,’” “If it bleeds, it leads,” and “Always claim or insinuate that you - and people who agree with you - are objective, and that no one else is.”
Journalist’s claims of objectivity are arrogant (as noted above) and self-indicting. The claim is self-indicting because

if you know that you are objective, that is tantamount admission that you don’t think you even have to try to be objective - and therefore that you are not even trying to be objective. And,

the negativity implied in “‘Man Bites Dog,’ not ‘Dog Bites Man,’” and “If it bleeds, it leads” rebuts any claim of objectivity unless negativity is objectivity. But “the conceit that negativity is objectivity” is a perfect definition of cynicism.
Journalism which follows standard Journalism 101 rules, therefore, is cynical. And cynicism cannot fall under any definition of “conservatism.”
Cynicism is an antonym for faith, and also for naiveté. But no one can be cynical about everything. For if “A” be the antithesis of “B,” cynicism toward/about “A” cannot but insinuate faith - or at least naiveté - toward/about “B.” As Thomas Paine noted in the opening paragraphs of Common Sense (1776), “society” and “government,” although frequently positioned as being synonyms, are instead essentially antonyms. Standard journalism is cynical about society, and naive at best toward government. And that is an accurate description of “socialism.”

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.