You're a contemptible idiot, but what the heck, why should I have all the fun?
We're talking about you at FreeRepublic http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2057276/posts
Enjoy the 5 minutes of fame, but make sure you polish up those drive-thru skills
IncPen
He responded:
From: jkay@nationalpost.com
Subject: Re: We're talking about you
Date: August 6, 2008 10:37:43 AM CDT
who said I was famous even for five minutes?
For the PeeWee Herman answer he sent me, I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that this twerp got beat up alot as a child.
I worked in the print media and radio for 20 years before changing professions in the middle 1990s, and the death of the print media is not due to its obvious biases. Impartial journalism is, by definition, impossible. Objectivity doesn’t exist among human beings. We all come to the table with our own culture, biases, experiences, and expectations.
And so the print media is dying. I saw it coming 15 years ago, and the death is slow and agonizing. However, it has nothing to do with the lack of objectivity and impartiality in newspapers and magazines.
Please allow me to explain what I mean here.
The idea that the media should be impartial comes from the reaction in the early 20th century from the yellow journalism of the 1800s. Newspapers and magazines in the late 19th century were fabulously biased, to the point of regularly printing lies, scandal, and libel against anyone who didn’t agree with the prevailing politics and feelings of the editor and publisher.
In the little Oregon town where I was editor of the newspaper, there were three newspapers in 1900 - a Republican paper, a Democrat paper, and a Populist paper. All of them were spectacular in their bias. All of them had nearly 100 percent circulation in the households of the town. I would often print some of that bias in the history column under my editorial, too.
When the ideal of objective journalism emerged, readers at first welcomed it as a new and interesting change. The problem, however, is that reporters translate and interpret events for readers (even radio picks and chooses which quotes to broadcast), and eventually the bias of the reporter comes through.
This bias wasn’t much of a problem when the newspaper you read was locally produced and a “mirror for its community,” to quote Horace Greeley. The publisher would use his ink to promote local industry, the editor would pontificate (often to the good humor of his community), and reporters would be a part of the local landscape.
That started to change about 30 years ago with twin changes: the growth of media conglomerates and the growth of advocacy journalism.
Newspapers started getting swallowed up by large corporations whose interest was a profit margin, not serving the local community. Reporters became interchangeable cogs, going from paper to paper (which I’ve seen in person). As a result, the reporters and editors no longer reflect the community.
Then there’s advocacy journalism. You can blame Woodward and Bernstein. Reporters made their names by advocating a viewpoint, as in the news articles from “Rolling Stone.” Soon enough, advocacy became the norm (again, a change which I witnessed). Often that advocacy comes from an academic insularity, not the community, and the readers suddenly find themselves confronted with media which challenges their viewpoints instead of reflecting their community. Not surprisingly, circulation drops. To make matters worse, no one in the media wants to give up what is now considered the “norm” for journalism - objectivity. You can’t be an objective advocate, and the reader correctly infers that the media consists of lying bums.
The solution is simple. Be honest.
I’m listening to Limbaugh right now. I know where Limbaugh is coming from. His biases are right up front. The same is true with Savage, Mark Levine, Glenn Beck, and the other radio commentators I listen to. None of them are suffering from slowly evaporating listenership. The same is true with the Internet. Biases are embraced. Go to the DailyKos and you know what you’ll be getting. The same is true here.
Opinion can be both informative and entertaining. Leno is basically journalism in his monologue. He just uses humor and wit to get his point across. So is Dennis Miller. There is room for Victor Davis Hanson and Thomas Sowell out there for the serious, but no one seriously thinks that those gentlemen are intellectually objective. They are making a point.
This is actually what the First Amendment - and journalism - are supposed to be about. Robust opinion and a sharing of ideas mean, by definition, lots of biased viewpoints. The reader or listener (or viewer) then make up his or her mind. If the New York Times put on their masthead, “All the news from a progressive point of view,” the readers would admire their honesty. In the meantime, though, poetry is basically dead, too, and its death didn’t really hurt literature.
oic