Morxist ?
Posted on 11/25/2008 5:27:08 AM PST by Kaslin
That the news media were biased in the 2008 presidential election is now acknowledged by fair-minded people, left or right
As Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin said this weekend at a Politico/USC Conference on the 2008 election: “It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business. … It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."
Given how obvious this bias is, the question is not whether liberals in the media tend to offer biased reporting. The question is why? Why can’t liberal news people report the news without any slant?
The answer is that for people on the left, all -- I repeat, (set ital) all (end ital) -- professions are a means to an end, not ends in themselves. That end is the social transformation of society, meaning the promoting of “social justice” as the left understands that term.
For most liberal news reporters, therefore, the purpose of news reporting is not to report news as objectively as possible. The purpose of the media in general and of reporting specifically is to promote social justice and the social transformation of society.
For most liberal judges, the primary purpose of being a judge is to promote social justice and transform society. That is why liberal judges are so much more likely to be judicial activists than conservative judges. Most liberal judges do not see their roles as merely adjudicating a dispute according to the law. They see their role primarily as using the law and their power to rule on the law to promote social justice.
For most university professors -- and many high school teachers, as well -- outside of the natural sciences and math, the same holds true. The task of a teacher is to teach, i.e., to convey the most important information as honestly as possible. But, again, this conflicts with the social justice goal of the left. History teachers who merely teach history are of little use to the left. History -- and English and political science, and sociology and other liberal arts -- teachers must use their classroom to produce young people who will wish to engage in society-transforming work for social justice.
For most liberals in the arts (there are very few conservatives in the arts) there is no denial of their having an agenda. They state quite candidly that the purpose of the arts is to challenge the (conservative) status quo, to raise political and social consciousness by advancing a “progressive” political and social agenda. The artist whose agenda is merely to produce beautiful art is looked upon as a reactionary buffoon, and is not likely to be taken seriously -- no matter how talented -- in the worlds of music, dance, painting, and sculpture.
Even the natural sciences are increasingly subject to being rendered a means to a “progressive” end. There was the pseudo-threat of heterosexual AIDS in America -- science manipulated in order to de-stigmatize AIDS as primarily a gay man’s disease and to increase funding for AIDS research. There are the exaggerated secondhand smoke data popularized so as to decrease smoking and fight “Big Tobacco.” And now we have the scientifically questionable belief in man-made carbon emissions causing global warming leading to natural catastrophe – and recommended “solutions” many of which, if adopted, will serve the goal of undermining corporate capitalism.
The best analogy of the directing of all human endeavors toward a left-wing purpose would be those early medieval centuries of European life when just about everything man made was supposed to reflect a religious consciousness. Virtually nothing stood apart from the Church. The arts were religious, the sciences were handmaidens of theology, and schools were religious in nature.
Most moderns look upon that period as a dark age -- perhaps a bit unfairly at times. But the people who most scorn what they deem the religious “Dark Ages” are trying to building a secular-left dark age in our time. Because the left is a religion, a substitute for the Christianity it seeks to displace.
Morxist ?
I love it ping!
Oops...dang fat fumble fingers of mine...that's marxist.
Ill sum it up more simply....
The left views government as their religion - they find refuge, hope and salvation in growing and government and destroying freedom. They view real freedom as chaos and government restriction as freedom.
Nanu nanu.
ping
Advocacy journalism. It proves a study a few years ago that was posted here. Journalism students were asked “why do you want to be a journalist” and their answer was “ to change and shape the world”.
We need a parallel graphic of the little black kid yelling “that’s racist”...
hmmm... who would it be... yelling “that’s Marxist!”
A point that F. A. Hayek makes in much of his writing: to the extent a society tries to pursue the goal of “social justice” is the extent to which there is NO equality before the law — the law will be applied differently to different groups of people depending on what “prior injustice” they claim to have suffered.
Prager might also have mentioned this point: mainstream media is dying. Its only hope of staying alive in its present form is to become the official “propaganda arm” of a socialist government. Many journalists, both print and broadcast, approve of that idea.
Mainstream media journalists are least in favor of freedom of speech.
This is one area that I’m training my kids to recognize and point out - leftist bias in the “news” media.
They won’t be like some of their older relatives that just can’t fathom WHY a journalist would be biased, and therefore, they must not be.
Liberals in the media believe that we are childlike in our ignorance and must be lead to make the right choices. We see this demonstrated in the condescension that many media type have in their reporting. Remember Walter Cronkheit's famous sign off ..."that's the way it is" as though given the facts we could not make any conclusion ourselves?
Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian sociologist / economist who wrote in the first two decades of the twentieth century, proposed a theory of the “circulation of the elites.” Pareto observed that on of the first signs that an elite was on its way out was an increase in humanitarian rhetoric and a loss of willingness to defend the status quo.
This is exactly what we’ve seen in Europe as the tired, secularist elite pander to new, hungry islamist immigrant groups. It’s what we’re starting to see here as tired voters lose sight of the good parts of America and take refuge in homilies to social justice.
Dennis Prager has consistently been one of our most insightful commentators, year after year, no doubt about it.
This article still doesn’t address WHY most people in those professions ARE liberal wackos.
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