And I agree - to an extent. Our founding fathers were quite understanding about the politics practiced by the media of the day, which is why the 1st Amendment recognizes a free press, AND the rights of all Americans to practice free "speech". The right to dissent vocally is not just a right reserved for the "talking heads" and pundits.
So we have 4 groups, government, the media, and the people, and one more I'll reach in a moment. How do we know what the news is?
For the very reasons you describe (herd mentality), the media attempts to distort the news - intentionally or unintentionally, he result is the same. Consider the 2000 election fiasco - every network abandoned ethics to be the 1st network with the results. It's the same with almost every major story - damn the truth and correctness, just be the 1st with the story (almost the same here on FR with Breaking News). FOX News is/was a breath of fresh air for many, and is succeeding because it is different than the other networks. But how long will it last?
Now for my opinion of who really controls the news - Advertisers. Consider the differences in advertisers on each network - how long will it be before more liberal companies begin to advertise on FOX to increase market share. And will FOX then bow to the demands (to change it's bias) placed upon it by those advertisers?
The media will continue to report/distort the major stories, but will still slant their reporting to "follow the money". The truth is not accorded a place in modern broadcast journalism.
IMHO advertisers pay protection money as much as anything else. You have these bigmouth journalists demanding that they say whether or not they have stopped beating their wives . . . and blowing up pickup trucks to make them look unsafe. If you can tell the difference between a journalist and a plaintiff's attorney and a liberal politician I think there is a distinction but not a difference. Anyone who can do one thing, can do the other.
The media will continue to report/distort the major stories, but will still slant their reporting to "follow the money". The truth is not accorded a place in modern broadcast journalism.Yes, by all means follow the money. If journalism fails as entertainment, it fails financially. Gripping the attention of an audience is the sine qua non of profitable journalism (and in the ideology of "the press" such profits as accrue to successfully entertaining journalism--or even investment in journalistic enterprise assembled from some other source--are in politics inherently cleaner than your "filthy lucre", or mine).
In competition with journalism which "accentuates the NEGATIVE," any attempt at "conservative journalism" would inevitably fail as mass-market entertainment. Besides, the deadlines of journalism focus it on the moment--if journalism is your only information source and if you do not heavily discount what you read/hear, you will at all times think that, in the famous words of Henny Penny, "The sky is falling!" If you have a conservative bone in your body, you can't write journalism (I'll post a link to confirmational testimony elsewhere on this same thread).
So journalism is anticonservative before it even has the circulation potential to talk to advertisers. The advertisers, having actual rather than merely theoretical competition, are divided and conquered by journalism's protection racket. Journalism herds together because there is safety and strength in numbers; the fact that constitutionally illicit broadcast journalism herds along with constitutionally protected print journalism is in that light hardly remarkable. Were it otherwise, the scales would fall from the eyes of the public and broadcast journalism would stand revealed as the naked emperor.
Note that I draw a distinction between journalism and commentary. Think of the conservative "news" programs--Paul Harvey's News and Comment and Fox News Channel. The distinction is that journalism will not recognize conservative comment as being journalism. Fox News' "conservative" reputation, IMHO, derives strictly from commentary which is at least balanced if not actually conservative. Rush Limbaugh makes the same distinction when he says "I am not a journalist."
Under the First Amendment there cannot be such thing as a journalism license (at least for print), so it is not necessary for Limbaugh to cede the point but it is tactically expedient to do so because then conservatives have the word "journalism" to kick around with no risk of "friendly fire" collateral damage.
Now for my opinion of who really controls the news - Advertisers. Consider the differences in advertisers on each network - how long will it be before more liberal companies begin to advertise on FOX to increase market share. And will FOX then bow to the demands (to change it's bias) placed upon it by those advertisers?Show of StrengthThe media will continue to report/distort the major stories, but will still slant their reporting to "follow the money". The truth is not accorded a place in modern broadcast journalism.
From Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2003 (Front page headline)
How Media Giants Are Reassembling the Old OligarchyThis IMHO shows the power, and the danger, of centralized media. The intention if not the reality of such centralization is to moot the free will of we-the-people, convert us to sheeple to be lead as it suits our "betters."Mix of Broadcast and Cable Proves Lucrative in Driving Bargains, Promoting Shows.
Playing Hardball With Barbie
Two years ago, Matell Inc. gave CBS a choice. The network had refused to broadcast the toymaker's movie "Barbie in the Nutcracker" in prime time. So Mattel threatened to pull millions of dollars of advertising from the Nickelodeon cable channel--owned by CBS parent Viacom Inc.
Viacom, which had spent a decade bulking up with acquisitions, now wielded its new clout, according to people familiar with the situation. If Mattel made good on its threat, Viacom said, it would be blacklisted from advertising on any Viacom property--a wide swath of media turf that also includes MTV, VH-1, BET, a radio broadcasting empire and even billboards. Mattel backed down, and the Barbie movie ended up running during a less-desirable daytime period.
Neither company will comment on the scrape, but Vacom says Mattel remains a "valued advertising partner." More generally, President Mel Karmazin in an interview is blunt about his company's strategy: "You find it very difficult to go to war with one piece of Viacom without going to war with all of Viacom."
Note, BTW, that Benito Mussolini got to be the dictator of Italy by first becoming its most influential journalist. His acquisition of power was a media event staged for the photographers, just as some of the "big protests" were staged for TV during the Vietnam era. Mussolin remained in control of Italy by becoming de facto editor-in-chief of all Italian journalism from then on . . .
So the idea that the advertisers control the PR media is questionable. In this case it looks like Barbie found herself paying protection money . . . and I think that is the general case with advertisers and journalism.