That's what THEY think.
It isn’t journalism if it is propaganda.
That's what THEY think.
The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing.IOW, it’s all propaganda. Before Morse's 1844 demo of the telegraph, and the advent of wire services (AP started out as the New York Associated Press in 1848), newspapers were mostly weeklies, and were mostly about the opinions of their printers - as everyone knew. You only wanted a newspaper whose printer’s opinions were interesting/congenial to you.. Pretty much like people today decide which talk radio shows interest them.The man whom we believe is necessarily, in the things concerning which we believe him, our leader and director, and we look up to him with a certain degree of esteem and respect. But as from admiring other people we come to wish to be admired ourselves; so from being led and directed by other people we learn to wish to become ourselves leaders and directors. And as we cannot always be satisfied merely with being admired, unless we can at the same time persuade ourselves that we are in some degree really worthy of admiration; so we cannot always be satisfied merely with being believed, unless we are at the same time conscious that we are really worthy of belief. As the desire of praise and that of praise-worthiness, though very much a-kin, are yet distinct and separate desires; so the desire of being believed and that of being worthy of belief, though very much a-kin too, are equally distinct and separate desires.
The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires. - Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
The AP “wire,” and all other wire services, are virtual meetings of journalists. The result could have been predicted by Adam Smith:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Wealth of Nations (1776)IOW, you have to be pretty naive to assume that, after all these years of continually meeting virtually, journalists have not been conspiring against the public for a long time. Journalists are ideally situated to produce propaganda, and they have the motive to produce pro-journalist propaganda. If not for the fact that the Sophists of ancient Greece ran the scam into the ground, journalists would have been claiming all these years that they alone were wise. But they have hit on a euphemism for claiming wisdom - in the face of evidence to the contrary, they claim superior objectivity. And launch a propaganda campaign against anyone who durst disagree politically from the herd - especially anyone who claims to be a journalist but does so.
So your statement, "It isn’t journalism if it is propaganda,” is itself the fruit of your having absorbed - as we all have - journalistic propaganda. We are suckers if we take for granted that anyone gives us “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
The natural disposition is always to believe. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing.