Posted on 09/14/2001 7:02:19 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
Yes. Well, broadcast journalism is the linchpin of that, IMHO. People who don't read (not to say that they can't, but for sure they don't) listen to broadcast journalism and actually think they know "what is going on." The government gives broadcast licenses, and the licensees try to vindicate the government's decision to do so, on the basis that they tell us "what is going on." Well, if all you knew about "what is goning on" is what a Dan Rather type will tell you, you certainly would be ignorant!But we have been subject to a massive propaganda campaign to convince us that we have independent sources of information if we listen to more than one broadcast network. We don't; the networks are commercially competitive but they all have the same negative, superficial, arrogant, and cowardly perspetive. All the classic components of the makeup of the bully and the cynic, inherent in the commercial melieu in which "objective" journalists operate. And people wonder why "the media" is "biased!"
Objective JournalismTM is an establishment defined by:Objective JournalismTM is the left's version of Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh defines his perspective openly and is optomistic about the American people, and people generally. Objective JournalismTM is negative, superficial, arrogant, and cowardly - IOW, cynical and bullying.
- the superficality inherent in its "the show must go on" deadlines.
- the "boy who cried wolf" negativity inherent in its need to grab for peoples' attention.
- the "you never pick an argument with someone who buys ink by the carload" arrogance of those who claim the virtue of objectivity.
- the "you never pick an argument with someone else who buys ink by the carload" cowardice.
Just like the liberal politicians who use the propaganda wind which Objective JournalismTM creates.
Just like Hillary.
Hillary's Secret War"
Richard Poe
More of Hillary's Secret War:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1446638/posts
. . . the first two questions we need to ask are:
Quite. Indeed, to the extent that nominally independent souces of information are in fact not independent, serious issues of what would in less significant arenas of human endeavor be prosecutable "conspiracy in restraint of trade" seem to be raised.Worse, as is becoming aparent enough to raise some comment among analysts, the Democratic Party is becoming ever less independent of this "conspiracy" - and all three branches of government is on board McCain-Feingold, which essentially codifies into law the fatuous notion that journalism defines objectivity.
But the rules which any journalist acknowledges define real commercial journalism include not only claims of "journalistic ethics and objectivity" but the deadlines which guarantee superficiality, and the "if it bleeds it leads" negativity for the sake of ratings which is perfectly analogous to the boy who cried, "Wolf!"
It is arrogant for anyone, and doubly so for anyone whose job it is to attract attention, to claim the virtue of objectivity.
The other virtue commonly claimed by journalists it courage; journalism persistently boasts of "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable." Either journalism is powerful, or it is courageous - or it carefully chooses "comfortable" enemies who are not dangerous. In fact every "objective" journalist studiously avoids challenging one particular type of enemy - other "objective" journalists.
As noted earlier, the distinction between the Democratic Party and so-called "objective" journalism is becoming ephemeral. A Democratic politician can become an "objective" journalist at the drop of a hat; a Republican is suspect if s/he dares so much as get a gig as a lifestyle commentator. But the defining characteristic of liberalism - of journalism and Democratic politics - is that nothing matters to its practitioners except PR.
Nothing at all matters to these people but PR, and that is an elitist, antidemocratic, and essentially a cowardly POV. Because the individual practitioner of journalism is afraid of the collective, and the Democratic politician defines his politics by whatever negativity is coming from that collective.
Journalism, and the rest of liberalism, is just cheap talk and second-guessing. Socialism - the advocacy of government ownership of "the means of production" - is actually a second guess in the sense that "the means of production" themselves, and most products which are produced, have been developed by private enterprises which succeeded while other enterprises failed. Socialism wants the credit for the successes, and has no interest in taking responsibility for the failures. Yet the liberals do not already own the successes because they did not know which ones would be successes and which would be failures - only time shows that.
We the people have been subject all our lives to a massive propaganda campaign to blind us to the reality that journalism and the rest of liberalism is superficial, negative, arrogant, and cowardly. IOW, that journalism is cowardly, bullying leadership of a cowardly, bullying Democratic polical "leadership." Every four years the Democratic Party nominates a candidate for POTUS - but they do not nominate a leader. They do not want a leader. At least since x42 they have been all symbolism and no substance. They'll say anything that sounds good at the moment.
Excellent article about Jim Robinson - Showdown: The left vs. the Web
World Net Daily ^ | July 20, 2005 | Richard Poe
All this is very well, but how to address the practical limitations of public bandwidth. The issue is not dissimilar to water rights. The advent of the internet and satellite make much of the old limitations moot. Under what conditions do you allot a slot of bandwidth and under what conditions do you remove it?
The advent of the internet and satellite make much of the old limitations moot.
I think that's pretty much true; technologically they could probably replace the old media's simple receivers with a box with a chip or two in it that would receive satelllite at such low expense as to be, in perspective, free. You could also do the same sort of thing with celular technology - just like cell phones being enabled to browse among "calls" which were intended for the purpose, really broadcasts.My central point is that the government created broadcasting by censoring competiton to enable distant receivers to pick up the licensed transmissions - giving we-the-people not the right to speak (and implied right to listen if in proximity to the speaker) but the right to be able to hear - bought at the expense of a duty to shut up. Now if I'm giving a speech and others assembled to listen to me, you do IMHO have a duty to shut up rather than preventing others from listening. But that seems fundamentally different from the government essentially assembling the listeners for certain people to speak to them. It is undoubtedly seductive to be enabled to listen to entertaining or demagogic speakers, but the right to speak on an equal basis is to precious to sell so cheaply.
Ping. This vanity, and subsequent thread, is the repository of my analysis of the perspective of unregulated commercial mass journalism.I'd be interested to get your response to it.
The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN. All hyped the startup, none featured the scandal of Air America.Omitting Air AmericaWhich is OK, under the First Amendment. But does the First Amendment apply?
What a silly question! Does the First Amendment apply to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Time? Certainly - at least to the extent that it is not subordinated to McCain Feingold.
What a silly question! Does the First Amendment apply to ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR? Not remotely. Those institutions exist only due to the sponsorship of the Federal Government in the form of exclusive licenses to "speak" at particular frequencies in particular locations. In principle Bill Gates could start a nationwide newspaper or magazine tomorrow, printing only his opinions - and the government has no authority to censor him. But unless the government favors him with a broadcast license, Bill Gates cannot so much as start a 10-watt college broadcast station.
But the hyping of the startup and the subsequent suppression of the funding scandal of the "liberal" Air America by all those journalism outlets clearly indicates that the political independence of The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Time, and ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and CNN - and Air America - is illusory.
Of course, The Rush Limbaugh Show doesn't even pretend to be anything other than conservative - what's the difference? From a philosophical perspective there is no difference between the open partisanship of Rush Limbaugh and that of Al Franken; both lay their cards on the table. And from the First Amendment perspective the print media are unambiguously free to be partisan - even to the extent of claiming that they are not partisan.
The egregious malfeasance lies in the fact of de facto government sponsorship of ABC, CBS, and NBC - and of the de jure government sponsorship of NPR - none of which are politically independent of Air America or of the Democratic Party. But all of which disingenuously claim full political independence. They perpetrate the fraud, that is, that a mere consensus of those whose business is attracting attention is "objectivity." In claiming objectivity, the propaganda organs are guilty of claiming the virtue of wisdom - and claiming virtue is arrogance.
Indeed, the reason journalism is monolithic as it is, IMHO, is the simple go-along-and-get-along imperative. Negativity towards the actual doers - military, police, and bottom-line-oriented management ingovernment and industry - aggrandizes the importance of the critic, the journalist. The extreme of aggrandizement of the importance of the critic is the assumption that all actual management and all actual force is illegitimate and unnecessary. IOW, people who control things - who make decisions without waiting for complete information, when the decision would be too late to be effective - are always the target of second-guessing.The police, to use an example from Thomas Sowell, are always either guilty of overreacting or of letting things get out of hand; in the usual case where things go smoothly, the journalist does not deign to comment.
Perhaps FR/bloggosphere is just the political version of the general trend for the Internet to improve communication and cut the cost of knowledge. To the detriment of the centralized information oligopoly, which simply finds it impossible to adapt to the reduction in the difficulty of its customers to get to the truth without dependence on middlemen who are out for number one.
Byron York: Cindy Sheehan is her own worst enemy
The Hill ^ | 8/17/05 | Byron York
To: conservatism_IS_compassion
Interesting essay.23 posted on 08/17/2005 11:10:37 PM EDT by Mind-numbed Robot (Not all that needs to be done needs to be done by the government.)I suppose that truly free speech has no obligation to be true or objective. It is the moral and ethical purists who see journalists as reporters of truth and accurate information. Libel laws keep the media somewhat in bounds.
My fundamental point is that First Amendment journalism inherently tends toward superficiality, negativity, arrogance, and cowardice:However, the public looks to the media for truth and depends on them to be honest and accurate. Pushing a particular political or moral philosophy is accepted as long as both sides are presented and so long as what is presented is accurate.
- deadlines make journalism superficial, not only by forcing the journalist to finish under time pressure but by requiring the journalist to start writing under time pressure. Which means that the article may be about fluff in the first place.
- negativity is natural to people; it takes work to put things in perspective instead of merely complaining.
- as long as there is no true competition in ideas on the front pages of newspapers, newspapers can all claim the false "objectivity" of concensus with each other. The claim of objectivity, like the claim of any virtue, is arrogance.
- but since that power position of being able to talk down to the rest of us depends on concensus, each individual journalist is intimidated by the collective. Therefore you need not expect courage from a journalist - only the claim of courage.
Unfortunately, being honest takes courage, and that is not common among journalists. In fact, if you are actually courageous you will be read out of journalism as "not objective." I mean by that, for example, that everyone in journalism must have known the reality that CNN could not have a Baghdad bureau without kowtowing to Saddam Hussain. A true, accurate, honest assessment would have told the public that CNN was flacking for a tyrant, as CNN's Eason Jordan ultimately admitted The News We (CNN) Kept To Ourselves [must read] after our coalition deposed said tyrant.When that fails the public starts looking for alternatives. That is what gave birth to the internet and talk radio as popular purveyors of information.Yet no other journalism blew the whistle on CNN. Why? Either because they were all too stupid to know it - even though they know why they didn't have Baghdad bureaus - or they knew a significant derrogatory truth about CNN and withheld it from the public out of fear of the repercussions of criticizing someone else who "buys ink by the carload."
News as entertainment? I disagree that that is the driving force for audiences. Complete truth and accuracy are what drive audiences for news.Don't misunderstand when I call news "entertainment." I do not mean that the reader of the front page of the newspaper thinks he's reading the funnies; indeed, the reader of the front page thinks he is performing a civic duty by informing himself as a voter.That is why I say the MSM is moving ever so slightly toward a more balanced approach. They are losing their reason d'etre, money.But what the reader thinks he is doing and what he is actually doing are two different things; the superficiality and negativity of journalism are there not to inform but to attract attention. What the reader is actually doing is satisfying (more or less idle) curiosity - and flattering himself that he is doing more than that.
I like your tagline; my analysis of it is that leftists so habitually employ "society" or "public" as a euphemism for "government" that they are all like my uncle, and cannot tell you the difference in the meanings of the words. Thus the leftist will say, "society should" (e.g., provide vaccine for the children), and mean nothing other than that the governement should do it.What is the difference between "society" and "government?" Nothing. Nothing but freedom, that is . . .
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1465165/posts?page=23#23
Media bias bump.
This may be the crux of the difference in our opinions. The power position ultimately depends on us, the audience, not the interplay among the media and their interchangable parts.
I think the word "interest" better describes what you are saying than "entertainment" although the media themselves say that entertainment is the driving force for audience. They are wrong about the news department.
You make many interesting observations and you obviously generated a thread of interest to a lot of people. Keep it up.
"Us, the audience" is not under your control or mine. There are still far too many of them - I listen to a lot of talk radio but very little "objective" journalism - for the two of us to think that journalism's arrogance is under our control. US soldiers feel the slap whenever TV journalists patronize them, and there's little enough that you and I can do about it until "objective" journalism becomes discredited as a paradigm.I think the word "interest" better describes what you are saying than "entertainment" although the media themselves say that entertainment is the driving force for audience. They are wrong about the news department.A consummation devoutly to be wished, but only glimpsed so far in the distance . . .
You are stuck in the "should be objective" paradigm. It is actually only naivete which makes us listen and nod our head when we're told of a wonderful
Code of Journalistic Ethics Promises sound wonderful, but if you're listening to a carnival barker you don't take them seriously. And after hearing the overwhelming propaganda campaign which throughout our lifetimes has promoted the fatuous idea that journalists are objective if they say so, we're all a little brain-damaged. We want to believe so bad that we just can't remember that they really are all just a bunch of self-interested shills.
Self-interested left-wing shills.
It is individually, which expands into collectively. It is called the on/off switch or channel changer.
Almost all talk radio is conservative radio. It is certainly more successful that liberal radio. It is not objective in opinion but it does reveal the truth not told by the MSM. That is an example of audience choice. Were it just ideological rant, as we get from the left, it would not be as popular.
That is also what accounts for the popularity of Fox News Channel. The rest have lost market share to them almost to the point of irrelevance.
Nearly all newspapers across the country are losing subscribers. Is that because of the internet or is it because the internet and talk radio provide a contrast which the public chooses rather than the newspaper?
As long as an enterprise is dependent on support from the people the free market will decide their success or failure.
You make good observations about the interworkings of the media but, absent government control, which we see in PBS and NPR, they are all ultimately dependent upon acceptance and support of the audience. The success of Fox and talk radio and the decline in readership and viewership of the MSM indicates where America is. The leftwing media will change or disappear unless they gain political power and impose censorship and limit choices.
The leftwing media is in fact the Democratic Party. Democratic Politicians are wholly owned by "objective" journalism. And "objective journalism" has a big piece of the Republican Party, too - or there would be no need for hail Mary plays to try to get a conservative on the Supreme Court with a Republican president and 55 Republican senators."OSullivans First Law" states that
"All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing."Which is just another way of stating the fact that people with the courage and principle to resist the bullying of "objective" journalism will be labeled "right-wing."Nobody is objective - least of all people who actually think that they are objective. Journalists are negative, superficial, arrogant and timid. IOW, journalists are left-wing bullies.
. . . The hour-long debate did not allow for lengthy answers. The candidates were asked about education, affordable housing, terrorism, crime, race relations, gay marriage, unemployment and disaster preparedness and in most cases had just 30 seconds to respond . . .
You see, that is just the trouble. They have, understandably enough, four candidates to winnow down to one nominee - and they have no principled way to choose among them, since the one who polls the worst could in principle be the one who is the second choice of the all the voters in the primary. So what do they do? They run a "first past the pole" race with a runoff against "second past the pole" if the winner doesn't get 40% of the vote.Let's just suppose that what they actually wanted to do was inform the public enough to get a good candidate for mayor. What would they do? IMHO they should:And how do they inform the public on the candidates and the issues? They broadcast a brief live, competitive joint TV
debatepress conference among the whole lot of them.
IMHO that process would seperate the wheat from the chaff - candidates who aren't ready for prime time would probably realize it by the time they got their clock cleaned by three different people in three seperate three-hour radio debates.I thintk that method of debating in the general election would enable Republicans to blow Democrats away - Democrats depend so heavily on being protected by journalists (see Hillary Clinton, poster child).
Democrats Debate, Asked 'Why Is Bloomberg Popular?' (NY) WNBC Television ^ | 9/8/2005 | Puppage
I have no problem believing the documents were forgeries. I just can't say I've come to that conclusion on my own. - liberallarry
As a teenager I had the experience of having demostrated something to Dad and having him criticze me for taking the chance. I replied, "It worked, didn't it?" Dad rejoined, "Once in a million!" My reaction was to repeat the (actually low stakes) stunt, which predictably (in my own recondite experience) worked again. Dad replied, "Twice in two million!"The moral of the story is that:
You claim that you "have no problem believing the documents were forgeries" and yet you set the standard of proof to infinity with your rope-a-dope "I haven't looked at it" evasion. You have not looked at it, and you will not - because it's too clear that you could not sustatin your worldview if you did look at it.
- You can always avoid a contrary conclusion if you can set the standard of proof arbitrarily high. And,
- It is easy to set the standard of proof arbitrarily high - if you are Dad talking to a young son. You need power to control the standard of proof.
From the fact that the "memos" are patent forgeries it follows not only that Mary Mapes was tendentious but that CBS as an organization was and is tendentious with its "independent commission" which was about as independent of CBS as your left eye is from your right.
As an impartial arbiter of truth, therefore, CBS News is rotten to the core. And what follows from that? All other news organizations know it - and do not say so. They do not say so, because Big Journalism is permanently in full go-along-and-get-along mode. Competition exists among the various organs of Big Journalism - but not ideological diversity. Big Journalism defines itself as "objective" journalism. But it is not objective; no human institution is. Big Journalism defines "objectivity" as not breaking the mutual admiration society pact.
I assert that there is no ideological competion among Big Media organs, even though I do not claim that they are all controlled by the Democratic Party nor even, as some would have it, Hillary Clinton. Big Journalism is a voluntary, ad hoc "organization." Big Journalism self organizes on the principle that "you never pick an argument with someone who buys ink by the carload." That is a principle which is at once arrogant and cowardly. Externally arrogant toward the general public, and internally cowardly among each other.
Each individual journalist is not able to control the course of journalism, any more than George Bush could with a breath have controled the course of Katrina. The individual journalist is not Big Journalism; the individual journalist is a mere celebrity among many celebrities. Movie stars are celebrities, not inherently qualified to speak authoritatively on farm policy for having portrayed farmers on TV or on law enforcement for having portrayed cops in the movies. And yet the Democratic politician - whether Hillary Clinton or any other - does not control Big Journalism either. All are entrained in the dervish of whirling motion, unorganized and yet systematic. All liberal celebrities, bound up in the one idea - that nothing really matters except PR.
Those who insist on any other principle, the PR Borg vociferously punishes with negative PR. They are "extreme right wing." Most of all they are "not a journalist, not objective." Thus a Bernard Goldberg can be a journalist - until he insists on a principle which is independent of, and therefore contradictiory to, the PR principle. Bernard Goldberg writes Bias, and he is an unmade man - "not a journalist, not objective."
What is the issue between those who call themselves liberals (or who, having run that word into the ground, insist on being called "progressive," or some other virtue) and those whom those "liberals" call conservatives? Conservatives, idealists that they are, have taken for granted that the issue was truth. But reality is different. The issue is not truth; the issue is whether the issue is truth. Whether, that is, the issue is truth or power.
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