The media-industrial complex is not the "free press" of the Founding Fathers. It is an unelected and unaccountable shadow government, created by a gradual hijacking of the genuine free press and based on atavistic appeals to emotion, prejudice, and the personal authority of a depraved elite. It is anathema to Enlightenment principles of individual rights and equality and therefore the deadly enemy of free people everywhere.
Another Enemy Propagandist (Journalist) Detained by U.S. Forces?
Ping.I'm curious as to your take on this article of mine, and how your "media-industrial complex" formulation agrees or contrasts with it.
And why do those who hate those principles have the clout to define who is called what? Because they are journalists, or fellow travelers of journalists.America obviously had something which could be meaningfully called "the press" in the founding era - but it was not journalism as we know it. Newspapers of the day were idiosyncratic and opinionated, and did not claim to be objective. They couldn't, and get away with it - because, before the telegraph and the Associated Press, newspapers were often explicitly associated with one political party or another, but they were independent of each other. With the advent of the AP, newspapers are all associated, and they are all selling the same product. And as such they are a special interest.
Journalists call themselves (and, especially, call each other) "objective." They call others who promote the product journalists are selling but are not themselves working journalists "liberal" or "progressive." And they call those who denigrate the product journalists are selling "conservative" or "right wing." Those labels are nothing but advertising slogans, having no natural descriptive power. In the case of "conservatives" and "right wingers," of course, the labels are negative advertising slogans.
The Misnomer of Conservatism By Bruce Walker
American Thinker ^ | February 23, 2008 | Bruce Walker