at one end you have Moderates
In the middle, you have extreme rightwing crazy people
At the other end, you have Hitler (and Trump).
Academics who try to discuss this stuff in terms of Mainstream vs Conservative just showcase their bias. They aren't even smart enough to see it.
bkmk
I have never yet spoken to a liberal who has any concept of what the political spectrum looks like to conservatives, nor where they are on it.
The point was demonstrated by Ethan Barton, managing editor of the Daily Caller News Foundation, who bragged, "Within conservative media, I would say our big thing is that we're far more in-depth and measured -- and I know this is obviously my biased opinion -- and reliable than other conservative outlets.”
That's not going to win friends and influence people for the Daily Caller. This is not what you find in major media. You don't often see The Washington Post saying to interviewers, "The New York Times is far less reliable and deep-thinking than we are.”
Historically - up to the post-Civil War era - newspapers mostly were weeklies, whose printers didn’t have a striking ability to report far-flung news to which the layman could not, over the course of a week, learn from sources other than the newspaper. Consequently newspapers were largely about the opinions of their printers, and thus didn’t agree about much of anything. The thing that changed that, obviously, was the telegraph (demo’d in 1844). And the wire services, which disseminated the news nationwide while economizing on expensive telegraphy bandwidth.As late as the mid-1870s, the AP could defend itself from charges of propaganda potentiality by saying that it just disseminated stories that various newspapers printed - those stories were from all perspectives, so the AP itself was “objective.” It was possible to say that with a straight face that long ago. But the wire services constitute continual virtual meetings of all major journalists, and - as Adam Smith put it:
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.Ultimately those continual meetings had to produce "a conspiracy against the public.” That conspiracy consists of the propaganda campaign to the effect that “all reporters are objective.”That claim is false because objectivity is not a state of being but a goal - laudable if diligently attempted, but not a state to be achieved or conferred by some authority. To attempt objectivity seriously it is necessary to analyze one’s own perspective from the POV that where you stand might depend on where you sit. This is the very opposite of claiming actually to be objective.
Consequently the claim of journalistic objectivity reduces down to a powerful incentive for journalists to go along and get along with each other - and call that “objectivity.”
Journalism is about bad news. Thus, journalism is knowingly negative - and a claim that “journalists are objective” is a claim that negativity is objectivity. As definitions of “cynicism” go, it’s hard to beat that. But it would be incoherent to be cynical about one thing, and also cynical about its opposite. Journalism is cynical about society and, concomitantly, naive about its opposite, which is government. And that combination is precisely, IMHO, what defines socialism.
Thus, “the media” as we know and (don’t) love it. And thus, “conservatives” do not claim to be objective but only, like the ancient Greek philosophers, to love truth.
You also have to remember that these journalists have gone through the academy when Post Modernism was all the rage in English departments and inter disciplinary studies. That means a basic disregard for truth and an acceptance of cultural relativism. But this disrespect for truth was actually a tactic used by social scientists (they are honest enough to write about it in their educational journals) to neutralize capitalist values and indoctrinate the student toward the left. Further, many students accepted their fate knowing that they would please their professors, get top marks and that they’d enter the lucrative field of journalism as a reporter for a major publication. But did they? Just the opposite — if they are lucky they’d write for Huffington Post and get paid dirt. But they’re still addicted to the activist cause, even if that means spending years in the trenches, thinking their time will come.
Money is the key word for them... not truth. Even older journalists like Juan Williams will bow to the paycheck of being a spokesperson for the left, which means that Trump can’t do anything right. The truth is there before their eyes and they are willfully blind, reciting their hateful narrative against Trump. Narrative (again from Post Modernism) and money are key... truth is not.
bump