Compare and contrast with todays media.
Charles Wiley often lectures about Vietnam - including events in the United States, as well as those in southeast Asia. In addition to covering the war in 1962, 1964, 1968 (the Tet Truce offensive) and 1972 (the Easter offensive), he has returned to Vietnam, North & South, and Cambodia, since the conflict. He knows many of the key players. During critical periods, Wiley had very long one-on-one interview/briefings with General Westmoreland, Presidents Diem and Thieu, Marshal Ky and other top figures. He learned much about the Vietnam war during his many extensive trips to China, the Soviet empire and Russia.
Wiley’s extensive knowledge about the home front during the conflict is based on vast personal experience with leaders and rank & file from both camps: those supporting the American armed forces and those in the anti-war movement. He was at numerous college teach-ins during continuous travel in the United States.
Charles Wiley has reported from 100 countries and regularly continues his world travels. His in-depth search for facts led to his arrest eight times by secret police throughout the globe, including the KGB, and imprisonment in a Cuban dungeon while he was a correspondent for New York City radio station WOR.
Wiley has covered 11 wars, including reporting for NBC, UPI, the London Express and numerous other U.S. and foreign news media. A graduate of New York University, Wiley's freelance articles and photographs have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek and Time. A well known radio/TV talk show personality and commentator, he has appeared on hundreds of network and local programs throughout the country - including many times on CNN Crossfire and C-Span. Wiley has lectured in all 50 states and on five continents - including talks in Germany, Taiwan, Australia, South Africa, Thailand, Belarus, Namibia and Albania. He lived briefly in the Soviet Union while giving talks at Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) University. Wiley lectured, and resided on campus, in China (Jinan University, Guangzhou), Russia (Moscow State University) and elsewhere abroad.
He contributed to establishing guidelines for a free press in Mongolia, spoke in Spain and Luxembourg (under the auspices of the U.S. government) and was a speaker for the White House Public Outreach Group. Wiley has played a major role at international conferences in Great Britain and Italy - and lectured in New Zealand at the Ministry of Civil Defence Academy. He frequently addresses military audiences - in the USA and abroad – including the Naval War College, the Defense Intelligence Agency school, the Air Force school for its top NCO’s, the Navy Postgraduate School, CincPac, the UK intelligence school and many others.
Evidence that the Washington Post is Democratic? I'm shocked - shocked!Politics is controversy about what constitutes the public interest. In claiming to be objective, Journalism identifies the public interest with itself and its own interest.
But the interest of journalism is the promotion of journalism at the expense of the rest of society. Journalism's "objectivity" promotes journalism's hypercritical outlook over business, which journalism belabors as paying its employees too little and its management too much - and of polluting and depleting the earth while charging too much for its product. Journalism promotes itself over the police, which it accuses of brutality and failure to capture fugitives. And journalism promotes itself over the military, which journalism accuses of spending too much money, killing too many people and breaking too many things, and failing to accomplish its mission with no loss of American lives.
Those who promote journalism's self-interested agenda journalism flatters, those who oppose that agenda journalism slanders. "Liberals" and "progressives" and "moderates" promote talk and criticism above action and responsibility for results. In its halcyon days journalism called those who respect concrete action such as manufacturing and law enforcement and national defense "right wing cold warriors." But then Ronald Reagan had the temerity to win the Cold War. Now they are reduced to decrying "Tax cuts for the rich" when their opponents promote the real economy.
BUSTED....WASHINGTON POST REPORTS DEMOCRATS BEHIND FOLEYGATE!
Gateway Pundit ^ | 10/11/06
I bought the videotape when "Television's Vietnam" was first produced, back when I was a subscriber to Reed Irvine's Aim Report. For myself, the videotape was a disappointment. Just a bunch of trenchant condemnation of the reporting of the war. True, but I couldn't see it doing anything but preaching to the choir.If you wish to ruminate over Vietnam, you could do far worse than to read Mom, Apple Pie, and the Ghost of Quagmires Past. It's a most excellent vanity - long but exceedingly well written - I didn't even suspect it was a vanity until I finished it and looked back to see where it had been published. marron told me that every time he tried to shorten it, it got longer instead - so he finally decided to publish it on FR "before it took over my hard drive." If indeed he could have filled a hard drive with that quality of writing, he would have had a bona fide book on his hands.
I dropped my subscription to the AIM Report because it became a twice-told tale - each issue merely proved again what the prior issue had already proved. I was convinced, and felt no need for further examples of "bias in the media." At that point I was interested not in whether "the media" was "biased," but why. And that explains the genesis of this thread.
I now put scare quotes around "media" and "bias" because I find those terms either imprecise or over broad. It makes no sense to make a fuss about the perspective of a fiction writer such as a screenwriter; according to the Constitution s/he is entitled to hold and express opinions with which I disagree. And since everyone is entitled to their own opinion, it isn't even a "bias" to be pejorative about when journalism is political.
The actual "bias" of journalism is in its claim of identity with the public interest. Journalism claims to be objective, and yet journalism behaves in ways that betray absorption in self-interest. Journalism will openly state - in justification of its incessant negativity on Iraq - that bad news is what sells newspapers. Fine. You are looking out for your own interest when you report only bad news from Iraq. You are looking out for Number One, as you are entitled to do. But that appeal to self interest puts the lie to any claim that you are "objective" when you make that choice.
Journalism, in styling itself "The Press," emphasizes its constitutional protection. Yet the First Amendment is not superior to the second, which protects "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." In protecting the newspaper printer who uses a printing press, does not the First Amendment implicitly protect the manufacturer of printing presses? And if so, as is IMHO certain, what nonsense journalism prattles when it inveighs about the evil of the manufacture of arms!