Posted on 09/14/2001 7:02:19 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
BTT!!!!!
..... In reality it is only there that I may reasonably hope to learn something significant.....
Interestins comments. When considering news papers, you omitted the sports section. I'm told that the sports section is all that's keeping many papers afloat.
In my local paper there is better sports reporting and more staff than any other section. Since I am not a fan, It matters not to me.
Well, I was speaking of the sections which have more direct political implications. I will admit to reading the sports section in a paper that has one. I actually subscribe to a newspaper, but it's the Wall Street Journal and it has no sports section. The only part I reliably read is the editorial page.
This thread is an analysis of that question.
bump
"My view of this is that the media is like the guy going down the street with a sign that says 'The End of the World is Near,' and he picks a date and the day comes and goes, and the world doesn't end. So he doesn't stop with the sign. He goes home, makes another sign, puts a new date on it, and starts marching again. That's the way the media is," Crichton said.He argues that researchers who study global warming often exaggerate the problem in order to get grants, often using celebrities to promote their cause.
Foolish Fears / The Big Lie
ABC TV - 20/20 ^ | Dec. 10, 2004 | Michael Crighton with John Stossel
Mumbo jumbo. What kind of "obligation" do you have to do exactly what you want to do??? The First Amendment protects the press (whether it be a newspaper or a book publisher) from any requirement to print any particular truth; most truths never reach the newspaper and even fewer reach books.No, the newspaper prints whatever truth it wants and, truth be told, more than a few whoppers as well. But if the newspaper announces that it has obtained information which no one was legally entitled to give it, that should be just too bad for the source - or for the newspaper, if it is foolish enough to subject itself to geometrically increasing fines until it is bankrupted.
Judges as Plumbers NY Times ^ | Dec 13, 2004 | William Safire
We have a "mainstream" press that is interested in self-promotion, including promotion of its own bottom line. And we have a political party (the Democrats) which - like all other celebrities including each individual journalist - toadies to the arrogant, negative, superficial posture of journalism. The fact that it is the Democratic Party which is following journalism, and not the other way around, is a distinction without a difference - there's still not a dime's worth of difference between the ideology of the two.The "ideological press" - talk radio and Fox News Channel - are just as interested in the bottom line as the "mainstream," but merely take the courageous contrarian approach and fill the
nichegaping chasm left unserved by the "mainstream."Bill Moyers biggest news story of our time -
Jewish World Review ^ | December 20, 2004 | Joe Scarborough
Very good work here. I hope to find some time to sift through the whole thread. Thanks again for making me aware of this essay.
Do you find it difficult to detach yourself from such current history as the War on Terror for analytical purposes?Not really. I am of the view that while no historian can escape biases, one should neither pretend they do not exist (the "empiricists") or seek to counterbalance them with antithetical concepts (the New Left).
If you look at my previous book, "The Entrepreneurial Adventure," published in 2000, I went through 1996 or 1997 and (so far) my assessment of what was happening at the time I wrote it does not appear to be too far off.
I am interested in the nature of factual reporting, and the limitations of topical information ("the fog of war"). Part of my brief against journalism as we know it is the fact that journalists IMHO continuously hide from the judgement of history by taking refuge in the fog of breaking news. That is, they simply change the subject when events threaten the template in which they have been cramming the news into.For example, "the Cold War is over" - but who won it, and who lost it? From the Tet offensive until the disintegration of the USSR, journalism was unanimous that the Right Wing Cold Warriors such as Reagan were the great threat to peace and safety of the world. Yet Reagan can be buried full of honors as the statesman who won the Cold War without the least implication that journalism, and journalism's pollitical organization known as the Democratic Party, fought Reagan tooth and nail from the start of his campaign for the presidency to the inauguration of his sitting VP as president. And beyond, with the Iran-Contra investigations.
As I said - the subject of journalism's wrongheaded perspective during the Cold War simply never came up when Reagan's life was celebrated. Yet the signal virtue of Reagan was that he was able to do what was necessary over the bitter opposition of journalism and its lackeys.
But watch the media again claim later on that this even higher figure is due to political pressure from his critics.
The purpose of journalism is not to inform. The purpose of journalism is to make journalists seem important. Consequently journalists criticize, and then claim that their criticism has a significant effect on events.Bush Orders Flag Tribute to Tsunami Victims (media bias alert)
Reuters ^ | 1/1/05 | David Morgan
Pein's perspective is sympathetic to Dan Rather, Mary Mapes and CBS, and hostile toward the bloggers and others who exposed the fraud that 60 Minutes participated in, intentionally or otherwise. This gives his article a weirdly off-balance perspective. Pein holds out hope that the documents may not have been forgeries after all. He writes that:
We don’t know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination thereof. Indeed, they could be fake but accurate, as Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told CBS on September 15. So this is now, apparently, an accepted journalistic standard: fake but accurate. Which means, I guess: fake, but they help the Democratic candidate.
Journalism In Decline
Power Line ^ | January 05, 2005 | John H. Hinderaker
The truth is that there was always far more evidence that Rather/Mapes wanted to damage the Bush campaign than there ever was reason to believe that valid memos damaging to Bush had been uncovered.IOW the truth is well-known already; the only question is how long CBS will continue to stonewall that reality. And whether the Bush Administration will do anything about that stonewall of the use of fraudulent government documents by broadcasters who require federal licenses to operate.
- the topic of the report was arguably irrelevant; Bush wasn't running as a former pilot but as an incumbent POTUS; Bush did not claim to have been a paragon of valor in 1973. It was only the Kerry campaign which promoted the conceit that 30-yo records of military valor were more important than recent, far higher-level, political experience.
- the "memos" were putatively written to file only and not to circulation, and were putatively so closely held that they did not surface during prior Bush political campaigns - but OTOH the only copies available were of the poor quality normally associated with widely circulated many-generation copies. Such poor copy quality, and not the original, is however normal for the attempted passing of forgeries.
- the memos' putative author is dead - a fact convenient to a forger.
- the next-of-kin of the putative author deny that the memo was in the putative author's effects and deny that the putative memos reflect attitudes expressed contemporaneously by the putative author.
- the next-of-kin of the putative author assert that the putative author did not type (a characteristic not IMHO uncommon among military aviators of the period), and his secretary (although herself sympathtic to the sentiment of the documents) says she did not type it.
- questionable to highly dubious internal anomalies, including an out-of-date address, exist in the documents.
- and famously, of course, the font and format of the documents duplicates that of Microsoft Word at its default settings - and equipment which could have done so in 1973 was nearly nonexistent except for use in publishing, which is at the opposite end of the spectrum from what would be expected in a memo not made for distribution in terms of availability and operability by non-specialist operators such as fighter pilots.
CBS Affiliates Await "60 Minutes II" Investigation Report http://poynter.org/ ^ | Jan 7 04 | Al Tompkins
In fooling with Google on FR I happened onto a very significant article - naturally I would think so, it's a vanity I wrote in 2000 . . .Why "Liberals" Have a Corner on Big Journalism
media bias bump.
At least three generations passed under the sway of the drug pushers of Broadcast Media, grown dumber than the worst main-lining junkie. We have hell to pay on that accrued account.
Not that we ain't saddling our own kids with OUR own nasty debts -- we are -- and they'll have to work through them in their way. Yet on this one -- the liberation from the narcotic trade that is Broadcast Media -- we are working together one generation shoulder to shoulder with the next. A happy thing, that.
Speaking of being in denial, some conservatives argue that the Pay to Pander program is no big deal compared to the CBS scandal. The Clinton administration did it, too, they point out. Other liberal journalists have failed to disclose ethically suspicious payments, they steam. Excuses, excuses. I thought we on the Right stood against such expedient moral equivalence.The difference between Armstrong Williams and CBS is that Williams got paid. Otherwise the two are exactly the same; CBS aggressively worked to convince its viewers to vote the way CBS wanted. In fact, it's easy to show that CBS did so in reckless disregard of the facts.
CBS's "independent" investigation now says that Mary Mapes got on her "Bush skated in the National Guard" hobby horse 5 years ago with a memo to her bosses asserting that Bush got into the pilot billet despite the "fact" that there was a waiting list at the time - yet Mapes' own file showed at the time that there was no waiting list for TANG flying billets when GWB signed up.The issue is not whether people are getting paid to say things. The issue is whether the things they say are actually true. And for that issue, dear reader, you have no choice but to read critically, just as you read this anonymous posting critically.And of course, as the "independent" CBS report states, a roomful of smoking guns makes clear that the "Gillian memos" were no such thing.
The fact is that the anonymous posting you read on FR is in a significant way more reliable than CBS. After all, the FR poster does not have the a propaganda machine behind him/her; for all I know my post will follow immediately after a genuine, certifiably kook posting. My posting has to make sense and have the ring of truth, or it will easily be scorned - in the same FR forum as it was published in. OTOH the thing for which CBS (and the rest of the alphabet soup) is notorious for is the fact that it is a one-way medium which is formatted to exclude serious internal criticism.
The one thing that no "objective journalist" can be open about is the fact that everyone (including every journalist) has their own perspective, their own POV. It will not do to say that Armstrong Williams is a journalist; Mr. Williams has always been open about his own "conservative" opinions (since he doesn't conform to the facile socialism of journalism, he had no choice about that) and therefore would never have been called a journalist by those who put themselves forward as paragons of objectivity. And his being paid by the government, or not, didn't change that.
"Objective journalists" don't pander to liberal politicians; liberal politicians pander to "objective journalists." The font of liberalism is, as my tagline notes, the conceit that nothing actually matters but PR. Liberal politicians help the celebrities known as journalists to look good, whereas conservatives merely serve as a convenient target for both.
This column is not for sale (or, the stink of DU)
WND/Michelle Malkin ^ | Jan 12 / 05 | Michelle Malkin
My study of the problem has led me to the conclusion that leftists are natural journalists - in the sense that leftists elevate complaint to the status of action, and journalism is complaint as action. What happens when leftists obtain political power, of course, is that these mere second-guessers are cast in the role of one-guess doers - and the results are almost never pretty. The actual results, that is; the journalists/leftists are remarkably effective at putting a happy face on their own handiwork (for example, the Russians are still not sure that getting rid of the Soviet system was a good idea - and 48% of the American voting public thinks that John Kerry was fit for command).Journalism in general has an inherent credibility problem, in that it claims to be objective, and in so doing elevates itself above us mere mortals on the basis of nothing more than its own word. Journalism is arrogant and cynical (negative and superficial).
And if such be the case with print journalism, which is truly competitive, the problem is compounded with broadcast journalism with its need to justify its broadcast monopoly licenses, and of
publicgovernment broadcasting, with its further need to justify its government budget.All publishing and broadcasting attempts to suppress the proper incredulity of its reader/listener. The main information problem of society is that we are too credulous when people position themselves as being authoritative. And that people who position themselves as authoritative can tend to underreact to an actual emergency for fear of undermining that authority by being seen to cry "Wolf!" Note that word the recent disasterous tsunami spread far too slowly through offficial channels; what was wanted was a ham radio network and/or a FreeRepublic to spread the word unofficially so that at least some of the public would have had timely warning.
Journalism constantly warns us of the influence of Republicans. There is however a real Establishment, hiding in plain sight - and that is the inherently leftist perspective of journalism itself.
BBC harm is worldwide
American Thinker | 13.01.05 | Aleksander Boyd
Bumping a continuing great thread.
First, it isn't the "Rathergate" report, it's the CBSgate report; the report itself is a coverup and part of the total story. The "independent" investigative panel did no substantive investigation beyond what we knew within a couple of days of the broadcast, and it didn't even draw the obvious conclusion that in fact the "memos" were frauds, and not particularly good ones. The "independent" panel was created for no other purpose than to apply a "metaphysical certainty" standard of proof to the "question" of political bias motivating the broadcast.There is no logical reason for a disinterested observer to accept a CBS panel's definition of the appropriate standard of proof. Indeed there is no logical reason for a disinterested observer to accept any journalist's definition of the appropriate standard of proof. Because objectivity is part of journalism's institutional definition of itself, and anyone who says that a journalist is not objective is not - retroactively, "never was" - a journalist. As witness the case of Bernard Goldberg.
I'd say that the question belongs in court, but the trouble with that is that nearly all judges (Mr. Justice Thomas being the lone exception of which I am aware) subject themselves to the flattery and calumny of journalism by reading their own press clippings. That is a problem that is so pervasive that it is not to be noticed by anyone unwilling to be treated as if he had just declared that the emperor was naked.
Indeed, it is a question that would never arise if the First Amendment were actually to be applied to the issue; "freedom of the press" would override any other question but broadcast journalism is not part of the press. The First Amendment would of course forbid the government from requiring a license to broadcast, if broadcasting were actually considered part of "the press" (the other half of the conundrum is of course the fact that "broadcasting" as we know it only exists because of the censorship of all but the few government licensees). The justification for public outrage over the patent tendentiousness of CBS News (indeed of broadcast journalism generally) lies in the fact that the federal government enables the few to broadcast by censoring the rest of us.
Prove it!
Powerline ^ | January 12, 2005 | Scott W. Johnson
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