Posted on 09/14/2001 7:02:19 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
The framers of our Constitution gave carte blance protection to “speech” and “the press”. They did not grant that anyone was then in possession of complete and unalloyed truth, and it was impossible that they should be able to a priori institutionalize the truth of a future such human paragon even if she/he/it were to arrive.
At the time of the framing, the 1830s advent of mass marketing was in the distant future. Since that era, journalism has positioned itself as the embodiment of nonpartisan truth-telling, and used its enormous propaganda power to make the burden of proof of any “bias” essentially infinite. If somehow you nail them dead to rights in consistent tendentiousness, they will merely shrug and change the subject. And the press is protected by the First Amendment. That is where conservatives have always been stuck.
And make no mistake, conservatives are right to think that journalism is their opponent. Examples abound so that any conservative must scratch his/her head and ask “Why?” Why do those whose job it is to tell the truth tell it so tendentiously, and even lie? The answer is bound and gagged, and lying on your doorstep in plain sight. The money in the business of journalism is in entertainment, not truth. It is that imperative to entertain which produces the perspective of journalism.
And that journalism does indeed have a perspective is demonstrated every day in what it considers a good news story, and what is no news story at all. Part of that perspective is that news must be new--fresh today--as if the events of every new day were of equal importance with the events of all other days. So journalism is superficial. Journalism is negative as well, because the bad news is best suited to keep the audience from daring to ignore the news. Those two characteristics predominate in the perspective of journalism.
But how is that related to political bias? Since superficiality and negativity are anthema to conservatives there is inherent conflict between journalism and conservatism.. By contrast, and whatever pious intentions the journalist might have, political liberalism simply aligns itself with whatever journalism deems a “good story.” Journalists would have to work to create differences between journalism and liberalism, and simply lack any motive to do so. Indeed, the echo chamber of political “liberalism” aids the journalist--and since liberalism consistently exacerbates the issues it addresses, successful liberal politicians make plenty of bad news to report.
The First Amendment which protects the expression of opinion must also be understood to protect claims by people of infallibility--and to forbid claims of infallibility to be made by the government. What, after all, is the point of elections if the government is infallible? Clearly the free criticism of the government is at the heart of freedom of speech and press. Freedom, that is, of communication.
By formatting the bands and standardizing the bandwiths the government actually created broadcasting as we know it. The FCC regulates broadcasting--licensing a handful of priveledged people to broadcast at different frequency bands in particular locations. That is something not contemplated in the First Amendment, and which should never pass constitutional muster if applied to the literal press. Not only so, but the FCC requires application for renewal on the basis that a licensee broadcaster is “operating in the public interest as a public trustee.” That is a breathtaking departure from the First Amendment.
No one questions the political power of broadcasting; the broadcasters themselves obviously sell that viewpoint when they are taking money for political advertising. What does it mean, therefore, when the government (FCC) creates a political venue which transcends the literal press? And what does it mean when the government excludes you and me--and almost everyone else--from that venue in favor of a few priviledged licensees? And what does it mean when the government maintains the right to pull the license of anyone it does allow to participate in that venue? It means a government far outside its First Amendment limits. When it comes to broadcasting and the FCC, clearly the First Amendment has nothing to do with the case.
The problem of journalism’s control of the venue of argument would be ameliorated if we could get them into court. In front of SCOTUS they would not be permitted to use their mighty megaphones. And to get to court all it takes is the filing of a civil suit. A lawsuit must be filed against broadcast journalism, naming not only the broadcast licensees, but the FCC.
We saw the tendency of broadcast journalism in the past election, when the delay in calling any given State for Bush was out of all proportion to the delay in calling a state for Gore, the margin of victory being similar--and, most notoriously, the state of Florida was wrongly called for Gore in time to suppress legal voting in the Central Time Zone portion of the state, to the detriment of Bush and very nearly turning the election. That was electioneering over the regulated airwaves on election day, quite on a par with the impact that illegal electioneering inside a polling place would have. It was an enormous tort.
And it is on that basis that someone should sue the socks off the FCC and all of broadcast journalism.
Journalism has a simbiotic relation with liberal Democrat politicians, journalists and liberal politicians are interchangable parts. Print journalism is only part of the press (which also includes books and magazines and, it should be argued, the internet), and broadcast journalism is no part of the press at all. Liberals never take issue with the perspective of journalism, so liberal politicians and journalists are interchangable parts. The FCC compromises my ability to compete in the marketplace of ideas by giving preferential access addresses to broadcasters, thus advantaging its licensees over me. And broadcast journalism, with the imprimatur of the government, casts a long shadow over elections. Its role in our political life is illegitimate.
The First Amendment, far from guaranteeing that journalism will be the truth, protects your right to speak and print your fallible opinion. Appeal to the First Amendment is appeal to the right to be, by the government or anyone else’s lights, wrong. A claim of objectivity has nothing to do with the case; we all think our own opinions are right.
When the Constitution was written communication from one end of the country to the othe could take weeks. Our republic is designed to work admirably if most of the electorate is not up to date on every cause celebre. Leave aside traffic and weather, and broadcast journalism essentially never tells you anything that you need to know on a real-time basis.
Valor can be defined as putting your blood where your mouth is. Even "putting your money where your mouth is" is not so clearly the antithesis of cheap talk as valor is.Since journalism is the mass production of talk, journalism is naturally inclined toward cheap talk. Cheap talk - the advocacy of easy fixes at the expense of the intergenerational long run - defines liberalism in general and the anti-valor ("antiwar") movement in particular. That is why liberalism, and why the anti-valor project, emanates from journalism.
Apart from that understanding it is impossible for a conservative to understand how, after smearing the US troops in Vietnam, Senator Kerry has gotten as far as he has politically.
If journalism can install Kerry in the WH . . . perish the thought.
Murdering’ troops? What could Kerry have meant?
The Union Leader. ^ | March 28, 2004
Response: BINGO! TV journalism is theater complete with 'meaningful' facial movements, and 'chest tones of deep conviction.' The verbage is all based upon 'compassion,''outrage,''deep concern,''the little guy,'oppression,''equality,''room at the table,''the big tent,' etc. We will be the only civilization in history to die through the means of theater.
You are of course entitled to your opinion. In fact that's all you are entitled to, as far as information is concerned. Since you are entitled to your opinion and to listen to whoever you choose to and to ignore everyone/everything else, I have to be entitled to tell you fairy tales such as the conceit that I am objective. You can't sic the government on me for it; you just have to decide to ignore me if you decide I'm unreliable.Or you can decide that I am reliable, and choose to pay attention to what I say; your choice.
But when you say, "a pox on both their houses" you are saying that neither side tells the truth - which may not be the best that a liar can hope for if someone is trying to tell you the truth, but it's better than if you believe the truth to the exclusion of the lie. In a sense it's deciding not to have an opinion because sorting out conflicting claims makes your brain hurt.
For myself I take the arbitrator's viewpoint. If I say, "the truth must lie in the middle," all I am doing is destroying all incentive for either party to tell the truth. The bigger the whopper that they tell me, the more they tug "the middle" their way - and the other side just replies in kind if only in self defense. And that is my argument against "moderate" trust in splitting the difference.
I just have to run the risk of straining my brain in order to associate my opinion with the side that is closer to the truth. My analysis of the propaganda war is that journalism is the pilot fish of liberalism, that celebrities typically are in over their heads in a serious analysis of global warming claims and suchlike, and that celebrities - including individual journalists - therefore mouth what they know journalism will not attack.
The perspective of journalism is negative and superficial because journalism is the mass production of cheap talk - second guessing and easy (but unsustainable) answers. The resulting facile perspective is called (in America) "liberalism." And all you do to be a liberal politician is to count on the resulting propaganda wind to propel you to electoral victory. It's all just a matter of never showing courage.
Let us all now praise Richard Clarke (CLARKE KNEW! Not.)
WorldNetDaily.com | Friday, March 26, 2004 | Bill Press
America has to have leadership to incorporate "lessons learned." But the president is not the only leader in the country. The president does have what was famously called "a bully pulpit" - but who can honestly state that on a day-to-day basis his pulpit equals that of Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, et. al.? At some point the question has to be asked whether journalism bears any responsibility for leadership. As distinguished from second guessing and incessantly crying, "Wolf!"
The question to be asked is, "How many questions did reporters ask the candidates about airline security during the 2000 presidential campaign?" But the prior question - the vexation par excellence of American politics - is, "Who asks reporters tough questions?" Only FNC, talk radio and the Internet - and the reporters are well able to "give as good as they get" in that exchange. "Objective" journalism is after all published on radio (on talk stations and on all other formats) and on the Internet as well as on television and in newspapers.
There is a huge disparity in PR power between commentators who admit to being more likely to note the faults of liberals than those of conservatives on the one hand, and the PR power of those who are adamantly and selfrighteously reject any label or critique of their own perspective on the other. Yet because of its institutional perspective which hypes novelty, journalism is sensitive to superficial and negative news and self-blinded to the long run interests of society - much as a view through a magnifying glass makes it easy to see the small things but prevents one from seeing things which are obvious to the naked eye.
Because of this blinkered perspective "objective journalism" as an institution is systematically hostile to conservatism and friendly to liberalism. Indeed the phenomenon of liberal politics can be viewed as nothing more than the unprincipled and demagaugic exploitation of the anticonservative perspective of "objective" journalism. This tendentiousness is so pervasive as to call into question the very legitimacy of journalism on licensed broadcast media.
Dems playing with fire
Boston Herald | 3/31/04 | Boston Herald editorial staff
Yes. But I am far more interested in the unity of perspective across apparently competitive journalism outlets, which is IMHO pervasive and deleterious to the nation.The truth is that "talk radio" is a form of journalism which scrutinizes the supposedly "objective" kind of journalism. Talk radio does not affect to be objective and consequently is more objective than the other kind. But the PR power of pseudo-objective journalism is so great that, for most people, its fatuous claims are difficult to see through.
Electoral Votes: 102000 Result:
Gore 57%In Maryland, the 1988 election doesn't really count. Bush the elder's victory over Michael Dukakis was a fluke. Does anyone remember Willie Horton, the Massachusetts murderer/rapist who was allowed a furlough despite serving a life sentence? The people Horton brutalized while on furlough lived in suburban Baltimore, and lots of normally-'Rat voters swung to Bush because of that.Bush 40%
Since the 1960 election, the only Republicans to carry Maryland were Nixon for his re-elect, Reagan for his re-elect, and George H. W. Bush during his first campaign. Clinton did not need Perot to win here either time. This is a Democrat state.
In other words, a single (if horrific) crime produced such terrible PR for Michael Dukakis in that specific state that the state went against its otherwise reliable party tendency.Electoral College Breakdown 2004, March 31st Update ECB2004 - DalesWhich goes to show that what national politics would be like if "objective" journalism were actually objective! Or if, alternatively, broadcast journalism simply were banned in the last week before an election.
From the moment the September 11 commission was authorized, the only important question was when it would propitiate the media gods. That moment has arrived. We have finally reduced the entire story of September 11, as always, to heroes and villains, winners and losers.The malfeasance of Democratic President Lyndon Johnson as commander-in-chief of the Vietnam-era miltary precipitated a crisis in American politcs. Liberalism - journalism, the Democratic Party leadership - reacted to that crisis by abandoning its (always-halfhearted) support for military resistance to the impostition of Communist tyranny abroad and moving to outright opposition to military resistance to the impostition of Communist tyranny abroad.When this exercise is over, we will know very little important about September 11 that we didn't know on September 12.
Recall the famous phrase, "September 11 changed everything." What that meant is that September 11 changed the American mind about terror. ... After September 11 the president of the United States declared war on terror. He then established the fact of war, not merely the sentiment of war, by defeating the Taliban and Saddam Hussein with armies.
. . . over 30 years, an entire industry had grown up to work the terrorism problem. Abu Nidal and Carlos the Jackal were household names. And still the destruction of embassies, hotels, ships and finally skyscrapers continued.
. . . Amid the rubble and death of a September 11, it is everyone's instinct to say these agencies should have been focused on the problem laserlike and 24/7. That has never been and never will be -- short of war.
. . . After Mr. Bush's September declaration of war, the bureaucracies focused and functioned magnificently from Afghanistan to Baghdad. Policy. . . had the backing of the American people.
That shift did not merely imply Democratic abandonment of blanket respect for any American who manifested valor in service to the U.S. It did not merely imply the granting of amnesty for draft evasion. That shift implied the assignment of respect for the draft evader and contempt for valor when exerted under the leadership of a Republican president. The Democratic Party became the the party of the draft-evading Bill Clinton and the military-baiting John Kerry. And the party of bitter partisan emnity to much of American tradition in general. A party which is institutionally incapable of more than the sounding of "an uncertain trumpet" even if faced with violent challenge.
Such a party as that could not fail to produce a strong reaction in American society. In the first instance voluntary service in the military, and in the traditionally militantly nonpartisan officers' corps in particular, became strongly associated with disaffection with the Democratic Party - and thus with affinity for the Republican Party. The tradional, conservative South - institutionally Democratic since before the Civl War - changed more slowly but changed in the same way.
Such a party tears at the informal assumptions which make society cohere; it is essentially an anti-mainstream party. Such a party, to be blunt, is utterly dependent on maintaining, in the mind of each of half of the nation's voters an image at odds with reality (that image need not, unfortunately, be the same to every such voter). Such a party depends on massive PR support. With the support of "objective" journalism, that party has been able to agressively invert the meanings of words in order to prevent the electorate as a whole from seeing throug its image-making fog. "Liberalism" is "objective journalism." Scare quotes belong around "liberalism" because journalism has enabled its meaning to be be inverted from opposition to government regulation/high taxes to demand for precisely those things. Scare quotes belong around "objective journalism" for the obvious reason that journalism's "objectivity" is an egregiously tendentious, self-promoted, fiction.
Richard Clarke. . . . clearly thinks Mr. Bush's declared war was a mistake. . . .. . . Richard Clarke represents bureaucracy.. . . for all his reputation as a bull in the bureaucracy's china shop
Richard Clarke represents the avoidance of moral clarity. Richard Clarke is slippery and two-faced. Richard Clarke represents liberalism.
Source:
Clarke, Condi And the Wars Of September 11
Wall Street Journal ^ | April 2, 2004 | DANIEL HENNINGER
False premise. Once we fell for regulatory control of the free enterprise in the name of protecting public health and safety (thanks you REPUBLICAN Teddy Roosevelt), it became possible to use democratic power to control the use of property. At that point, to make money, one need only control public opinion.
That's why.
Ted Kennedy said today that Iraq was Bush's Vietnam .. we cannot allow that to happen. - cyberant
"He means that Iraq has to be Bush's Vietnam in order for the Democrats to win. The problem is that journalism and the rest of the Democratic Party is aiming for the same thing that our murderous opponents in Iraq are aiming for - the political defeat of the US Iraq policy. The linchpin of the problem is the truth which journalism does not say.And that truth is that
All this is law which the public - in Iraq and in America - should understand. Making the established law clear to the people is inherently in the public interest. It follows that an advertisement which did nothing more than to do that, would be a "public service announcement" which could be paid for and run by anyone, at any time, without reference to campaign finance regulation.
- There is no legitimate authority in Iraq above the US commander there.
- Where the writ of the US runs it is the responsibility of the US government to deploy forces to punish violence, with violence.
- Making an attempt on the life of any agent of the US government in the performance of his legitimate orders is capital murder, subject under martial law as in Iraq to summary capital punishment.
Such an ad could begin with a memorial to a specific dead American (or coalition) soldier-and it could be a different one each time the ad ran (subject of course to the permission of the next of kin, who indeed could narrate a bit of it). The ad would honor that dead person for volunteering to fight for democratic self-governance. And it would state that the writ of Saddam Hussein no longer runs in Iraq, and that the killing of anyone who was attempting to maintain order under martial law there was therefore a criminal act of capital murder.
The ad would then switch to the upbeat message of the donut in which those casualties are in truth a very small hole - images of the scores of thousands of American/coalition troops who have high morale and become more determined with each casualty. The ad could end there - but it could also conclude with a call for volunteers for the U.S. armed services.
That ad would let the air out of the Democrats' main hope, but it would not name any politician at all - at most it might show the crew of the Lincoln reacting the the president, taken from behind him - and could be run with soft money or even with DoD recruitment money. If it didn't have the president in it at all, I don't see how there could be any regulation of that ad - it would be a public service announcement.
KERRY'S CRASH CONTINUES
New York Post | 4/06/04 | DICK MORRIS
Indeed. But of course my point is that the decision to buy the paper at all is an entertainment decision - we buy the paper because we are bored. And because the product the public actually buys is entertainment, not enlightenment (although positioning the reader as being interested in enlightenment is a valuable marketing tool for the newspaper), the actual mission of the journalist differs from the (putative) mission of the historian - the focus of the journalist is on the negative things which grip your attention. And such things tend to grip your attention even if those things are distasteful to you.Which explains why it can be profitable for the journalist to publish stories with anticonservative themes. Even conservatives are attracted to the stories, even though they yell back at the reporter as they read them. Indeed there scarcely exists a conservative front page in the country - Washington Times and NY Post might be exceptions. But the Wall Street Journal definitely is not.
There are many who don't. I used to buy (now I give my money to FR) news serivices to be informed. I used to buy The Economist and the Christian Science Monitor. Your projection of your values upon the purchase decision, in that respect, induces you to miss the purpose of the owners of the news and information service in biasing that material to the left.
Sheep are easier to control. The media have every reason to direct you to entertainment to reap the advantages of hypnopaedia.
There are many who don't.Many, perhaps - but there is a crucial difference between "many" and "nearly all." If nearly all readers were actually interested in being informed rather than entertained, the newspapers could sensibly be expected to write to that audience. But since there is an ineluctable potential market of sheeple out there to appeal to, and because the last 10% of circulation tells the tale of how much profit or loss the paper will net (that's true of nearly all businesses), the pressure to entertain is unavoidable.
I used to buy (now I give my money to FR) news serivices to be informed. I used to buy The Economist and the Christian Science Monitor. Your projection of your values upon the purchase decision, in that respect, induces you to miss the purpose of the owners of the news and information service in biasing that material to the left.From my #505:
Journalism defines itself by its deadlines first of all, and secondly by its affectation of objectivity.The deadline has the effect of demanding of the journalist that something which happened - or at least was learned about - since the last deadline shall be deemed to be "important." Significant enough to demand the public's attention. All very well, if the Titanic sank yesterday - but what are the odds that you would be able to recall any portion of the front page headline story of The New York Times ten years ago today? The deadline is simply, "The show must go on," applied to topical nonfiction entertainment.
It is a means to an end. The end is influence. Were the paper unable to influence, they could not sell advertising. Advertising revenue is usually the lion's share of print media revenue; in the case of broadcast media, it's virtually all their revenue. No matter how many people read the paper or watched the station, unless that medium is capable of modifying behavior, there isn't a dime in it no matter how entertaining it might be.
Witness the influence exerted by Walter Cronkite. He was hardly entertaining; he was trusted. Your case for entertainment in news, is at best, applicable only at the margins. It doesn't satisfy the requirements as a premise as you have adopted.
Significant enough to demand the public's attention. All very well, if the Titanic sank yesterday - but what are the odds that you would be able to recall any portion of the front page headline story of The New York Times ten years ago today?
You have a very odd and subjectively broad definition of, "entertainment."
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