The left does not believe in the First Amendment. It is the left which promotes the fiction that journalism is "the press" - which is nothing more than the notion that you have to have access to the AP newswire to have the right to freedom of the press.The McCain-Feingold law was promoted by journalism, and for journalism - and for journalism's allies who join journalism in their self promotion via the criticism and second guessing of businessmen, the police, and the military. Anyone, that is, who takes concrete responsibility for concrete action.
When media stopped covering up all her blunders."Where did the Hillary Clinton campaign first go wrong?"
Obama's campaign wouldn't be doing so well either if media didn't keep stuffing the skeletons that keep falling out of his closet back in.
Gee, just imagine what Democrat fortunes would look like if media was actually unbiased, and journalists wrote real investigative journalism articles instead of biased op-eds?
Journalism is just talk, not action - and it follows that journalism has an inherent bias in favor of talkers at the expense of doers. Talkers can always second guess, and point out the hole in any doughnut. When a talker is proven wrong by the course of events, a talker will always change the subject.American "conservatism" is about gratitude, about giving credit to " the man who is actually in the arena . . . who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds."
As an engineer who believes in tech progress, it is a grief to me to recognize the disastrous consequences of the simple telegraph. Because, as a solution in search of a problem, the promoters of the telegraph promoted the idea of the importance of the news out of all proportion. In the real world the news is rarely something that we need to, or even can, take effective action on. But we have been sold the propaganda that that almighty "wire" of superficial, negative, unrepresentative stories from the Associated Press was of vital everyday importance.
Rush talks about the fact that if you miss one news outlet, there is always another one telling the same story . . . or some other story of equal irrelevance. And that is perfectly true because the AP newswire has homogenized the press and turned it into journalism. Newspapers used to be openly partisan affairs, notably fractious and contentious. The AP newswire was a faustian bargain - it gave each newspaper an unlimited supply of news, but it also gave the same news to all newspapers. With the result that the news is a national monopoly, and all those notably fractious and opinionated papers suddenly limited their ideological competitiveness to the editorial page.
Underneath it all is the shared need for the public to perceive that the Associated Press is objective - meaning that, far from acting as a check on each other, each newspaper committed itself to the proposition that all newspapers are objective. Whereas, of course, none of them is objective since all are selling the same exaggerated idea of the importance of the news in and of itself. So, exactly because newspapers took on a facade of objectivity, they became insidiously propagandistic. And that has been going on since the memory of living man runneth not to the contrary.
We can only hope that the Internet and the bandwidth revolution reverse, or at least effectively expose, that.
Where did the tables turn?
Politico ^ | 4/8/08 | ROGER SIMON