When you asked, "Any good political news regarding the military out there?," my immediate reaction was, "Of course not!" So long as the definition of "news out there" is "what Big Journalism reports," there will never be good news about the military.The fundamental is that journalism has one overriding objective - to look important. Whoever promotes that objective gets praise, whoever competes with journalism for importance gets criticism.
Since journalism does nothing - except criticize, journalism is competing for importance with people who are providing food, clothing, shelter, fuel - and security. People who do things are the natural target of journalism; people who only complain - plaintiff bar, unionist, socialist politician, etc - mutually reinforce the complaining of journalism and are given positive labels such as "progressive," "liberal," and "moderate/centrist." In that context it is actually a smear to call those who promote liberty "conservative" - liberty is what allows change, and what "conservatives" conserve is the ability to change and progress.
Whereas socialism is actually reaction against the discomforts of change due to liberty. The very last thing socialism is is "progressive." Socialism is the (il)logical extreme of criticism and second guessing, the specialty of journalism which claims to be objective or which admits to being socialist. Ownership of the means of production is simply credit for developing the means of production (and the product which it produces as well, often enough). The socialist is a critic who wants to take from the producer the credit for the ability to produce.
The true progressive, the true liberal, agrees that
"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena - Theodore RooseveltBut then, whoever agrees with that is opposing the arrogation of credit by journalism. And that puts you in the cross-hairs of journalism's very considerable ability to attack your reputation. Starting with deceptively labeling you, and assigning the labels that truly apply to you to your opponents - so that there does not exist an accurate, positive label for you. Newspeak lives!
It is not enough that what is printed be the truth - it must be the truth in perspective. The reporting from Iraq is probably mostly true - butLiberal bias only irritates the minority of people who can detect it. Most of the decline can probably be attributed to short attention spans of TV addicted masses. People simply do not like read anything longer than a street sign. Most college grads I know have not read a nonfiction book since graduation.Half the truth is often a great lie. - Benjamin FranklinThus, people get the impression that things are only bad and not good in Iraq. They seldom reflect that they would conclude the same about their own home town, if they knew nothing but what was reported about it.
Here there is a solution - the end of broadcast journalism. Broadcast journalism - all broadcasting - is a creature of the government. As such broadcast journalism is illegitimate government intrusion in politics - and the fact that broadcast journalism perfectly mirrors the political tendencies of print journalism does not make it OK. That is because the FCC puts the imprimatur of the government on broadcast journalism's claim of objectivity - and the government is not authorized to do that and is not competent to do that. After all, the government presumptively would style eternal incumbency "objective" if it were permitted to do so.Red All Over -- Is there any hope for the future of newspapers?
The Wall Street Journal ^ | February 19, 2007 | Steven Rattner