"Character assassination is just another form of voter fraud."
Dr.Thomas Sowell13 posted on February 4, 2012 2:38:17 AM EST by onyx
Gingrich should articulate the principle that people, including Romney, have First Amendment rights to publish, and to purchase advertising space or time. And he should follow that with a discussion of the irresponsibility which is at the heart of journalism, and which so readily polluted anti-Gingrich advertising which used journalism as if it were a font of historical truth. There is a lot of historical truth in journalism, of course - but there is a great deal more innuendo, half-truths, and outright erroneous misinformation and even disinformation in journalism.A salient example of this sort of thing was seen in the coverage of the "Duke Lacrosse Rape" case. What started out as a very thin case obviously being flogged by an overzealous prosecutor quickly revealed itself to be a nonexistent case in which charges were flung at patently arbitrarily selected targets. But - from the point of view of the irresponsible holders of the gatekeeping franchise of wire service journalism - it was a "great story." It was "great" because the alleged victim was a black woman, and the alleged perpetrators were white men. And it may even have been considered "great copy" for the very reason that the factual basis for it was thin-to-nonexistent - because it revealed the power of the journalist to "afflict the comfortable" more than would a case where the defendants were obviously guilty.
The anti-Gingrich people who paid money to advertise a journalist's casting Gingrich in a partisan negative light exploited the credulousness of the public which has been exposed to propaganda hyping the "objectivity" of journalism since memory of living man runneth not to the contrary. As unbalanced and unfair as the original "news" broadcast was, it is sheer demagoguery to quote it after the official government report cleared Gingrich completely of the charges the broadcast alleged.
Journalism has always been a business for partisans. From the founding era up to the Civil War era, readers selected their newspapers - to the extent that they had a choice - on the basis of the congeniality of the opinion of the printer of their paper of choice. There are still varying editorial stances among newspapers, of course. The salient example of a conservative editorial page is that of the Wall Street Journal. But in a larger sense, journalism as we know it is wire service journalism, with its newswire as a font of more stories than any one newspaper has space to fill. And whether you are the Wall Street Journal or a paper with a "liberal" editorial stance, it is stories from "the wire" - or internally written local stories by the paper itself which are written in style and tenor to be passed along to the other members of the wire service - which homogenize journalism so that it really doesn't much matter what outlet you read or listen to, the unstated assumptions of the stories are all the same.
The natural slant of journalism is that "journalism is important." The desire for attention, and for the ability to sell advertising space which flows from the ability to attract attention, is inherent in the business. It is natural that the journalism of the wire services would embody that slant, and they all do. The rules which journalists sometimes cite as the basis of their objectivity, what determines what they emphasize and what they do not report - "If it bleeds, it leads" and "'Man Bites Dog,' not 'Dog Bites Man'" - have no obvious relation to the public interest but have obvious utility for interesting the public. The claims of journalistic objectivity are themselves a means of hyping the importance of journalism. There is no gainsaying that those claims have insinuated themselves into the American culture, notwithstanding the fact that claiming objectivity is the very negation of the humility required to actually try to transcend the subjectivity which inheres in the human condition.
There is an old cautionary tale about a desire for attention, called "The Boy Who Cried 'Wolf'." Journalism is tempted to "cry 'wolf'" - and journalism is not very good at resisting that temptation. That is bad enough. But there is a type of person who elects to live in symbiosis with the journalist, having no moral or ideological commitment to any higher ideal than to obtain favorable PR, and to exploit it for monetary or political advantage. Such people participate along with journalists in "crying 'wolf'" by criticizing the people and institutions upon which the public depends. These complainers exploit the resulting PR for gain as union leaders, teachers (to a remarkable degree), and most of all, politicians. Such people are rewarded by the journalist with positive PR and positive labeling. They are called "progressive," "liberal," "moderate" - just about any positive label you can think of, except "objective," which is the one label journalists reserve exclusively to themselves. Of course, having the same mindset as the journalist, any "liberal" can get a job as a journalist at any time and - with no training or adjustment of mindset - become "objective." Just like George Stephanopolis.
I had an aunt, now departed from this mortal coil, who was in the news reporting business for a southwestern city newspaper. For the most part, what she wrote was reasonable, even though she had personal liberal leanings. She did one grand expose — or at least it purported to be — on how American Indians had been misled about the dangers of radium in uranium mines and had been stiffed on related disability claims. For all I know it was mostly based in fact, even though it was the kind of thing that lends itself to bleeding-leading journalism. And we know that mismanagement of Indian treaties has been endemic with the Federal government, so this would be more down that same alley. But she had a cartoon posted over her writing desk that caused me a bit of a concern — it had a TV reporter screaming about things like Alar and “deadly apples,” then thinking to himself afterwards with a grin, “God, I love journalism!” I hope that was irony to her. She had a weird sense of humor sometimes, and used an Indian magic conch shell to sprinkle good luck water on her car....
Thanks c_I_c. A great quote by Dr. Sowell. Fraud/misrepresentation runs rampant in our lives. The fraudsters devalue associations/life. The best you can do is avoid them on a personal level yet they permeate government and will destroy the republic if left unchecked. HOORAY Bill! BTTT!