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.
Journalism since the late1960’s has been about issue advocacy.
Journalists since then have gotten into it (in their mid 20’s) to help “change the world” (per their progressive ideology), not to report the facts.
Today’s communication channels make coordinating their words and agendas with each other (colluding) so very easy.
That is a pretty good response on your part, CIC.
Thank you for the ping...