Ping.
Ping.
Broadcast journalism was created out of neccessity for World War II and it became a means to promote opposition to Hitler, sympathy for England and American involvement in the war.
After the war it transplated itself back home and found its niche promoting liberal causes in the United States.
It bears repeating: Objective journalism is an illusion. A reporter may try to be objective, and in many cases may approach an objective viewpoint, but the mere process of observing and reporting upon those observations is subjective. It's human nature and it cannot be avoided---nor should it be, really, because the subjective opinion of the reporter often provides the slant that makes the story compelling.
C-SPAN probably comes the closest to objective journalism when they plant a camera and let their viewers observe the action.
Great article, thanks for posting.
Big market. All we have now is the Washington Times and the New York Sun. The Times is daily in Washington and weekly in the rest of the country. The news arrives too late, after I’ve already gotten it on the internet. The Sun isn’t available in my state.
Forget print media.
We need an internet-based medium that goes out and finds the news. Not a bunch of links like we already have (FR, Lucianne, World Net Daily, Drudge, etc).
Then we need local news. This is the catch. For local news we are stuck. We have no choice except the local liberal rag.
How about it, some of you rich Republicans? Start financing a good news source?
The "objective" propagandists NEVER have to prove their case. They do not subject themselves to scrutiny from anyone at anytime. That is fine because as evidence of their methods permeates your senses from your (or others) observations, you would rather jettison them than confront them. Life is short.
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.
BUMP!
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.
Captured the essence of the change taking place by FReepers and non-FReepers! BUMP-TO-THE-TRUTH!
OUTSTANDING!
Very interesting philosophical discussion. My philosophy is that we ought to oppose leftism on the very fundamental philosophical level:The sophist argues from the assumption of his own wisdom, resulting in the trivial argument, "I am wise and you are not. You disagree with me. Therefore you are wrong." The philosopher replies, "I do not claim to be wise, but I love wisdom and am ready to hear your facts and your logic. But not your claims to superior virtue which you cannot prove."
- "philosophy" means "love of" (philo) "wisdom" (sophy).
- "sophistry" means wisdom.
It is my opinion that journalism as we have known it all our lives is not something which always existed, but something which is an artifact of the telegraph and the monopolistic Associated Press. In the founding era papers were often weeklies, or even irregularly published - and therefore did not deliver news any faster than you could get it by word of mouth. With the advent of the high speed printing press the printers had bandwidth they needed to fill, and became aggressive in pursuing news stories to fill up space. The AP filled that need admirably - and gave the news editor sources which the general public did not have access to.
When the editor had that, he was in a position to talk down to the reader, and he used his propaganda power to promote the conceit that journalism is "objective." Note that I did not say that the editor said he was objective and other journalists were not - it is critical to understand that journalism in general had to be set up on a pedestal because they all have the same source and are essentially fronts for the Associated Press. At root, journalism as we know it is a monopolistic enterprise - the establishment in America, if that term has any meaning at all.
There is no proof - no way to prove - that journalism is objective. The lack of bias is an unprovable negative, and the con of the journalist is that the fact that it couldn't be proved if it were true shows that we must assume that in fact it is true. It would be impolite to say otherwise, just as it would be impolite to say that a woman is immoral just because she cannot prove that she did not sleep with twenty different men last year. But the situations are not comparable because
First, assuming that you are objective is the very essence of subjectivity. Second, journalism claims to be not only objective but important, and yet journalism does not do things but only criticizes those who do. Theodore Roosevelt said that "It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . ." But journalism not only criticizes the doer, it praises the fellow critic by applying the positive labels "liberal" and "progressive" to him.
- claiming to be objective is logically very similar to claiming to be wise (is there any such thing as "unwise objectivity?"), and that means that the journalist's claim of objectivity puts me at an unfair disadvantage if I disagree with the journalist about something important.
- there is evidence that the claim of journalistic objectivity is false.
And third, of course, is the historical record of cases where journalism has promoted - often, continues to promote - notions which are provably false. It was patent from the beginning that Michael Nifong was abusing his office when he tried the Crystal Mangum charges in the newspaper. It was patent from the moment that Dan Rather made his "Killian memos" charges that, having only copies and not originals of the putative memos, and no chain of custody for them, CBS could not possibly know that the "memos" were authentic - and it was very quickly demonstrated that it was extremely improbable that the documents had been produced on a machine which even existed at the time the "memo" putatively were written. And on and on; one could go down the list of charges of bias which Ann Coulter lays and documents in Slander.
In sum, leftism is simply criticism and second guessing of the doer by those who take no responsibilty for results. It is supported by the propaganda power of a monopolistic news industry which selectively throws data at us in a confusing cloud to obscure the lack of evidence for the wisdom of its worldview, and is comfortable making baseless ad hominum arguments. Journalism as we know it is inherently leftist - and leftism is sophistry.
Natural Law and Child Abuse American Thinker ^ | November 24, 2007 | Ed Kaitz
bttt
There’s a common saying: “Garbage in, garbage out.”
But, with the Democrat Media, it doesn’t matter what goes in. Good, bad, indifferent. Everything that comes out is garbage.
And the Republican Party has given them control over the debate and the presidential selection process.
The Stupid Party lives. Kinda. For a bit longer. Maybe.
Well done!
The fundamental fallacy under which most Americans labor is the fatuous conceit that journalism is, or even should be, objective. That is the product of the biggest propaganda campaign in history, far longer in extent than Goebbels was able to muster. It has been going on so long that memory of man runneth not to the contrary - indeed, that was already true before most of us were even born. It started back in 1848 with the founding of the Associated Press, which quickly established a telegraph news distribution monopoly which was obviously a propaganda colossus, and was challenged on that basis. But it deflected criticism of its monopoly status by claiming that the Associated Press was (all say it together now, class) "objective."The telegraph and the the AP "wire" transformed the newspaper business. Founding Era newspapers were openly opinionated, with Jefferson and Hamilton each sponsoring a paper to attack the other. And early newspapers were frequently weeklies rather than dailies, and some had no deadline at all and just went to press when they were good and ready. In fact they most resembled our modern local freebie weeklies, which also assume that you get distant news from some other source by the time you see their publications.
The claim of journalistic objectivity is fatuous because the one thing journalism is in favor of is that journalism be assumed to be important. That is its underlying bias, and that explains the fact that reporters and journalistic organs do not question each others' objectivity. They are unified on the importance of their business, far more fundamentally than they are competitive about anything. The reality is that, most days, if you pick up a newspaper in a library from the same date five year earlier you won't remember anything in it because nothing of lasting significance was reported that day. Most days, the most significant thing that happens is all the routine work that the tens of millions of employed people in the country did that day - none of which is ever going to be reported in a newspaper.
So even in the unlikely event that the newspaper contains no outright falsehoods on a given day, it will be a half truth because it systematically ignores the big picture. And that makes the conceit that journalism is objective absurd. The only "evidence" for that conceit is the opinion of journalists that journalists are objective - and belief in your own objectivity is the very essence of subjectivity.
With all due respect, that sounds exactly like a fairy tale. And I don't mean only the "Once upon a time" part.In reality, journalism in the founding era was more like a modern local weekly rag than anything else. Most newspapers were weeklies, and some had no deadline at all and simply went to press when the printer was good and ready. And like the modern local weekly, the founding era newspaper printer took for granted that its readers would have heard the latest news by the time they ever got around to reading a week-old newspaper. Hamilton and Jefferson sponsored competing newspapers in which they waged their partisan battles against each other; I see that as the embryonic stage of political parties in America.
And then came the high speed printing press, and the telegraph and the Associated Press. The high speed printing press was hungry for content to fill its new bandwidth, and the telegraph was just the ticket for providing it. The Associated Press aggressively worked to attain and maintain a monopoly on the telegraphic transmission of commercial news. All very efficient. It was of course noticed at the time that the Associated Press was potentially a centralized propaganda operation, and questions were raised about it. But the AP defended itself by pointing out that its component newspapers were of all different sorts and persuasions, and asserted that it was "objective."
The reality is that journalism is a special interest, the business of persuading the public to pay attention to itself and its advertisers on the basis that journalism - with its "wire" - has information that the public does not yet know. But the reality is also that the information which fits that category is inherently superficial. The newswire tells you in lavish detail about the house that burned down yesterday, but it doesn't mention all the work contractors did on houses yesterday. Consequently after a few years of the papers telling you only that houses are burning down, you may wake up one morning and realize that an entire city has been built.
Journalism is an artificial reality in which journalists are heroes and the people who produce and distribute the food, fuel, security, and other goods and services you depend on are suspects or villains. In the real world Theodore Roosevelt is correct that
"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena - Theodore RooseveltIn the artificial reality of journalism, it is just the opposite. In JournalismWorld, people who second guess are heroes who should be in charge of everything. The planted axiom of JournalismWorld is socialism.In the real world the correct definition of subjective should be, "having a belief in one's own objectivity." There never was a golden age of objective journalism, only a golden age of propaganda success of the newswire monopoly which I like to call Big Journalism. If you read Ann Coulter's Treason, you will come to understand that the term "McCarthyism" is simply a smear of a patriot (albeit not necessarily a more perfect person than, say, yourself).
Dan Rather's behavior during and since the "Killian memo" flap is inexplicable unless you understand that it is simply the standard operating procedure of "objective" journalism. The only reason it didn't work - the only reason Rather is not Cronkite, and John Kerry is not POTUS - is that the Internet and Talk Radio have broken down the walls between you and me and the sources of news. Cronkite could count on the support of the rest of Big Journalism to prevent a critical mass of knowledge of the truth from developing in the general public which would have made a wide public aware of journalism's tendentiousness. Rather counted on the same thing, and his fellow gatekeepers at NBC, ABC, The New York Times, et al did not let him down but followed right where he was leading. The only trouble was, gatekeepers are irrelevant when the walls are down. Some people - a lot of people, actually - are still restricting themselves to the gates, out of habit. But others have the sense to realize what the gatekeepers have been up to, and go through the hole in the wall instead.
I will say this.
If you are a Media Company your News Division should be a loss leader. If it’s not, you aren’t providing enough news or you are not relevant enough. I should be able to read (if I want to), what kind of gum was passed out to the line at the concert I was at (or my kid). If it’s not Pajama media will grow (yay) because of increased connectivity.
Do not Editorialize your News. I paid for your friggen paper just like the other guy. Consign your insulting me to something discretionary in nature, or else I will just decline you totally. This goes both ways
I really don’t care about your writers views on things beyond the topic they are covering. This crap annoys me to no freggin end with sports writing. I am tired of the whole Workers of the World Unite deal when it comes to people who makes millions of dollars.
In any case, just an excellent piece of writing.
You have apparently looked at the problem a good deal; you believe the "objective" tag really began with the creation of the AP in the 1840's, or did it possibly come later?
Lacking the telegraph and the Associated Press, originally newspapers were loaded with partisanship and made no pretense to objectivity. Thus, the newspapers which Hamilton sponsored to wage partisan battles with Jefferson and which Jefferson sponsored to wage partisan battles with Hamilton were, in their time, entirely unexceptionable. Another way of putting that is that the newspapers of the founding era did not necessarily claim, much less attain, independence from political parties - and might be considered nacent political parties in their own right. Just as Rush Limbaugh could be considered.With the advent of the telegraph and the aggressively monopolistic AP, that began to change. Suddenly the newspaper printer - who formerly had gotten his "news" stale via travelers who talked to everyone, not just to publishers - had in "the wire" a source of fresh reports from far and wide not accessible to public at large except as the newspapers printed it. But since the AP was a monopoly, it was necessary that it be publicly viewed as an objective operation - and the newspapers which previously had worn their politics on their sleeves - and mastheads - adopted an "objective" face to present to the public - and did so by ostentatiously creating an editorial page in which to confine their partisan opinions. Thereby "positioning" the rest of the paper as being objective.
This had the political effect of promoting news. News was "objective," and editorials were a matter of opinion. Just as in radio "The News" is "objective," and Rush Limbaugh is "a matter of opinion." But even with good intentions, it is impossible for mortal men to be objective all the time, and they can deceive themselves and think they are objective when in fact they are not. Indeed the very conceit that "the news" is important (even if the news is objectively reported) is an artifact of the fact that they are selling "the news." OTOH the parson will tell you the "good news" - the English translation of the Greek word "gospel" - which is 2000 years old, and will assert in all seriousness that it is the only thing which it is actually important that you know and accept as true.
So it is clear that promotion of news is anticonservative, and tends to promote the journalist at the expense of the prestige not only of the parson but of everyone whom the journalist finds it possible to second guess in his reporting. So the conservative has every reason to question the objectivity of the journalist, who is denigrating the conservative in the ordinary course of business. But is the conservative right, or is the journalist? My answer to that is that at most we do not know, at least in real time, whether the journalist's reports are objective or not. The conservative cannot necessarily prove that the journalist's report is biased, and the journalist does not have any way of proving the negative that it is not biased. But although the conservative may not be able to prove bias in real time, that is not the end of the story. After all, the conservative can wait. Time will show. So instead of allowing the journalist to keep the focus on current events, the conservative can refer to historical facts. And the historical record is replete with example after example of journalism being anything but objective. It is hardly rare for such examples to be clear in a matter of months, weeks, or even days or hours.
Certainly the reality that Dan Rather's best remembered 60 Minutes program was a fraudulent partisan hit piece became clear (Rather's Ruin and the Rise of the Pajamahadeen) to many conservatives in hours. And in days it was clear that not only CBS itself but the rest of "objective" journalism was in the tank for the idea that journalism was right even when it was wrong. CBS formed an "objective" outside panel for the purpose of "investigating" and "learning" that Rather/Mapes's partisan hit on Bush, patently coordinated with the DNC and intended as the "October Surprise" of 2004, "was not politically motivated." Its report, the capstone of the affair from the POV of journalism, was credulously reported by "objective journalism" at large, or not reported at all.
The Duke Lacrosse "rape" cause celebre' was an instance where it was fairly clear fairly quickly that prosecutor MIchael Nifong was bending every rule - to put it plainly, lying outright - to gain reelection to his post, at the expense of the reputations of everyone associated with the Duke Lacrosse Team in general and at the expense of the freedom of a few of its members. None of whom, obviously, were guilty as charged. Within a year, the young men were all actually called "innocent" - not merely unconvictable in court, but innocent of the charges - by the North Carolina Attorney General's office. Yet as Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case extensively documents, major "objective" journalism institutions were convicting innocent young athletes in the press for most of the time up to the point where the NC AG took over the case.
In the larger sweep of history, careful post mortems of such cause celebre's such as the Alger Hiss perjury and the Army-McCarthy hearings reveal that journalists have consistently been biased against conservatives. Against conservatives, and in favor of their own importance. The mirror image of journalism's arrogant contempt for conservatives (and people who work to a bottom line and make decisions which commit them to actions in time to be effective and thus before enough information and analysis is available to fully predict the outcome of those decisions, and therefore are easily second guessed) is affinity for others who find it convenient to second guess and criticize. Union leaders, plaintiff attorneys, teachers and professors (who after all do nothing which can be second guessed, and whose job entails criticizing students extensively), and politicians who do not have a commitment to defending the interests of executives and the middle class fall into this group. Surprisingly enough </sarcasm> journalists assign favorable labels to members of this group - labels such as "liberal" and "progressive" which, in point of fact, are far more descriptive of the actual characteristics of proponents of freedom and of material progress than they are of their political opponents, including journalists.
Another way to address the "objectivity" of journalism is simply to observe that, being a self-professed virtue, it is inherently a doubtful if not oxymoronic claim. To take your own objectivity for granted is the very defining characteristic of subjectivity. And if any journalist should deny claiming his own objectivity, it is enough to point out that he does not challenge the objectivity of any other journalist, and no other journalist questions his objectivity. And the effect is exactly as if each journalist claimed objectivity for himself. If you would be objective, you must examine and attempt to discount your own motives as a first step toward dispassionately analyzing or reporting on a matter. As Antonin Scalia put it, you have to doubly scrutinize your analysis if you like the result too much. The very pace of journalism and its deadlines will make it clear that journalists are poorly situated to be doing that.
But what of the nature of conservative commentary? If I dismiss so-called "liberalism" and so-called "progressivism" as mere self-serving labels applied by journalists to their friends, do I thereby reverse the labeling and simply claim that conservatives are wise? That would not be sensible, and it is not necessary. Rather, conservative commentators and politicians must be judged according as they adhere to the rules of logic and are fair with the facts they adduce. The ancient Greeks had "sophists" who claimed to be wise - and who actually were insufferably self righteous and were the source of the word "sophistry" to describe their arguments. The answer to those who claim to be wise - or objective, which I take to be essentially the same thing - is actual wisdom, which does not presume to call itself such. The answer to the wise guy - the sophist - is to limits one's own claim not to having but to loving wisdom. The one who loves wisdom but does not claim to have a monopoly on it commits himself to being open to new facts, and open to the logic adduced by others. The Greek word for the one who loves wisdom is, "philosopher."
ping for later
You can post hundreds of Thomas Sowell articles without getting a whimper of disagreement from me. But on this issue Mighty Casey has struck out.It is a quibble based on the definition of the word "journalist." Professor Sowell is using the term as journalists themselves define it. A journalist defines journalism as being objective. But that is not reality, that is a mere advertising slogan. Just as calling Democrats like Barak Obama "liberal" or "progressive" is an advertising slogan having no relation to the fact that such politicians do not favor liberty and they do oppose progress (other than in the narrow, tyrannical sense that they want the government rather than the people to progress). Journalists award positive labels - advertising slogans - to themselves and to those who support journalists' self-image.
The First Amendment famously rejects government "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Everyone takes for granted that "the press" obviously existed in the Founding Era. And everyone is familiar with the usage of the term "the press" as a synonym for "journalism." We are familiar with the journalists' organization, the National Press Club. But the reality is that journalism as we know it is a modern invention. Before the invention of the telegraph and the 1848 founding of the Associated Press, the press was not a single entity as we are familiar with it; "the press" was individual, opinionated printers expressing themselves. Hamilton sponsored a paper which opposed Jefferson's policies - and Jefferson returned the favor. Nobody with access to more than one newspaper could possibly have been under the illusion that all newspapers were "objective," and in substance all alike.
The telegraph and the Associated Press - an aggressive monopoly on the telegraphic distribution of news - changed the newspaper business by giving newspapers a source of news not available to the public at large except as it was delivered to them by the newspapers. No longer did the printer get his news from the same source - travelers - as the general public did. And no longer was it sensible to have a leisurely weekly publishing schedule - or in some cases, no deadline at all. Now newspaper publishers were selling a perishable commodity, and speed getting to press was an issue.
The fact that the Associated Press was a monopoly was not unnoticed in the early days, and the AP had to defend itself from charges that it was an illegitimate concentration of propaganda power. But the AP responded that since it consisted of newspapers of various political tendencies and temperaments, it was not monolithic. No, the AP assured us, the AP was "objective." We are supposed to pass over the fact that taking your own objectivity for granted is the very definition of subjectivity. And the fact that the AP was selling news. We are not to scrutinize the implications of that; we are to take it for granted that because timely information can in particular instances be vital that all news which the AP - and whatever newspaper you happen to look at - is important in principle.
In reality, of course, news is such a perishable commodity that its purveyors cannot generally wait on the development of the whole story, but will tantalize us with sketchy reports which may be largely or entirely misleading. In fact, the extent to which a story breaks expectations - that is, seems unlikely and therefore surprising - is an important criterion in story selection. That rule is expressed as, "'Man Bites Dog,' not 'Dog Bites Man'." But if a quick preliminary report of an event is surprising, that reflects the fact that it seems unlikely - and things that seem unlikely may actually not be true. The "Duke Lacrosse Rape" story is an excellent case in point. It was always unlikely on its face, since it implied the collusion of perhaps a score of young men who each had an incentive to turn state's evidence and rat out the others - and their solidarity was impeccable. But so far as "objective" journalists were concerned, it was too
goodbad not to be true, and journalists ran with the story as if there were some plausibility to it long after the only real question was whether Nifong and Mangum were going to get away with their scam unpunished (and in the case of Mangum, the answer was "Yes").On the face of it, journalism is not objective but selects its stories because they are fresh and because they are entertaining in their novelty. Adults should know that, and if we all did no one would suggest - as even Professor Sowell does here - that journalism should be, or ever was, the "objective" endeavor which it proclaims itself to be in its own (unackowledged) advertising.
The media and politics (Thomas Sowell)
Jewish World Review ^ | February 12, 2008 | Thomas Sowell