As it is today (as it's always been) employees are loyal to the muckety-muck who signs the paycheck...they tow the company line or else lose that high-priced, high profile status; as well as those coveted "press credentials" and any semblance of prior access.
Of course, today (with all the mainsteam media mergers) those who sign the paychecks are an increasingly small, powerful cabal of men on the mountain who can dictate what they deem as newsworthy topics. Reporters and reporterettes (for lack of a more descriptive adjective) prostitute themselves for the check signer in leiu of objectivity, unbiased content and newsworthiness.
To put this into context, Thomas Jefferson referred to the running of a newspaper in 1791 as a "polluted enterprise"...and today he is surely spinning wildly in his grave.
The most important thing about journalism's "bias" (it is such, but for tactical reasons I prefer the word "perspective") is not that it has cropped into a pure and noble profession, but that bias is the natural product of the forces which created journalism.Nothing is more natural than that people all have their own individual perspectives. You have one, I have one, adults take that for granted. So the interesting fact is not that journalists their own perspectives, but that they all have such similar perspectives--and that they claim to have no perspective at all.
Think about the conceit which claims not to have a perspective! It is that conceit which makes journalism's perspective truly a "bias" in my eyes. Apart from that conceit, I would just say that "One man's 'perspective' is the other man's 'bias'."
But of course the homogeniety of journalists' perspective is in part a consequence of their claim of being unbiased (which would have to imply that they have no perspective). If one journalist projected a markedly different perspective from all the rest, he would thereby imply that the others were "biased"--or else that he was. That would theoretically be an option, but think how much less work it is to just go with the flow! Accordingly projecting the homogeneous perspective which is the journalistic "bias" has a job-survival value to the individual journalist.
Bernard Goldberg's career is a case in point: he was a journalist until he pointed out that the emperor has no clothes; now he is a nuisance but certainly not a journalist. He has been drummed out of the club. Back in the Vietnam era, journalists loved to broadcast students' railing against "the Establishment." Well, guess what--journalism is the Establishment if such a thing exists in America.
Do I then rail against freedom of the press? On the contrary I think it would be a good idea, and we should try it sometime. Indeed with the Internet in general and FR in particular, I think we are trying it to a (so-far) limited extent. On the Internet there is no guarantee of accuracy, so runs the critique of journalism. It is the "guarantee of accuracy" which is journalism's homogenizing factor--the factor which subverts freedom of the press. The press was free when Hamilton and Jefferson were sponsoring competing newspapers with which to wage their political battles. It is far less so when, for marketing reasons, all position themselves as nonpartisan paragons of "objectivity."
But journalism is not, after all, the whole of "the press;" books and magazines have First Amendment protection, and books especially are not subject to the tyranny of "objectivity"--and are to that very extent far less biased.
It is one thing for print journalists to hew to a homogeneous perspective--"go along to get along"--but it is quite another for the government to create an amplifying system which aggressively "goes along to get along" with print journalism. Broadcasting is a creature of the FCC, and could not exist as we know it without it. And the FCC makes broadcasting as we know it possible by censoring the many and licensing the few in a way entirely inconsistent with First Amendment freedom. Broadcast journalism is journalism on government-issue steroids.
Why then is the particular bias we observe in print and other journalism anticonservative? That is to be understood by reference to the marketing techniques of the genre.
Journalism markets itself not only as "objective," but also as fast. Emphasis on being the first to tell you any given report tends to deemphasize reliability, most evidently in the twice-withdrawn "calls" of Florida and the national election within a few hours on election day 2000. Compared to the most topical book imaginable, then, journalism is by nature superficial.Conservatism is essentially faith in the institutions of society. Commercially successful journalism is negative and superficial, and that makes it border (at least) on cynicism. Journalism is essentially an acid test of those institutions, and thus of conservatism."Man Bites Dog" is news; "Dog Bites Man" is not. That is, journalism emphasizes what is unusual. It makes mountains out of molehills. This is another source for the tendency toward superficiality in journalism.
"If It Bleeds, It Leads." That is, journalism emphasizes the negative as a way of scaring people into not ignoring its reports.
Commercial journalism should be understood to be inherently "liberal." So long as it has any perspective at all--and it would be dishwater-dull if it had none--journalism cannot assure that it is nonpartisan. In point of fact, liberal politicians systematically align themselves with journalism's cause celebre du jour, assuring themselves of a propaganda wind constantly at their back. Journalists would have to do the sort of heavy lifting--which, as we have seen, they normally abjure--in order to create space between themselves and liberals.
Each individual's right to print and profit from journalism is enshrined in the First Amendment. But journalism should not set the national agenda as it now does. Broadcast journalism should be abolished by eliminating broadcast licensee's ability to be topical. All broadcast programming except weather, sports, and traffic reports should be recorded a week in advance.
People who want fast news (including business news) should log on to the Internet. And (if they are conservative) they should log onto FR, exercise their own right to communicate nationally, and DONATE!
. . . but I think if you read this thread you might agree that I have some clue . . .There's an early flame war in the discussion, but otherwise the whole thread is edifying IMHO. See especially #50 by hadit2here . . .
. . . who in turn presumably lived better than the slaveholders of the antebellum South. That puts a whole different light on it, doesn't it?In fact, by most standards, poor Americans today live better than average Americans did just 50 years ago.
. . . and some of us remember that as being O.K. . . .The larger point is that journalism's short deadlines systematically filter out the small day-to-day improvements which accumulated to such remarkable economic progress over the course of the 20th century.
Journalism's bias is hiding in plain sight:
journalism is superficial because of its short deadlines, and--as illustrated above, (only) partly for that reason--journalism is negative towards the institutions and people upon which we-the-people depend.That is sufficient, in-and-of itself, to explain why journalists are as anticonservative as Ann Coulter (Slander) says.
All Americans believe in progress.Conservatism is a long term view of progress--a vision of progress over a multigenerational span of time. This viewpoint necessarily looks at all past history worldwide in the hope of discerning long-term threats to ourselves or even to posterity.
Conservatives recognize that there are always short-term negatives going on--our own individual mortality not least--but insist on the multigenerational viewpoint nontheless. Journalism seeks those negatives out and publicizes them. "Liberalism" exploits those negatives by using them as occasions to change the rules in ways that gain political credit--with minimal regard to, and generally to the detrement of, the welfare of posterity.
No commentator or columnist who takes account of the welfare of posterity--no conservative--is accepted by any liberal as a journalist.
Consider the following two news stories:
I don't dispute that some form of government regulation over the EMF spectrum is necessary; if there were no such regulation, radio transmission of any form would be just about useless for any purpose. On the other hand, the fact that legislation may be a good idea (or even "necessary") does not make it constitutional. What should have happened prior to the creation of the FCC would have been passage of a constitutional amendment explicitly authorizing its existence and defining its powers. Unfortunately, courts find it much easier to let such statutes 'slide' than to insist that legislators follow the Constitution.
I don't dispute that some form of government regulation over the EMF spectrum is necessary; if there were no such regulation, radio transmission of any form would be just about useless for any purpose. On the other hand, the fact that legislation may be a good idea (or even "necessary") does not make it constitutional. What should have happened prior to the creation of the FCC would have been passage of a constitutional amendment explicitly authorizing its existence and defining its powers. Unfortunately, courts find it much easier to let such statutes 'slide' than to insist that legislators follow the Constitution.
C-Span thinks to consciously be fair, and I don't doubt their good faith (at least, not very much). But the Fairness Doctrine was disasterous for conservatives; it was the reason talk radio was suppressed until Reagan arranged for or allowed the FD to lapse.The conceit of enforced objectivity is directly at odds with the philosophy of the First Amendment. The fundamental problem of the Fairness Doctrine is that "fairness" is really "absence of bias"--an unprovable negative. Since it can never be proven, defending against bias charges (such as Slander itself) is a Sisyphusian task; each new charge must be independently taken on. (and of course, often the charges are actually true, which makes disproving them even harder!)
Yet the charges are disposed of: they are assaulted with the propaganda power of journalism. Ridiculed, sidestepped, distorted into straw men and destroyed. In operational terms, they are ignored.
Under the First Amendment, which assumes free access to printing by any interested citizen, that tactic has no legal consequence. However, that legal situation is modified by the acceptance of the FCC, which created broadcasting by censoring competition in radio transmission. In so doing the government logically has exactly the task that the First Amendment banned Congress from--deciding "fairness" in publishing.
How then has the FCC decided the issue of fairness? By reference to the consensus of print journalism. But as we have seen, print journalism is legally unregulated; print journalism does not even have the authority of a witness under oath, subject to the laws of perjury. Yet the FCC and the unconstitutional McCain-Feingold law assay, de facto, to assign journalism the authoritative voice of a jury.
All its vaunted legal independence notwithstanding, journalism (print and broadcast) manifests a patent herd instinct. Even those who buy ink by the barrel, it seems, fear to pick fights with others who buy ink by the barrel. So the media outlets compete on the quickest delivery of the most gripping telling of the hardest-to-ignore reports, but they do not compete on the basis of telling the whole story, and telling it accurately.
The whole truth, in context, takes time. The whole truth, in context, is usually less dramatic than the first breathless accounts. The whole story may, in fact, prove to be a tempest in a teapot. Consequently it is the conservative who is more inclined to take the time to get to the bottom of things--and write a nonfiction book. The journalist has moved on by then to other stories, and if new information on an old news story comes out in a nonfiction book, maybe the journalist will discuss the book. But if so, the journalist assumes that journalists are the objective ones--and the writer either confirms journalistic prejudice (the negative angle which made a profitable news story) or is presented as a conservative wingnut.
Or, in the case of the Stacy Koon verdict, the jury was presented as the wingnuts. The first jury saw the entire video of the arrest of Rodney King, and heard an explanation of everything. Journalists, OTOH, edited the tape down to the best case to be made for police brutality, and asked how anyone could justify that. Essentially propagandizing for the riot that followed the verdict.
Slander points out many well-documented examples of anticonservatism; I propose a non-conspiratorial explanation for the reality Coulter describes. The Fairness Doctrine assumes Slander away. C-Span basically operates under a self-imposed Fairness Doctrine--and wonders why unregulated callers ran 5-to-1 conservative.
I've researched the issue of media bias for the last several years and this article pretty much reaffirms a lot of my observations.
Broadcast journalism is indeed unnecessary and illegitimate as evidenced by the continued cozyness which continues to exist between some news organizations and the Democrats. Clearly we as a nation are being done a disservice as a result.
Thanks C-I-C for the bump and the article. Regards.