The MSM is the left. period.
My question is, are they in on the plan to destroy America, or are they just useful idiots?
Breitbart seems to think the media leads it, along with academics I guess.
Yes
In on the plan. Given Chronkite's date of birth ((November 4, 1916), my guess he was in on the plan since at least the late 1930's.
My question is, are they in on the plan to destroy America, or are they just useful idiots?and this is different from today, how?The MSM is the left. period.
"The MSM" is the heritage of the telegraph. The telegraph, and the Associated Press.Without "the wire," newspapers from the founding era to the Civil War era were fundamentally about the opinion of the printer - much like National Review and so forth. Indeed, newspapers were usually weeklies, and some didn't have a deadline at all, but just went to press when the printer was good and ready.
With the AP, or any other newswire, the paper is about "hard news" - things that you didn't have any way of knowing about because they happened too recently, and you didn't have electronic communications except whatever you got from the newswire via the local newspaper. The thing is, the news service is expensive - and only useful if you trust the authors of the stories which come over the wire. So to make money with the AP or Reuters, a newspaper has to promote the fatuous idea that journalism is objective.
And that homogenizes journalism. The editorial page of the paper is a ghetto of frank opinion, and one of its main functions is to "position" the rest of the paper as not being a matter of opinion but of fact. But as Benjamin Franklin put it, "Half the truth is often a great lie." And the portion of the truth selected by journalism is superficial ("there's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper"), negative ("If it bleeds, it leads"), and unrepresentative of what usually happens ("'Man Bites Dog,' not 'Dog Bites Man'"). And, not to put too fine a point on it, calculated to cast the journalist as hero
Of course, it's a lot easier and safer to be a "hero" if you pick on "villains" who do not in fact pose any real danger. So journalism picks nice safe "villains" like the businessman, the policeman, and the soldier who is under civilian rule, and accuses him of malfeasance. Don't look for journalists to take on actual terrorists, tho - what, you think they're crazy? You could get hurt that way. So ultimately it is natural for journalists to behave like socialists, and promote socialism. "Liberal" politiicans simply join in the action, for fun and profit. They don't have to be really smart or effective, because they are cooperating with journalists to bully and second guess those who take responsibility of working to a bottom line.