Victor Davis Hanson Ping !
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Posted on 05/26/2005 4:22:23 AM PDT by Tolik
The recent Dan Rather and Newsweek controversies hardly seem connected. But on closer examination, both incidents symbolize what has gone wrong with traditional news organizations.
The old assumption was that opinion media — such as the National Review, The Nation and The New Republic — offer a slant on current events, but that major news outlets, outside of their designated opinion sections, do not.
This commitment to disinterested reporting — and along with it the public's trust in mainstream media — has been shattered in recent years.
It's easy to see why people no longer feel they can rely on a CBS News or a Newsweek for information without bias.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
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Never, never, repeat never, trust MSM!
"guys in pajamas" ping
He nails it as usual.
"With each expose, the harm has become cumulative — driving the public away from a now-stained mainstream media. "
So "stained", in fact, that were it a babies diaper it would need to be permanently disposed of. Mere washing would never do.
I blame Woodward and Bernstein...well not them so much as the Hollywood-adulation and rock-star status afforded them. It is the one, most tantalizing and irrepressible temptation that led many a MSM reporter down to hell.
Sure, there have been movies about the romantic ideal of being a street-wise reporter, uncovering crime and dirty politics, since the git-go. But something about the Hollywood Left's hatred of Nixon, the absurdity of politics in Vietnam, and the leftist media's determination to close ranks and conform things to their version and vision, came together in a perfect nexus with W&B. They had their very own real-life "heroes" and "guardians" and they never let anyone forget how they saved us from Tricky Dick, that wretched man who pulled a petty stunt to gain some dirt on his opponents. Yep the world was finally SAFE.
The mainstream media has never recovered from this. Even now. They still prop themselves up by mongering fear and ignorance, and striving to convince us that we are stupid, vulnerable, and in danger, unless we listen to them.
They probably all have "All the President's Men" in their DVD collection.
"Women and minorities hardest hit"
He could have thrown in Mike Barnicle. But Barnicle would have survived if the Globe hadn't fired Smith about a year earlier.
Until the MSM is forced into truth in advertising, the way they force other consumer products to live up to their own hype, we'll never be safe from publishers who call their claptrap things like, "Constitution".
Then again, I think, "Dispatch" could be funny and true on more than one level.
;)
They have always been propogadists. America is just finally catching on to their con game.
Second, these were not minor slips.
Third, neither organization was markedly contrite when exposed.
The lie is often the first weapon used from the arsenal of weapons of the anti-freedom, anti-life criminal. The pre-meditated intellectual rape of an individual or innocent citizens WITHOUT repercussion allows the perpetraitor to continue. The loss of life, money and freedom of innocent victims at the hands of the criminal is incalculable.
Well stated. Total agreement.
And I don't disagree with your disagreement. Actually, after posting that earlier remark, I remembered researching much older articles from the early 1900's, the Communist/proletariat/workers propaganda. And one could keep tracing back through the history of publishing and see that the press has been pretty much an agent of dissent since Gutenberg.
What the press has taught us is that the cure for disinformation is more information. Free-flowing knowledge keeps any one group from becoming the "guardians of truth," but can be admittedly messy and unattractive to those who have a need for order and discipline. In the last century we saw a very disciplined and orderly press corp combined with a romanticized star-power and cultural "lock" on perceptions. I think that is a recent and powerful phenomena that has been hard to break.
Bias in the press will never leave, but the cure for it has been the internet...the Gutenberg of our times.
"With each expose, the harm has become cumulative — driving the public away from a now-stained mainstream media. "
The question is, will they learn? I hope so but I am...skeptical.
It is true that the American press was highly progandisting during the Civil War and them for various causes thereafter (Hearst and the Spanish-American War comes to mind as a prime example of this.) One sense however, that during this period they were certainly understood to be essentially propagandists.
There was certainly no broad ranging Social program to be promoted "Behind people backs" as it were.
The usage of agitprop such as the MSM uses to day take as its inspiration the inventors of the politics of the manipulation of the masses: Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, and their most successful epigone, FDR.
Absolutely correct, and I think VDH missed the mark on this one. He's also wrong about "liberal talk radio" being "already served".
In fact "liberal talk radio" cannot stand on its own two feet because liberal ideas are factually and logically indefensible, and so liberal radio serves rants and insults as a substitute.
I don't mind propaganda, so long as the purveyors identify themselves as such, and they're entertaining.
It has nothing to do witht the format, the listeners are else where.
Here in NYC, Air America just got the NPR crowd, for instance.
In fact conservative talk radio succeed precisely for the reason that they were shut out of MSM.
But yes, consevative "media" in general tends towrd the rational. IT is all we have got.
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