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Journalism has many functions, but perhaps the most important is keeping tabs on public officials. That duty is even more vital concerning government positions that are subject to few other checks and balances. Chief among those is the prosecutor, who can use his awesome state power to punish, even destroy, private citizens.

That is the function of a free press. Contrary to the presumptuous claims of Big Journalism, however, Big Journalism is neither the whole of "the press" nor is it free. It is not free, in the sense that you or I cannot enter the field by the mere act of acquiring the requisite technology. The reason is that we are expressly forbidden by the government to engage in broadcast journalism without a license to broadcast, and - more generally - we are not part of the Associated Press, and we do not subscribe to the fatuous conceit that all journalists are objective.

Yet from the start, the press corps acted as an adjunct of Spitzer power, rather than a skeptic of it. Many journalists get into this business because they want to see wrongs righted. Mr. Spitzer portrayed himself as the moral avenger. He was the slayer of the big guy, the fat cat, the Wall Street titan -- all allegedly on behalf of the little guy. The press ate it up, and came back for more.

. . . the media never acknowledged . . . [that on] his first day in public office . . . Mr. Spitzer became the big guy, the titan.

Precisely. The fawning coverage of Eliot Spitzer, not despite but because of Spitzer's actual record of abusing power, is a picture of the actual nature of Big Journalism. The only difference between Spitzer and Michael Nifong is that Nifong was a mere wannabe in comparison to Spitzer. Accordingly Nifong was vulnerable to higher state governmental authorities, in a state which is not nearly as dominated by "liberal" politics as New York is - and therefore it was possible for Nifong to be caught without the help of Big Journalism.
The fact that such help from Big Journalism was not forthcoming for the victims either of Nifong or of Spitzer puts the lie to the conceit that journalism is objective (a conceit which traces back only to the advent of the telegraph and the monopolistic Associated Press). Wikipedia describes the classic dystopian short story, The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. In that dark story, there is a town which conducts a lottery once a year - the "winner" of which is stoned to death by everyone else in town.
That happens in America. But in real life, an Eliot Spitzer of a Michael Nifong typically functions as the arbitrary selector of victims to be destroyed - and Big Journalism functions as the villagers with stones inflicting much of the arbitrary abuse.
Spitzer's Media Enablers
WSJ ^ | March 12, 2008 | KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

The Farrakhan-Wright vision is fundamentally evil: it tells people from disadvantaged circumstances that they are not true Americans, merely “victims of Americanism.” It tells those without money or power that they will always be without money or power, always dependent upon government largesse for their daily bread. It teaches people to hate this country and the majority of its citizens. The Farrakhan-Wright social vision is a cancer that must be removed—by any means necessary.

Leftism is simply cynicism about endeavor and accomplishment. Since journalists don't do anything, the easy way for them to promote their own significance is to criticize those who do attempt to accomplish things, which means working to a bottom line. For journalists there is no true bottom line, because when things don't go the way they predicted, journalists merely change the subject. In fact the whole system of journalism, and of leftism, is to divert attention away from the big picture, which is the accomplishments of personal responsibility and initiative, and to focus on the individual failures to which we are all subject as if they were all of the story.
John Maynard Keynes famously asserted, "In the long run we are all dead." In the long run, certainly, each of us will be dead - but that is not quite the same as to say the we - the human race - are all dead. And indeed, life expectancy of individuals has been increasing, to such an extent that speculation has been raised about "escape velocity" - the possibility that our children's life expectancy might increase by ten years with each passing decade, so that death becomes less certain than taxes. In such a context we have even less excuse than Keynes' contemporaries to avert our eyes from the long-run perspective - the perspective in which personal responsibility and individual initiative are dominant.
The evil of the Farrakhan-Wright vision is fundamentally that it is a dishonest attack on the individual initiative and personal responsibility which has produced a geometrically increasing standard of living for Americans. An attack, that is, on what has made the modern American secretary so well situated that she would be ill advised to trade her circumstances for those of the fabulously wealthy Queen Victoria (1819-1901) of Great Britain.
The Division Bell
Human Events ^ | 3/22/08 | D. R. Tucker

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.
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
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.
The 'Recession' Is a Media Myth.
Fox News ^ | April 1, 2008 | John Lott

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.

What is scary about that? The results will be pretty close to indistinguishable.

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>

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

I guess I'm a liberal too. :-)

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 Roosevelt
to 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.
How Liberals Lost A Liberal (Why Many Democrats Became Republicans Alert)
Townhall ^ | 4/15/2008 | Dennis Prager

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.

An honest statement from the MSM at last!

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 . . .
It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith
Time Editor Defends Doctoring Iwo Jima Photo, Calls Objective Journalism 'Fantasy'
businessandmedia.org ^ | April 21, 2008 | Jeff Poor

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 Roosevelt
When 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

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.

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.”