Then you still think that freedom can allow you buy "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth". Were that so, we wouldn't need jurors; for seventy five cents and a trip to the convenience store we could just get to the bottom of things. Much cheaper than trials . . .No, freedom is exactly the right to loudly disagree with those who are rich and/or powerful. The worst feature of journalism today is its pravda--its ersatz "truth" which is really nothing more than a self-interested PR-driven consensus. It is the PR which generates the cash flow of journalism--people feel good about themselves for being "in the know" by reading or hearing journalism. That effect would be subverted by a lack of consensus among journalists, so journalistic organs define journalism by adherence to its consensus.
That is why Rush Limbaugh "is not a journalist." All he does is report, tell you the truth as he understands the truth--but he's "not a journalist" because he is outside the the consensus by which journalism defines the truth. Socialists argue by definition a lot. They're called "liberals" in the U.S. not because socialism has anything to do with liberty but because in the U.S. we-the-people were in love with liberty.
If ever you hear a "liberal" say that "society should" do some particular thing (e.g., provide medicine), try pointing out that society (we-the-people, including phamaceutical companies and insurance companies and charities) actually does quite a bit of that. Push the issue of a distinction between "society" and government hard enough, and the "liberal" will make clear that s/he defines "society" to mean nothing other than government.We-the-people in the U.S. saw thru the con which the label "socialism" really is (without necessarily being able to articulate it as above), and so the PR-savy U.S. socialists systematically applied the popular label "liberal" to their governmentist nostrums. If you read the WWII clasic The Road to Serfdom, you must understand the word "liberal" in the British sense, what Americans now call either "conservative" or "libertarian." This is explained in the foreword to the 1956 edition of Serfdom.If you understand that the socialist defines society to mean government, you can see that the coined word "socialism" should really be "governmentism". The fact that "governmentism" is essentially a synonym for "tyranny" explains why the PR-savy "governmentist" would find a touchy-feely word to conceal that nexus. The dictionary definition of "socialism"--something about "government ownership of the means of production" has nothing to do with the root-word "social" unless it be through the assumption of "democracy."
It is, accordingly, no accident that socialists prattle about democracy as if that were a magic incantation, notwithstanding (nay, in aggressive denial of) the fact that democracy is not the form of any real existing large government. It is also noteworthy that concern about voter fraud is beneath them. Voter fraud itself seems not to bother them, but concern about it sure does . . .
The upshot has been to discredit (at least in political context) the words "liberalism" and "society"/"social". The lefties have had to move from one warm-and-fuzzy word to another, but in the process they have subverted the language so that American "conservatives" have difficulty articulating the arguments against leftism which they intuit or understand. For example, if I mention that I favor "progress" you might become suspicious of me since that's used as a leftist codeword. American conservatives, however, are "conservative" precisely of the ability of we-the-people (a.k.a. society) to double our standard of living every couple of generations. Conservative, that is, not only of liberty but of its blessings, including progress for our posterity.
Mass-marketing/PR is a source of considerable destructive political power in America. Mass-marketing/PR have much to answer for, and the conceit of "journalistic objectivity" seems to be the root of PR.