>> “But it is doubtful if we have seen the last of the journalistic hoaxes.”
There is much to be said about the future of journalism should it retain its title as such. Sourcing, editorials, and syndication will continue to change and I believe for the better. The lease to the province of ‘news’ has expired.
The declining credibility of the New York Times and of other tendentious media is, in one sense, a healthy thing. There has been too much public gullibility that has been cynically exploited by both the media and politicians.
Perfectly true.In another sense, however, it is a sad day for the country as a whole that there are shrinking sources of reliable news and informed and honest commentary.
Not true.I put it to you that the definition of subjectivity is believing in your own objectivity. And that it is just plain silly to look for "sources of reliable news and informed and honest commentary" among those who claim to be objective .
It's not as though Big Journalism was unbiased in some long-ago Eden. Journalism as we know it was formed with the advent of the telegraph and the Associated Press in the 1840s. In no time the AP was becoming monopolistic and, to deflect criticism of its role, was claiming to be "objective." And the AP was a government lapdog during the Lincoln Administration, taking government favors and censoring the news at the behest of the government. It may be hard to think of the consequences had it not done so. But for the people who were reading reports from the AP in their newspapers at the time, those newspapers were not "sources of reliable news and informed and honest commentary."
Then of course there was the role of the Hurst papers in fomenting the Spanish America War, and there is the coverup of the role of the Communist Party in the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations. The latter coverup, of course, is still in progress, with the use of the name of a flawed and human but responsible man as a byword for arrogant bullying of the innocent. That is precisely what Sowell is criticizing The New York Times for - but no newspaper or broadcast network calls their actions "McCarthyism." Because ultimately, the newspapers are not independent of each other - they are all part of the Associated Press, and are all thereby co-opted by the "objective journalism" scam.
The Market for Conservative-Based News