I woke up this morning thinking this very thing. But then, I wondered what we can do about it.
We can talk to each other for hours and listen to talk radio, but what does that accomplish?
We can watch it all put on Trump as he faces the scores of attacks daily..... by himself.
We can vote every other year.
There has to be more. And I’m not insinuating violence. The left has always been agenda driven, but we are not.
Any ideas?
“The left has always been agenda driven, but we are not.
Any ideas?”
Well, I guess we can play the Rats’ game better than they do. But then, that makes us no better than they are.
I don’t know how old you are, but I am 67, and back in the day there was a saying: “Better Red than Dead.” I vehemently opposed that then and I oppose it now, with the same fervor. Besides, “Better Red than Dead” is a surrender, and I don’t believe in surrenders.
Exactly. Trump is the first Republican president since Nixon to actively fight the Media for control of the nation.
We have been living in a Mediacracy.
President Trump is taking back the government from the Media.
The left has always been agenda driven, but we are not.
****************
The Left is (at the moment) cohesive, aggressive, and most of all, they play to win. We are none of that (excepting president Trump who has few allies in the GOP).
We have to elect people who are committed to wining and producing results, not just empty talkers who accomplish nothing.
We can watch it all put on Trump as he faces the scores of attacks daily..... by himself.
We can vote every other year.
There has to be more. And I’m not insinuating violence. The left has always been agenda driven, but we are not.
Any ideas?
"The media” must be brought to book. And that means that it must be sued for libel, and pay debilitating damages. In principle this can be done, and I have suggested the way many times - at least in outline. The Justice Department could do a lot of it, if it would - but only a DJT would consider it IMHO. All other Republicans are so afraid of the MSM that they can’t think.First, a word about the meaning of the First Amendment.
It does not say, “abridging freedom . . . of the press,” it says “abridging the freedom . . . of the press.” Justice Scalia explained the difference by pointing out that freedom of speech and freedom of the press existed at the time of the passage of the First Amendment - but so did laws against libel. Scalia explained that “the” freedom of the press was not absolute, it was the freedom, and the limits thereof, which existed at the time of the enactment of the First Amendment.
- Amendment 1:
- Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I think of it this way: the purpose of the First Amendment is to protect heterogeneity of published opinion. It assays to do so by prohibiting the government from homogenizing it. It does not prohibit the pre-Civil War novelty of the major presses voluntarily homogenizing themselves, though - and that is precisely what the Associated Press and its membership have done. It started out innocently enough (by the standards of the day), with the expeditious transmission of news over the burgeoning telegraph network which Samuel Morse’ famous demo of the telegraph initiated in 1844. But, there is a problem. The AP “wire” is a virtual meeting of all major US newspapers and broadcasters. And what would be the natural result of that?
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)So the AP is the fundamental mechanism by which journalists in America “go along and get along” at the expense of the public interest. To suppose that any other result could be possible after a century and a half of continuous “meeting” - meeting not about diversion but precisely about the conduct of business - is utterly naive. And that is why we have “the media” - a misbegotten expression which simultaneously complains that all journalism is homogeneous, and uses the plural form “media.” Editorial pages can and do vary - but the body of the paper is homogenous bad news (and advertisements).The First Amendment obviously does not prohibit private institutions from homogenizing the media, but it does not authorize that, either. It was not contemplated as a possibility in the Eighteenth Century, or - I would argue - it would have banned it. Because the objective was that the people be free to access the opinions of others, as a general good. Nevertheless, the First Amendment does not protect monopolistic behavior in the “trade” of journalism. And the Sherman Antitrust Act prohibits monopoly behavior by anyone.
In the Twenty-first Century context, telegraphy bandwidth is dirt cheap, and measures such as wire services whose signal virtue is conserving telegraphy bandwidth - and whose signal vice is defeating the purpose of the First Amendment - are obsolete and can and should be sued into oblivion.
The 1964 NY Times v. Sullivan ruling made it difficult for public figures to sue for slander, on the assumption that if one newspaper attacked someone, another newspaper would defend him. That is the assumption that the First Amendment accomplished its objective of assuring heterogeneity in journalism. And as we well know, that premise is false. If anyone attacks a Democrat - a member of "the party of government” - “the media” will defend ferociously. And if anyone attack a Republican, “the media” piles on. “The media” should be sued for ruinous damages for libel - and when they appeal to NY Times v. Sullivan they should be laughed out of court.