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The Only Cure for Media Malpractice
American Spectator ^ | January 28. 2019 | David Catron

Posted on 01/29/2019 2:20:47 PM PST by Twotone

There has been much wailing and rending of garments over the weekend about the layoffs of some writers, editors, and other staff at BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Yahoo, AOL, and Gannett. Naturally, the affected employees are upset and inclined to blame malign forces beyond their control. Predictably, the primary villain to emerge is President Trump, who had the temerity to tweet that the real problem is the market: “Fake News and bad journalism have caused a big downturn. Sadly, many others will follow. The people want the Truth!” This is not what these unhappy folks want to hear, but Trump is right.

Trump understands what many journalists refuse to acknowledge — the news business is a business — and the customers are dissatisfied. According to Gallup, the public now has less confidence in the news media than in banks, big business, organized religion, the medical system, the military, public schools, the presidency, the police, etc. This is true for all news sources, including television, newspapers, and the internet. Moreover, because the erosion of public confidence in the media has been a consistent, decades-long process, it cannot credibly be blamed on “attacks” by President Trump.

The erosion became noticeable during the Clinton era and it has continued unabated until the present. In 1993, for example, 46 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in television news. By 2018 that figure had declined to 20 percent.

(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: clintonnonnews; cnn; defundnpr; defundpbs; dnctalkingpoint; dnctalkingpoints; fakenews; genderdysphoria; globalwarminghoax; homosexualagenda; joescarborough; malpractice; media; mediawingofthednc; mikabrzezinski; morningjoe; msnbc; news; newyork; newyorkcity; newyorkslimes; newyorktimes; nonplayercharacter; nonplayercharacters; npc; npcs; npr; partisanmediashills; pbs; presstitutes; smearmachine

1 posted on 01/29/2019 2:20:47 PM PST by Twotone
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To: Twotone

The only cure?

Rediscover the OFF Switch.


2 posted on 01/29/2019 2:29:09 PM PST by Texas Fossil ((Texas is not where you were born, but a Free State of Heart, Mind & Attitude!))
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To: Texas Fossil

turn off to the world and on to God.


3 posted on 01/29/2019 2:32:53 PM PST by HiTech RedNeck (May Jesus Christ be praised.)
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To: AdmSmith; AnonymousConservative; Arthur Wildfire! March; Berosus; Bockscar; cardinal4; ColdOne; ...
[President] Trump understands what many journalists refuse to acknowledge — the news business is a business — and the customers are dissatisfied. According to Gallup, the public now has less confidence in the news media than in banks, big business, organized religion, the medical system, the military, public schools, the presidency, the police, etc. This is true for all news sources, including television, newspapers, and the internet.
Have we ruled out the guillotine?

4 posted on 01/29/2019 2:37:44 PM PST by SunkenCiv (and btw -- https://www.gofundme.com/for-rotator-cuff-repair-surgery)
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To: Twotone
Cure? Here it is.


5 posted on 01/29/2019 2:40:14 PM PST by Magnum44 (My comprehensive terrorism plan: Hunt them down and kill them)
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To: Twotone

Augusto Pinochet figured out a way ...


6 posted on 01/29/2019 2:40:34 PM PST by bassmaner (Hey commies: I am a' white male, and I am guilty of NOTHING! Sell your 'white guilt' elsewhere.)
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To: Twotone

Augusto Pinochet figured out a way ...


7 posted on 01/29/2019 2:40:36 PM PST by bassmaner (Hey commies: I am a' white male, and I am guilty of NOTHING! Sell your 'white guilt' elsewhere.)
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To: Twotone

The media decided to become a player in politics and quit reporting the truth. That’s their prerogative but they can’t complain when the public decides to go elsewhere for news. People also have a limited capacity to absorb political dogma because they realize it’s 90% crap, regardless of who’s side they’re listening to.


8 posted on 01/29/2019 2:45:57 PM PST by Spok
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To: Twotone

9 posted on 01/29/2019 2:58:58 PM PST by BeauBo
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To: BeauBo

Short ropes and tall trees would help also.


10 posted on 01/29/2019 3:15:58 PM PST by oldasrocks
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No mention of Comcast, Disney... whatever.


11 posted on 01/29/2019 3:35:54 PM PST by Gene Eric (Don't be a statist!)
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To: oldasrocks

There is no news on cable it is opinion..

Want news go to OANN or even the BBC

News have facts....the train crashed...The low temperture in Chicago was -24


12 posted on 01/29/2019 3:36:11 PM PST by Hojczyk
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To: Twotone
The journalists of the establishment media see themselves not merely as people who approach politics from different first principles than do Donald Trump and his supporters. They see themselves as members of a superior tribe that is justified in taking any action to protect its territory and members.
But “superior tribes” are forbidden by the Constitution. We have neither official priests nor titles of nobility.
So, what do we do with creatures like this? The First Amendment as interpreted by SCOTUS in its 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan allows them to say and write absurd and malicious things.
The Sullivan decision was unanimous, but it seems quaint today. Of course no Court is likely to overturn Sullivan explicitly, now or in the future. But the plain fact is that it is an artifact of a different time. After the 1964 election Barry Goldwater complained about “the referees,” which now are called “the media” - and in simple fact are just: journalists. But the systematic assault on “bias in the media" did not go viral until later. Reed Irvine’s “Accuracy in Media” wasn’t founded until 1969, and I didn’t subscribe to the AIM Report until after the election of Jimmy Carter. Before that, I confess, I used to listen to the news assiduously. After a year of that, I was convinced - and became systematically skeptical of journalism.

After the 50th anniversary of the Sullivan decision it is time and past time to critique that ruling, and the inferences drawn from it. To give the Warren Court its due, Sullivan is a full-throated defense of the First Amendment, and the decision had to go against the plaintiff. The problem with Sullivan is the facts which were not presented, and in the inferences which are clear in hindsight only. First, the facts. Plaintiff was neither a Republican nor, as presently conceived by the party, a Democrat. He was a southern Democrat. An unsympathetic character to any right-thinking New York Times reader of that era, or now. And as unsympathetic to Republicans as well as Democrats. An absolutely perfect target for the Warren Court. And, in contradistinction to the planted axiom of this article, there was no claim by the plaintiff that he was being ganged up on by a journalistic cabal. He complained only about the decision of the Times to publish an ad - one which did not so much as explicitly name the plaintiff.

The explicit purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from unifying the newspapers on the side of the government. But logically, the implied purpose is to prevent newspapers from unifying, not only on the side of the government, but from unifying, period. What good is it if the government does not unify journalism, but journalism unifies itself - and on the side, not of the government as such, but of a political party dedicated to the proposition that society is deeply flawed and corrupt, and that therefore government should expand without limit? That plainly is the situation we face, and nobody brought that fact before SCOTUS in 1964.

Before the 1844 advent of the telegraph and the 1848 advent of the first wire service (the AP), newspapers were fractiously independent, and were famous for not agreeing with each other a lot. But over the succeeding decades, journalists were in the position of conducting a virtual meeting over the AP “wire.” And

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. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
The "conspiracy against the public” projected by Adam Smith inevitably followed:
The journalists of the establishment media . . . see themselves as members of a superior tribe that is justified in taking any action to protect its territory and members.
Another way of putting it is that journalists have one obvious power - the power to produce and publish propaganda. And so the inevitable result of a conspiracy against the public by journalists is a systematic barrage of pro-conspirator propaganda. Claims that we have no justification for questioning the objectivity (a word which is fairly close to meaning “wisdom”, and thus is a slippery way of engaging in sophistry) of the conspirators, and claims that those not inside the conspiracy are “not journalists, not objective.”

Because the object of the conspiracy is to make the conspirators the de facto leaders of journalism and of the Democrat Party - and through that, of government itself - blind application of the Sullivan precedent to subvert the right of proponents of limited government, and of the Constitution, to redress in the courts for systematic libel by those who seek to grow the government. is a perversion of the intent of the First Amendment. A case must be brought to SCOTUS which sidesteps Sullivan by attacking the journalistic “conspiracy against the public” on anti trust grounds as well as libel.


13 posted on 01/29/2019 6:02:24 PM PST by conservatism_IS_compassion
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To: Twotone

“Truth is the first casualty of WAR”


14 posted on 01/29/2019 6:04:02 PM PST by Studebaker Hawk (These geeks are a dime-a-dozen. I'm looking for the man with the dimes. Freddy Blassie)
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To: Studebaker Hawk

“Truth is the first casualty of WAR”

and that’s the TRUTH !!!


15 posted on 01/30/2019 4:29:51 AM PST by happytrumper
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion

I’ve read there are 6 major corporations as ‘owners’ of media conglomerates. It might be hard to break them up the way you could a true monopoly.

I think the rules on libel would be easier to change. Now just being a ‘public’ personality means anyone can say anything about you & pretty much get away with it. It should be that you can sue anyone who deliberately writes incorrect & malicious stories. Journalists are supposed to give us facts. If they don’t do fact-checking prior to posting, as was done with the Covington kids, they should be held liable for the harm they cause. That should give every journalist pause - not just about the FACTS, but the...shall we say ‘editorial comments’...they include with the adjectives they use.


16 posted on 01/30/2019 6:11:02 AM PST by Twotone
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To: Twotone
I’ve read there are 6 major corporations as ‘owners’ of media conglomerates. It might be hard to break them up the way you could a true monopoly.
The wire services in general, and the AP in particular, constitute virtual meetings of all major journalism and journalists. Adam Smith’s prediction about meetings of “people of the same trade” certainly were prescient in that case. The concentration of propaganda power inherent in that was questioned as far back as the mid-1870s.

Note well, the wire services’ raison d'être is to reduce the cost of transmitting the news nationwide and worldwide—but the cost of telegraphy bandwidth is now de minimus. The wire services, arguably, should be abolished. Either that, or all members of the AP should be forced to admit that they are not independent - and just become branded as “Monopoly Press Philadelphia,” “Monopoly Press Cleveland,” and so on.

Now, just being a ‘public’ personality means anyone can say anything about you & pretty much get away with it. It should be that you can sue anyone who deliberately writes incorrect & malicious stories.
That’s what the effect of New York Times v. Sullivan has been. It is over broad in the sense that first the journalist monopoly makes you a “public figure,” and then it savages your reputation behind the Sullivan decision. But if in fact the Covington boys do sue, the fact that they are minors just might, in and of itself, make Sullivan inapplicable.

That issue aside, Sullivan distorts our discourse because it is evenhanded politically in the same way that laws against sleeping under bridges is evenhanded between rich and poor. Rich people don’t want to sleep under bridges, and Democrats don’t want to sue for libel. They don’t have to, because they don’t get libeled. In actual fact, Sullivan only constrains Republicans. That wasn’t nearly so obvious in 1964, when Sullivan was handed down, as it is today.

The rules for commercial success in journalism - e.g., “If it bleeds, it leads” - result in journalists being on the lookout for flaws in society which they can embellish or even make up. I well remember the emotional reaction I had as a youth upon seeing a printing press and envisioning myself writing things that would be published and held up as truth. I was far too humble to think that I would have that much, or anything at all, to say that was all that important. In my oh-so-humble opinion, journalists as a class are very short on humility. Journalists are cynical about society. Note well, when I use the word “cynical,” you are not to associate “cynicism” with “skepticism.” Those are two different things. “Skepticism” is doubt. “Cynicism” is actually the absence of doubt, it is negative certainty. Skepticism is the idea that your plan might not work. Cynicism is certainty that you could not possibly have a plan that will work.

Journalists are cynical about society - certain that it is corrupt and stupid - so they have no doubt that more government is needed to control it. Cynicism is actually a form of naiveté. Certainty that society is NG, consequently certainty that government is good. And that is what socialism is all about.

SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one . . . Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)


17 posted on 01/30/2019 7:05:28 AM PST by conservatism_IS_compassion
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion

Thank you for your comments. VERY enlightening!


18 posted on 01/30/2019 11:39:49 AM PST by Twotone
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To: Twotone
These journalists could recover by reporting facts rather than propitiating the tribal gods.

I'm not sure they could. The difficulty with any commitment to tribalism is that it eliminates the middle ground on which non-tribalists need to stand. Anyone attempting to move back to it is considered a counter-revolutionary, a traitor, a recidivist, and immediately becomes a target with priority even higher than the other side. This is not speculation, it's observation, and it is so common in the history of the Left that it's scarcely worth special notice anymore.

It is very difficult to conclude otherwise than that the major commercial news media have crossed the Rubicon and neither would, nor could return. The current game plan of destroying the President and punishing anyone who voted for him shows no sign of abating. Low ratings are not the sign of a failing business, they're necessary casualties of their self-declared war.

19 posted on 01/30/2019 11:56:35 AM PST by Billthedrill
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