Of course - but it helps if you understand the homogenizing institution which causes political group-think in journalism. And that would be the Associated Press.Think about it: in the founding era, newspapers were fractiously independent of each other. Then along comes the telegraph and the AP newswire, and printers had a choice to make: remain independent and be marginalized, or join the AP and be prosperous and influential. Of course, if you join the AP then you pay big bucks for the service - but you can easily recoup that investment provided that you exploit it by promoting the AP. And promoting the AP means promoting the stories from reporters who don't work for you. IOW, you have to promote the conceit that journalism - all of journalism - is objective.
So what you have just done is to join the Borg. You can have a conservative editorial page if you want to, but that will be strictly a side show - the main event is the front page, and all the rest of the "editorial content" of the paper which will be scarcely distinguishable from one newspaper to the another. You will not be in the opinion business (as your predecessors in the founding era were), you will be in the news business.
You - all of AP journalism - will insist that "news" is objective. But is it? Can it possibly be so?
Claiming that journalism is objective is a self-negating prophecy. For if anyone attempts to be objective, the first thing they must do is to seek to identify and discount any reasons why they might not be objective. And claiming to be objective is the very antithesis of that.
What tendencies in journalism prevent the possibility of journalistic objectivity? First, journalism is inherently superficial - because of its deadlines, and for the reason that the news business is only about whatever the potential audience hasn't heard or read yet. So objectivity might, I would argue generally does, require depth of coverage of things with which reporters and editors - and readers - could be easily bored.
Second, journalism tends to accentuate the negative, in order to prevent the potential reader/hearer from feeling free to ignore the report.
And journalists are at heart cardboard heroes who pick fights with safe, nonthreatening targets such as Christians rather than, for instance, jihadists.
Exactly like "liberal" politicians. There is no difficulty is understanding why "objective journalists" agree with "liberals" - the causation works the other way. Journalists have their inherent biases, those biases create a natural propaganda wind - and politicians with no principles other than their own self-promotion must be expected to toady to the journalists' predilections.
I’m just curious, not that I mind, but how exactly did I end up on your ping-list? Is it the New York link on FR between us or is it something else, something I posted in the past? Just curious.
BTW .. good post regarding Journalism and its historical place in our culture and how its been perverted into a monolith of disinformation and propaganda. I have a BA in Journalism (Broadcasting) mainly just because I wanted to ‘play with the toys’ as it were .. I’m a techie, not a cultural activist ... /laughs ... maybe that’s how I got on your ping-list :)
As an anecdote, in Journalism school one instructor who worked for a local TV station did a lecture about how to cover a ‘great story’ ...
Instructor: “Fires. Fires are good, fires are great, fires make terrific entertainment” ... “Point the camera in the direction of the oncoming fire-truck with its red lights flashing and siren screeching and then cut to the leaping flames”
I remember thinking to myself during this lecture session: “What the F ??? This is totally insane!!! .. some poor shlub is watching as their life’s possessions get reduced to burnt out rubble and this guy is going on about how it’s *great entertainment* ???”
— MM
BTTT