. . . 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.
It's clear that, if there's a story which truly shocks, then people will leap to the TVs and the ratings will skyrocket. Ted Turner earned a lot of dimes with this basic rule of TV ratings.
But these profitable blips are clearly windfallish in nature. Randolph Hearst may have proved to have a raw talent in "making news," but this clearly can't be put into a managment textbook in a communicable way: his flair cannot be passed along through business school.
So any promotion-seeking executive would have to come up with some substitute because they know that the shock-and-huddle makes for better ratings.
What better way than by using a clique of reporters with an us-against-America attitude? Or a bunch of hysterics making much ado about ephemera? Or people that combine both?
The anti-Vietnam bias in the late 1960s got ratings. For all we know, the inspiration for the confrontational mode was far less Ramparts than Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In - a show with 40+ ratings.
As far as their wooden-headedness is concerned, another durable source of ratings is a fan base. Narcissistic arrogance, as displayed in verbal behaviour, actually leads to such a journalist being idolized and even worshipped. This implies (counterintuitively) that a queen bee - whose style of interviewing essentially is "see thing my way or all you'll hear is 'when did you stop beating your wife'" - makes strategic sense as a hire.
The fact is that extreme liberalism and moderate anti-Americanism is an optimal choice for a television reporter. The average American will be induced to watch regularly, because of the mild shocks administered and (quite possibly) the hunger-for-seeing-notoreity factor, which will raise news ratings higher than they otherwise would have been.
The fact is that liberalism of the New Dork type in television journalism seems to be as conducive to a successful corporation as don't-offend-anyone Republicanism is in the regular kind of big corporation.
"What's bad for America is good for the media - and Vice Versa!"