Posted on 09/14/2001 7:02:19 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
I've seen some outrageous reporting in alternate newspapers, but these left wing papers get a pass on whatever they say and no advertisers pull away from them.
I'm quite sure a Conservative alternate newspaper wouldn't get the same treatment as a left wing paper. Print one column that "offends" liberals and the liberal double standard would kick in: Advertisers would be pressured to pull out, lawsuits would have to be paid for, and the paper racks would be vandelized.
The definition of "objective journalism" is self-referential.The objectivity of anyone who adheres to the "party line" that mainstream journalists are objective (including of course the mainstream journalists themselves) is never challenged by any (other) member of mainstream journalism. It would be against the rules of the Establishment which is mainstream journalism.
If a Bernard Goldberg does write a Bias, he does not cease being a journalist--he is an unperson who never was a journalist.
The least regulated form of publication is the Internet web site, and it is no accident that you are reading the above subversive description of reality on a web site and nowhere else. Even a newsletter would be subject to more hassles, as Noachian has noted. Broadcast TV is the most Establishment-regulated, followed by big newspapers (Washington Times the only maverick) and cable news (Fox News Channel the only maverick). Radio, where conservative-hosted shows are rife, is remarkably low-regulation, if you don't notice that even the most conservative hosts are interrupted by anticonservative news programs. Rush's EIB network is the greatest conservative address in publishing space currently extant.
My humble opinion is that FreeRepublic.com is superior to anything other than Rush, and Rush's superiority lies only in his great address which only requires a pocket radio to access. Great addresses are expensive, tho--and even your newsletter costs money. I vote for spending that spare change on advertising FreeRepublic.com to improve the value of its address.
How to start and publish an independent Newspaper
Free Republic ^ | 09/21/2003 | Chad Fairbanks
If you can paint your opponent as an extremist and yourself as sweet reason, you have won the debate. So "objectivity" is the high PR ground, and it is natural for journalists to use their PR power to claim it."That's a myth now. It's not trueThe easy way to success being to go along and get along, journalists have adopted a system for avoiding unnecessary contention for the status of "objective journalist." Adherence to this code by journalists means that it is sensible to speak of "journalism" as an entity, an Estatblishment.
It is of the nature of an Establishment that, like the mafia, it "doesn't exist"--but you'd better not cross it! The journalistic Establishment coheres in the following code:
The objectivity of anyone who adheres to the party line that journalists are objective is never challenged by any other member of journalism Establishment.If a Bernard Goldberg does write a Bias, he does not cease being a journalist--he is an unperson who never was a journalist.
Yeah, Helen. Right . . . </sarcasm>
A theme of this thread is the superficiality of journalism. Nothing illustrates that better than the "get along to go along" Establishment which journalists have created; that process suppresses intellectual competition among journalists and averts meritocracy. You don't have to be particularly bright or hardworking to mouth the party line.
I think that question hinges on the definition of "conservative." I am enamored of the book The Theme Is Freedom--Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition, by M. Stanton Evans. Evans points out that different countries have different themes--and that American conservatives conserve freedom. Freedom, ironically, to do things differently than others have done in the past. Freedom to kick up a little dust.Thus we see American "conservatives" taking pride in, and advocating, progress. Progress of, by, and for the people. The anticonservative, OTOH, calls himself "progressive." But "progressives" seek progress in more government spending, more government regulation, and more government taxation.
The mechanism of anticonservative progress--progress of, by, and for the government--is criticism. Criticism of power not in government control. Criticism of the use of liberty by we-the-people, and criticism of the government for not reducing the liberty of the people.
Free, competitive journalism finds negativity commercially useful because it is difficult for the people to ignore. And it is difficult to ignore precisely because it has the effect of calling ino question the beneficence and/or the adequacy of the institutions upon which we-the-people depend.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.".
~ Theodore Roosevelt ~
Conservatism is the preservation of freeom--of the potential for progress of, by and for we-the-people. But in contradistinction to the liberal fantasy of instant government-induced nirvana, conservatives are under no illusions that progress of and by the people as a whole is anything but a "four yards and a cloud of dust" proposition.The football analogy is apt. A team which never gains less than four yards on any play, and doesn't turn over the ball, inevitably will score unless the time runs out. And that is true even if on every third down only three yards are gained. Superficiality would suggest panic, though, whenever a play only gained three yards--even if the play was a second-and-four and the next down will be third and one. Focus on comparison of single 3-yard-gain play with the "four-yards and a cloud of dust" game-plan standard obscures the reality of the field position attained and the expectation that progress will not be interrupted. If taken too seriously, it suggests that the coach "do something" like throwing a long pass to get to the end zone in one play. An unconservative decision, and seldom a good decision for a conservative "four yards and a cloud of dust" offense to make.
Superficiality exaggerates the importance of either the negative or the positive--but in the case of journalism with its predispostion to negativity, superficiality tends to exaggerate negativity and thus to call conservatism into question.
". . . 46 percent believe the press has too much freedom, and 71 percent believe "it is important for the government to hold the media in check." Moreover, only 53 percent strongly agree that "newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of a story, and only 57 percent agree strongly that "newspapers should be allowed to criticize public officials." But this is the natural outgrowth and implication of the way journalism traditionally (since the 1830s) positions itself. Namely, journalism puts frank opinion in the ghetto called the editorial page and the op-ed page, and either implies or says that the rest of the paper is "objective." Journalism also makes a huge fuss over journalistic "ethics," and loudly declaims how terrible it would be if the power of the press were "biased".If you compare that with "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . ." you should realize that the spirit of "ethics of objectivity" is in direct conflict with the "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach mandated by the First Amendment.
Whoso pretends to be other than a fallible human, even (and perhaps especially) when writing a newspaper, is a self-righteous fraud. And we-the-people have been indoctrinated by such self-righteous fraudulence since memory of living man runneth not to the contrary.
We have been indoctrinated, that is, to believe that we are free to speak and publish whatever we believe--and yet that it is wrong to seriously question the perspective which claims special authority to the publisher of a high-circulation newspaper. Without such indoctrination, already well-developed by the 1930s, it would have been impossible to think that an arm of the Federal Government could be given the authority to judge whether individuals publishing in a then-novel forum were doing so "in the public interest."
Nothing the FCC does would be constitutional if applied to print. That the FCC is incompetent to judge "the public interest" is manifest by the egregiously erroneous reporting of false signals which was done in real time on election night 2000. It was only because of that the election was thrown into question for a month--yet the FCC seems not to have any intention to change its procedures--or discipline its licensees to significantly change theirs.
I admit that the NEA is big, but I submit that there is a more influential lobbying organization by far. An Establishment of unparalleled influence--"the press.""The press" belongs in quotes not because it does not have First Amendment protection (though some of it patently does not) nor because "the press" (by which is meant nothing other than journalism) is not the only printing business protected by the First Amendment. "The press" belongs in quotes because it is not supposed to be--but in a very real sense is--a single entity like the NBA.
The NBA consists of competitive divisions such as the Lakers, Spurs, and so forth. But in regulating that competition by such means as giving each division the exclusive right to place certain players on its roster, the NBA acts as a single competition-limiting entity. It does that openly and publicly, and has lost antitrust suits over that behavior.
Like any illicit entity, "the press" denies its own existence as an entity; examples of this are nauseatingly routine whenever a journalist submits to Q&A. But any establishment coheres around a "turf," and must "send a message" when its turf is violated. What is "the turf" of "the press?"
Victory in any debate makes and the winner's side seems moderate, fair, objective, and balanced--and makes the loser's position seem "extreme". The turf of "the press" is the appearance of objectivity. Actual objectivity is of course impossible--topic selection is a fingerprint of the ineluctable perspective of the writer--but "the press" manipulates the appearance by use of the excuse of the fog of breaking news.
"The press" coheres in the following code:
The objectivity of anyone who adheres to the party line that journalists are objective is never challenged by any other member of "the press".The PR sythesis of the appearance of objectivity by "the press" is so pervasive and so effective that it is actually possible, even easy, to use that imposture in the"liberal arts academic fields. History , for example--precisely the field which should filter appearances out and, at the price of the wait, reveal truth which current events conceal--can be guilty of producing only a second draft of journalism. Some "truths" of journalism persist by the citation of journalistic reports alone, without serious scholarship in primary source material. See for example, the many fatuous "proofs" of the "McCarthyism" canard.If a Bernard Goldberg does write a Bias, he does not cease being a journalist--he is an unperson who "never was a journalist."
It took guts for Mr. Ashcroft to hold his symposium because, unlike during the civil rights era, liberals now often view federal election oversight with hostility. Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights called efforts to fight voter fraud "a solution in search of a problem" and "a warmed-over plan for voter intimidation."Socialists ("liberals"?--same difference) patronize--speak in the name of, but disdain--society (a.k.a. We the people). Consequently socialists need the cover of democratic legitimacy but do not respect it (How could an acolyte of Public Relations--who thinks that a printing press or a broadcast license is a license to control the sheeple--respect voters?). And liberalism is simply the political expression of the prevailing propaganda wind produced by comercial short-deadline journalism.
The natural consequence of those facts is a Democratic Party which is systematically engaged in a plan of ballot-box stuffing. And a journalism which is utterly unconcerned with Democratic vote fraud.
Socialists ("liberals"?--same difference) disdain, and lust for the power to control, the people. But, lacking titles of nobility, socialists find democratic legitimacy necessary for their ambitions. This implies the need for the socialist to patronize--speak in the name of, even as he disdains--society (a.k.a. We the people).
While it is true that Liberal "bias" in "the press" is the political expression of the prevailing propaganda wind produced by comercial short-deadline journalism, the nexus between media and porlitical liberalism is not limited to that business interest. Those who lust for power are attracted both to liberal politics and to journalism and the acadamy. The revolving door between "the press" and liberal--but not conservative--politics inheres in that nexus.
Talk radio is a critique of society from a frankly conservative perspective. But the statement,
is a self-critique.
Therefore talk radio critiques society more broadly than "objective journalism" does.
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