[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Personally, I thought that she had a *huge* angle to sell books a while back, that of exposing the historical perfidy of the left.

I was hoping that she would get with some seriously conservative historians, and do that on the grand scale, gutting the left throughout US history, and *then* with her rewriting it into a popular and sharp read.

She could create a conservative “reference set” of books that would have exposed the left around the world. Identifying their tricks, schemes and plots so that they can be thwarted.

Another book could be a Who’s Who of leftists, mini biographies listing all the foul garbage they have done, who their connections are, who funds them, etc. Stripping them of any ability to pretend to be honest or objective.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Another book could be a Who’s Who of leftists, mini biographies listing all the foul garbage they have done, who their connections are, who funds them, etc. Stripping them of any ability to pretend to be honest or objective.

If you think about it at all, you realize that the only way to attempt to be objective is to declare up front all the reasons why you might not be objective.

And that implies that anyone who claims to be objective - i.e., journalists as we have known them all our lives - is not even trying to be objective.

Are there any reasons why journalists might not be objective? Of course - every business has its own interests. Some of the well-known interests of journalism are:

1. the need for public credulity, including the need for public credulity of journalism's claims of objectivity,

2. the need to interest the public. The rules which journalists claim to be objective are actually rules to promote their own business by interesting the public.
   • If it bleeds, it leads
   • "'Man Bites Dog' not 'Dog Bites Man."
   • "There's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper" (i.e., "meet your deadline, tell the story first").

If journalists declared those interests before reporting their stories, they would be more objective. But, superficially, they might seem less so. And journalism - after all, the root "jour" is French for "day" - is about "what's happening now" rather than about perspective and the big picture.

The Associated Press and the rest of the wire services are useful to exploit scarce communication bandwidth. The wire services homogenize journalism, suppressing the individuality which was originally the hallmark of American newspapers. That homogenization does not make newspapers less tendentious - it magnifies the inherent tendency of the journalist to self-hype. Such individuality as is expressed in the editorial/op ed pages merely serves to "position" the rest of the newspaper (chiefly wire service material) as being objective.

The Internet is an expression of the technological fact that bandwidth now is very plentiful. The internet exposes the homogenization of journalism via wire services as the Nineteenth Century anachronism that it is.

The "objective journalism" emperor has no clothes, and no one in journalism can say so. Although I as an individual FReeper cannot drive that fact into the public discourse, via the internet I can publish it in a form which is accessible worldwide. It is up to talk radio and other opinion leaders to pick up the ball and run with it.

Once dispose of the baseless assumption that journalism is objective, and the idea of having journalists moderate televised political debates becomes risible. Dispense with that assumption, and the question becomes whether, and to what extent, politicians align themselves with the tendencies of journalism. And the answer becomes plain as the nose on your face.

Journalists assign positive labels to those who do align themselves with the interests of journalism, and negative labels to those who do not. I have my own Newspeak-English dictionary:

objective :

reliably promoting the interests of Big Journalism. (usage: always applied to journalists in good standing; never applied to anyone but a journalist)

liberal :

see "objective," except that the usage is reversed: (usage: never applied to any working journalist)

progressive :

see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").

moderate:

see "liberal." (usage: same as for "liberal").

centrist :

see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").

conservative :

rejecting the idea that journalism is a higher calling than providing food, shelter, clothing, fuel, and security; adhering to the dictum of Theodore Roosevelt that: "It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena (usage: applies to people who - unlike those labeled liberal/progressive/moderate/centrist, cannot become "objective" by getting a job as a journalist, and probably cannot even get a job as a journalist.)(antonym:"objective")

right-wing :

see, "conservative."

The Right to Know

[PGalt]

Another book could be a Who’s Who of leftists, mini biographies listing all the foul garbage they have done, who their connections are, who funds them, etc. Stripping them of any ability to pretend to be honest or objective.

Laura Holson
Google

Anne Barnard
Google

Alan Feuer
Google

BUMP! BUMP!