The NYT has inadvertently let slip the concerns that we in the public have when Big media hires Democrat operatives--Mr. Russert, Stephanopoulous, et el--to work as "journalists."
I wouldn't have brought this up given the tragedy of Mr. Russert's all-too-early passing, but the Times article today made it fair game.
-Wm Tate, A Time Like This
The non-stop lovefest IS getting tiresome...
http://exposingtheleft.blogspot.com/2008/06/russert-dead-at-58.html
Everyone forgets for just whom Russert worked.Some of the biggest lefties there ever were.
The way the “newreaders” of the MSM are going on (and on, and on, and on) I expect it won’t be long before they propose immediate sainthood for Mr. Russert (may God rest his soul).
He "acclimated" to it? Geez, they bring climate into everything. How about he got used to it.
If NBC puts Keith Olberfuhrerman in his place it will make even CBS’s decision to anchor Perky Katie Couric seem brilliant...Meet The Press ratings will fall faster than a Democratic politician’s pledge to cut taxes.
The NYT has inadvertently let slip the concerns that we in the public have when Big media hires Democrat operatives--Mr. Russert, Stephanopoulous, et el--to work as "journalists."
In reality "journalism" as we know it scarcely existed in the founding era. They had "newspapers" back then, of course. But the printers thereof didn't have the Associated Press newswire back then. And without "the wire," printers obtained information the old fashioned way - by talking to people and reading things. So that in principle, any given private citizen in the printer's local area might know any given fact that the printer might print in his paper before that edition of the paper came out. Consequently "newspapers" had a different character in the founding era than that which the AP newswire began to enable and produce in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. That is, they were more like modern political commentary publications than like today's journalism. Commonly they were not daily publications, and they all wore their editors' perspectives on their sleeves. Famously, two of them were sponsored by Hamilton and Jefferson, who used them as tools in their political battles with each other.The advent and spread of the AP, started as the New York Associated Press in 1848, raised the issue of a monopoly of public influence. The AP countered those charges by assuring everyone that since its member newspapers had wildly contradictory editorial policies, the AP was objective. Conceivably the AP might even have believed it - but it is, was, and always will be false. First because being convinced of your own objectivity is the best definition I can think of for subjectivity. And second, because of the aforementioned transformation of the newspaper business which the AP itself caused. The Associated Press, and every AP member newspaper individually, was in the business of selling highly perishable news. The only difference between the information on the newswire and information about the same events carried by physical rather than electrical means was - time. Time was the enemy of the journalist, because people would eventually learn from other sources whatever the journalist knew - and the journalist wanted to attract your attention and impress you by being the one who told you things first.
In short, the ineluctable characteristic of journalism is superficiality. At any given time the journalist is promoting a new story that you haven't heard yet, just as if every day's happenings were - at least on that day - as significant as the bombing of Pearl Harbor. If yesterday the news of the day was as important as Pearl Harbor, and today the news of today is sold as more important than the "yesterday's news," the existence of a perpetually accelerating crisis is the planted axiom of "the news."
If there is an accelerating crisis afoot, you had better do two things. First, you had better keep up with the news. And second, you had better see that the government agrees that there is a crisis as the first step toward responding to the crisis. How are you to know which politicians agree that there is a crisis? Well of course objective journalism cannot be partisan, but just between you and me (wink) journalists label politicians who agree with journalists positively, and those who do not, negatively. Everyone is in favor of liberty, so journalists label politicians who agree with journalists "liberals." And if there is a crisis, "desperate ills are by desperate measures cured. Or not at all." So if there is a crisis, the very last person that you want running things is someone who is most concerned about taking unnecessary and possibly dangerous action - a "conservative."
And that is why the only difference between an "objective journalist" and a "liberal" is in his job title. Any "liberal" can get a job as a journalist and instantly be accepted by all other journalists as "objective." But no conservative can do so.
Bump for later reading.
The question should be how fair he was, how often he let his bias show.
There are a lot of journalists on the tube who show more bias than Russert did.
And if you or I had his job, would we be fairer than he was, or just promote a different point of view?
From what I can figure out Russert showed bias in bland ways, accepting that things said about Kerry or Obama were "smears," or telling us that Obama's candidacy was "historic," or being tired of Hillary.
That's bias, but it's not much compared to what we get from other anchors and reporters.
I certainly can't say that he had no bias, but sometimes the bias is journalistic: if you pick one quote that makes a politician look bad out of a long discourse, are you prejudiced against that politician or are you just doing what makes for more interesting journalism? It can be hard to tell. If he grills your candidate and his opponent or a weak candidate and a strong one is that bias?
By now I'm as tired of hearing about Tim and Buffalo and the Bills and Luke and "Big Russ" as anybody else, but as television personalities go, Russert was one of the better ones.