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To: conservatism_IS_compassion
It seems we have progressed from the Founders' original intent to have a citizen legislature that would periodically return home after a short stint at writing law (presumably to live under that same law) to a class of professional lawmakers who have absolutely no intention of ever living under the very laws they wrote. Those laws are only for their subjects (called "constituents"). Being for the most part lawyers, Congresspeople have no skill in creating anything. They can only write law empowering themselves and extorting money from and otherwise hampering legitimate businesses.

The media mob (as Milhous has recently dubbed them) has appointed itself as the mouthpiece of these people. Their goal is to cheer on the efforts of the "leaders" to build a state completely controlled by the elite, and to put themselves into the position of speaking for their party (a la Pravda). Then they won't have to worry about profit or entertainment; they will have permanent jobs. Only the other day an article was posted on here where a journalism major posited that if newspapers could not survive as a business, why then it was the job of the government to support journalism all the same, out of your tax money.

Read the portion of the Gulag Archepelago where Solzenitzen talks about how the pre-Soviet media fawned over the leftist revolutionaries in jail, trumpeted their ideas and wailed about their conditions in prison. But Lenin turned on the media mob immediately after taking power, and their comrades buried their dead bodies in the northern island prison cemeteries where they had been shot like criminals. I suppose he had no reason to trust them, either. Presumably the same happened to the Chinese, Cuban, and Cambodian media as well.

It seems history isn't necessarily the strong suit of journalists, whether print or electronic.

1,304 posted on 08/27/2007 4:51:22 PM PDT by TenthAmendmentChampion (Global warming is to Revelations as the theory of evolution is to Genesis.)
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To: TenthAmendmentChampion
Being for the most part lawyers, Congresspeople have no skill in creating anything. They can only write law empowering themselves and extorting money from and otherwise hampering legitimate businesses. The media mob (as Milhous has recently dubbed them) has appointed itself as the mouthpiece of these people.
Doesn't it strike you that journalists are precisely like lawyers in having no physical product, and no service other than criticizing the people (businessmen, policemen, and military) who get necessary things done? IMHO the question is not, "Why do journalists help 'liberals'?" The question is why we are surprised that journalists promote themselves by tearing down others, and why we are surprised when the people called 'liberals' do the same thing and, being useful to and simpatico with journalists, get helpful coverage from journalists (including positive labels such as 'progressive' and, yes, 'liberal').
Their goal is to cheer on the efforts of the "leaders" to build a state completely controlled by the elite, and to put themselves into the position of speaking for their party (a la Pravda). Then they won't have to worry about profit or entertainment; they will have permanent jobs. Only the other day an article was posted on here where a journalism major posited that if newspapers could not survive as a business, why then it was the job of the government to support journalism all the same, out of your tax money.
There is no doubt at all that both 'objective journalists' and 'liberals' have identical mindsets, and differ only in that 'objective journalists' are employed as reporters/editors. And that McCain-Feingold - indeed, that all "Campaign Finance Reform" legislation, promotes journalism as a public good, and were pushed by journalists far more than by the general public. The FCC likewise has a history of promoting journalism as a public good, as evidence that a licensee is "broadcasting in the public interest as a public trustee." So there is absolutely no cause for surprise when a journalist proposes government subsidies for journalism - indeed, what are PBS and NPR newscasts if not government-subsidized journalism?

In that light, the "Fairness Doctrine" was regulation of broadcasting in the interests of 'objective journalism' - what could be more in the interests of "objective" journalists than suppressing Rush and the others who call them out for their tendentiousness? What could be more convenient for journalists than having the government prejudge all issues in favor of journalists by defining them as being "objective"?

I lately have become interested in the Associated Press as a transforming agent in American journalism. In the founding era, journalism was openly partisan; Hamilton and Jefferson sponsored papers in which to wage their partisan battles against each other. Now journalists think that a scandal. I, OTOH, think it a scandal that now journalism speaks with a single voice - and I wonder if the AP and the newswire is not the homogenizing force which made that transformation possible/inevitable?

Have you checked this out?


1,305 posted on 08/28/2007 3:05:01 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (The idea around which liberalism coheres is that NOTHING actually matters except PR.)
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