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The American Media in Wartime - Brit HumeTed [Koppel] was an embedded reporter in Iraq, and after he came home he . . . spoke with real generosity about the American officers and enlisted men that he dealt with, and how able they were and how good they were and how effective they were. But he went out of his way to make a point of distinguishing between them and the policy makers in Washington. About the latter he said, “I’m very cynical, and I remain very cynical, about the reasons for getting into this war.”

Cynical? We journalists pride ourselves, and properly so, on being skeptical. That’s our job. But I have always thought a cynic is a bad thing to be. A cynic, as I understand the term, means someone who interprets others’ actions as coming from the worst motives. It’s a knee-jerk way of thinking. A cynic, it is said, understands the price of everything and the value of nothing. So I don’t understand why Ted Koppel would say with such pride and ferocity – he said it more than once – that he is a cynic. But I think he speaks for many in the media, and I think it’s a very deep problem.

Yes. But cynicism is just superficial negativity. And as Hume points out elsewhere in the piece,

One of the problems we in the news business face, of course, is that sometimes there’s not much news. And there’s an old saying in newsrooms: “No news is bad news, good news is dull news, and bad news makes marvelous copy.” And that’s essentially true. Some good news, like Jessica Lynch’s rescue, is spectacular stuff. But generally speaking, news is what’s exceptional, and bad stuff tends to be exceptional in our world. Reporters have a natural instinct, therefore, to look for the negative.

A superfical focus on the negative cannot be far removed from cynicism. Hume is right, that's a problem--but the problem inheres in journalism.
Fox News is just as superficial as the rest of journalism--it's just not as negative. Consequently Fox News reports will stand the test of time much better than journalism which is overwhelmingly negative towards institutions upon which we have to depend--and which are actually quite good.

the majority of blacks do not bother to educate themselves to this fact. They take the democrats word like teenagers in awe of the latest music sensation.

We have to cut blacks a little slack. They are, in great majority, falling for what is to us an obvious con. But the root of that con is the conceit that you can, or at least should be able to, buy
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth
for a buck at the newsstand. And that is a con which is also self-evident--except that you don't have to be black, or culturally conditioned to be a Democrat, in order to sucker for it. I was over fifty before I even began to see through the massive "big lie" campaign behind it. A propaganda campaign so successful that it's actually believed by most of the people who--having grown up listening to it--perpetrate it with a clear conscience.
Making that bold a claim makes me sound like a kook test candidate, but I'm entirely willing to listen to reason.
Prove to me that I should trust journalists telling me that blacks should riot over the acquital of a cop in LA, rather than accepting--at most, investigating the fidelity to duty of--a jury.
Prove to me that I should trust journalists telling me that a general was wrong about Tet and all of Vietnam, when the historical evidence goes the other way.
Prove to me that I should trust journalists telling me that in the 1950s all the liberals in the 1950s were cowed into silence--and that I can know that by the number of "amazingly brave" contemporaneous reports to that effect.
Prove to me that I should trust journalists telling me that my apples have been poisoned by people who have committed their futures to the business of selling apples into the indefinite future.
Prove to me that journalism does not consist of a bunch of "has-been drips under pressure" posturing as "experts"--and deploying presses and broadcast licenses from the government, almost continuously engaged in practicing on the credulity of the public in one hoax or another.
Cast as a negative, that proposition is IMHO unprovable. The fact that something is unprovable does not make it false, but it emphatically does not make it true. And in this case the evidence is the other way.

The First Amendment makes it hard to punish what you think is an "abuse" of a printing press. That was the only possible way to keep the government out of the business of judging people for judging the government because it is difficult to prove that anything isn't in some significant way political.
Least of all--as the marked difference in religious observance between journalists and other Democrats on the one hand, and Republicans on the other, must suggest--religion (I believe it was King James I who declared, "No bishop, no king." What is apolitical about that?).

The package was edited by the news desk, not the features desk that handles the paper's movie reviews. It also ran in the Post's news pages, at the front of the tabloid rather than in the entertainment pages at the back of the paper where its reviews run.

The old "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" trick. Didn't work with Dorothy and Toto, won't work now.
Under the First Amendment there is presumptively no legal consequence to the New York Post's article. Rather, it merely serves as an exemplar of the hypocrisy involved in claiming a dichotomy between "hard news" and opinion. The decision to run that "news" article was--a decision. A decision which helped sell newspapers. The front page of the paper is an advertisement for the decision to buy the rest of the paper. That is, an attempt to convince you that you will be entertained by the rest of the paper.

Mel Gibson "Passion" bootlegged copy [reviewed by NY Post]
Variety ^ | Wed Nov 19, 7:00 PM | GABRIEL SNYDER

Last June, when I tut-tutted the Page 1 placement of Michiko Kakutani's review of Bill Clinton's "My Life," I think I missed the point: a front page position for an opinion piece may have been odd, but publishing a review of a 957-page book barely 24 hours after it arrived in Kakutani's hands was even odder, unless you buy the premise that speed equals virtue. The Pulitzer judges who awarded Kakutani her prize in 1998 cited "her passionate, intelligent writing on books and contemporary literature," not her speed-reading capabilities. The timing of both the cadaver story and the Clinton review, and their consequent claim on front-page real estate, are symptoms of a persistent genetic disposition. Some newspaper people seem to regard beating the competition as the opposable thumb of journalism, an essential characteristic that distinguishes winners from losers. I think it's more like the tailbone, a vestigial remnant from the era when reporters were still swinging from the trees - that distant time when New York had eight daily papers, and newsboys in knickers prowled the streets shouting "Extra!" whenever their papers had something the other guys didn't.

Darwinian selection might have weeded out the weaker specimens, but the traits that kept them alive for years haven't disappeared. Today, breaking news belongs to those who deliver electronically, so reportorial wiles become the chief weapons in this meaningless war.

All very well to say that the "scoop" is an anachronism in print journalism, jut journalism as a genre of nonfiction is defined by the attempt to be the first to tell a story. For that reason, journalism is inherently superficial. It makes far better sense to read and reflect on the editorial page rather than the front page of a paper. The front page claims to be disinterested but is superficial and heavily slanted toward the sensational; the editorial page OTOH is frankly opinionated, and the reader makes his/her own judgement of how much to discount that tendentiousness, and in what way.
Journalism claims to be "the first draft of history" - but journalism systematically ignores the big picture and draws attention to the sensational - and "first reports are often wrong."
EXTRA! EXTRA! Read Not Quite Everything About It! [NY Times Pulbic Editor]
New York Times ^ | April 10, 2005 | DAN OKRENT

every single teacher has a right to his or her own opinion. In fact, I would rather that they have an opinion than not.

People have perspectives. People who are open about their perspective - "I am an American conservative," or "I am an American socialist" - position themselves as being philosophical (the term "philosophy," after all, simply means "love of wisdom" - which is entirely different from claiming to be wise).
People who claim to be "moderate," or "objective," OTOH, position themselves as being sophists (since "moderation" and "objectivity" are virtues, to claim either of them is to claim superior wisdom and thus to arrogantly talk down to people who in principle may know something that you should listen to).

But, they have a responsibility to differentiate between teaching their assigned subject, and politically indoctrinating their students. There can be no commingling of the two in a public school.

When a geography teacher teaches about places and the cultures to be found in them, that teacher speaks with authority and presumptively can cite noncontroversial references for whatever he says. When a teacher teaches the perspective of one political party only, that is obviously an abuse. Yet, even "balancing" Fahrenheit 911 with Fahrenhype 911 simply compounds the felony - because the actual felony is not telling only one side, but inculcuating the idea that the students should accept political discourse in binary, Read-Only, form.
That isn't the only way to do politics - and it's certainly not the way we do it here at FR.

School Indoctrination: A forum owner's son watches Fahrenheit 9/11 in a high School GEOGRAPHY class!
The Annoyed Army | April 12, 2005 | The Annoyed Man

Mac mini, iPod help drive Apple's profit higher (Net income up 530%)
Reuters | April 13, 2005

...but for the life of me I can't understand why [Steve Jobs is] still a liberal...

People who do "intellectual" work (I'm a software engineer, EE, BTW (NOT IT!)) and make it big, often haven't really struggled to survive or been through real hardships. I'm not talking about working overtime to meet a deadline. I mean using your back or brawn to do a boring job day-in and day-out to barely keep food on the table.
Thus, they haven't learned to appreciate the small things in life and be thankful to God for their life. Many will attribute the liberalism to guilt. IMO, it's not so much guilt per se, but as it is just having led a somewhat sheltered life and then getting rich for thinking up stuff (that other people have to actually build). Plus people like Steve get by by talking a good game. Getting by and getting rich on your social "skills" seems to me to be the prime reason for rich liberals. Look at Hollywood. They can't even produce an original movie anymore. And their lives are so phoney and fickle. Always looking for something to fill the void...
Beside, most of us engineers know that it was Steve Woznick who did most (if not all) of the work on the original Apple. Jobs was the salesman/businessman side of the partnership.
One last jab, although I haven't heard anything about her, I suspect Steve Woznick's ex-wife falls into this category as well. She made huge bank when her and W. divorced and she got half of his Apple shares. Compare this with Ta-Ray-Za Hines, who never really worked a day in her life: going from her father's house to a billionaire husband. She has no idea what it is to actually create your own destiny and wealth.
24 posted on 04/13/2005 11:23:18 PM EDT by Clock King
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Your interesting analysis is at least as related to this ongoing thread about the causes of "bias in the media" as it is to a thread about Apple Computer.

My basic thesis is that liberalism is (as Rush puts it) a "gutless choice" - because the incentives of the genre of nonfiction known as "journalism" produces a propaganda wind in favor of it. That is, if you don't have any principled beliefs about an issue, and are put on the spot to discuss the issue, the easy way to sound nice is what is called "liberalism."

Trouble is, journalism needs people to criticize because if everyone's a hero, then nobody can be a hero. And the easy, safe people to criticize are the responsible people; they have something to lose by striking back and - since they make decisions - they make mistakes and suboptimal decisions. So they are easy to second-guess.

So you would think that journalists are the businessman's natural enemy. And you'd be right, except that journalists tend to extract "protection money" in the form of having the businessman take on a liberal coloration - become either outright liberals or RINOs on the model of John McCain.

BTW, I'm an engineer myself (retired). One thing to say that Wozniak did all the heavy duty logic work on the Apple II, and another thing entirely to credit him with the whole thing. The example of Thomas Edison is very interesting: he is known as "the inventor of the electric light." But the crucial point is that he didn't just announce a scientific discovery, he founded General Electric Corporation to make the light bulbs and the Consolidated Edison company to provide power for them. It's really neat to invent something, but to really do the job you have to create the enterprises necessary to bring it to market.

But I like your point that a Steve Jobs - or a Hollywood type - can get rich without getting their hands dirty, and having done so can delude themselves the meaning of that. Most of us just have to run a "four yards and a cloud of dust offence" - if everyone tried to be a movie star who would make or service automobiles? Who would grow our food?

Bias can work both ways.

That is true, in principle. But there is an important difference between listening to an avowedly conservative or avowedly "liberal" commentator, on the one hand, and listening to a putatively "objective" journalist.
It has been known since Socrates that fair debate can only occur between parties who are modest enough to claim only a desire or love of wisdom rather than arrogantly claiming wisdom itself. The Greek word for "brotherly love" is "philo" - as in "philadelphia," "the city of brotherly love." The Greek word for wisdom is "sophy" - hence, the word for an honest debater is "philosopher." And the word for a tendentious debater derives from the Greek for "wisdom" itself - "sophistry."
So the openly conservative (or "liberal") commentator is "philosophical," but people who claim to transcend the limited perspectives of mere mortals - people who claim the virtue either of "objectivity" or of "moderation" are sophists. Jounalism, therefore, is in principle a hotbed of tendentiousness. You will say that journalism is restricted to truthtelling and cannot be tendentious - but that begs the question not only as to whether some of what journalism tells us might actually be wrong, but as to whether the news is what is important or merely what is interesting because it is novel.
My critique of journalism is that it is arrogant in claiming objectivity, is superficial because of its deadlines, and is negative because cheap criticism and second-guessing makes its practitioners and its audience feel superior to people who make mistakes because they act rather than merely talking. And my critique of "liberals" is that they follow journalism rather than leading - and journalists give them credit rather than criticism for taking leadership positions and then scapegoating rather than leading.

Fox News host: Repeat after me New York Daily News ^ | 4/15/05 | Llyod Grove

That's the way things are in today's America. If you ever make any comment or suggest in any way that you don't think that it's a good idea for religious groups to attempt to use the law to promote their religious ideals you are "anti-Christian" and a "Christian basher."

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric? - Washington's Farewell Address (A. Hamilton, speechwriter)

The system of those who would "exclude religious principle" is to promote the conceit that anything beyond praying in your own closet is "an Establishment of religion." Not true. "An Establishment of religion" is a church funded by the national treasury, and/or with advantages given to those who attend it. Anything less than that is constitutional, as this author should know. And to propose that no religious symbol ever be placed on government property is to propose the removal of all religios symbols in military cemetaries. It is nothing less than a project to destroy the national memory.

There is however an actual Establishment based on the favor of the government and having political and religious implications. Broadcasting as we know it could not exist without the censorship of all but the few whom the government favors with licenses. And broadcasting - especially broadcast journalism, which the government promotes - contains the planted axiom that what is unusual and novel is what is important.

And the Bible - and church tradition - is neither unusual nor novel - it is the most common book in the country and it doesn't change.

SETBACK FOR REPUBLICANS
Neal Nuze ^ | 04/25/05 | Neal Boortz

Experts say that in many ways lawyers representing the news media have done a remarkable job over the last three decades turning an essentially adverse ruling in Branzburg to their advantage, arguing with success in many instances that the news media does have a privilege to protect sources.
The media's lawyers relied on language in Branzburg by then-Justice Lewis Powell, who wrote a separate concurring opinion that was somewhat sympathetic to the press.

"It was a classic case of making lemonade out of lemons, and to a large extent it worked; the problem is, now the courts aren't buying it anymore," said Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and the law at the University of Minnesota.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
That single sentence lumps together freedom of religious expression, freedom of speech, freedom to use technical means to publish, and freedom of political speech. From the First Amendment's perspective they are all just one big ball of wax.
There is no distinction between freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It follows that the courts should do for me as a speaker what they would do for you as a journalist. If they won't allow me to stonewall a subpoena of information just because I'm a speaker, they have no reason to allow you as a journalist to stonewall a subpoena.
Likewise when Democrats in Congress assay to decide that someone shouldn't be allowed in the "press room" at the White House, when the president chooses to answer questions from particular individuals they are prattling about things completely apart from their jurisdiction. Bush could invite any individual he chooses into the "press room" or the oval office or his private quarters, and discuss any topic he chooses to with him or her. What is that to Congress??
What that is, of course, is Democratic members of Congress carrying water for the Establishment known as "objective journalism." That Establishment self-selects on the criteria of adherence to the liberal concensus; its members implicitly agree that an attack on the credibility of one is an attack on the credibility of all. Journalism's very own NATO pact, not written on paper and signed but agreed to by common consent.
Media Struggles to Protect Sources
AP on Yahoo ^ | 4/26/05 | Pete Yost - AP

The productive vs. the unproductive: Walter E. Williams
WorldNetDaily.com | Wednesday, April 27, 2005 | Walter E. Williams

life expectancy rose from 47 to 77 years of age. Deaths from infectious diseases fell from 700 to 50 per 100,000 of the population. Major killer diseases such as tuberculosis, polio, typhoid fever and whooping cough were virtually eliminated. Infant mortality plummeted. The 20th century saw unprecedented material gains as well. Controlling for inflation, household assets rose from $6 trillion to $41 trillion between 1945 and 1998. Today, more than 98 percent of American homes have a telephone, electricity and a flush toilet. More than 70 percent of Americans own a car, a VCR, a microwave, air conditioning, cable TV, and a washer and dryer. In 1900, no homes had the modern conveniences of today. Today's poor Americans have choices that yesterday's millionaires could have only dreamt of, such as cell phones, computers and color TV sets. Added to all this progress, most adults have twice as much leisure time as their turn-of-the-20th-century counterparts.

As Steven Den Beste once observed: That's the critical transition from non-zero-sum to zero-sum. Once the market saturates, you can only grow at the expense of a competitor. Which finally leads up to the key insight I had a couple of days ago: during the non-zero-sum expansion stage, it is the virtues of each competitor which decide how well they prosper. But after the switch to zero-sum competition, it is their faults which decide who will die.
Alternatively, perhaps we've moved to a non-zero-sum period in which mediocrity is no longer enough. I'm inclined to suspect the latter, but it's certainly clear that something's changed, and that traditional media are doing poorly out of it. The Big Media organizations have their faults -- chiefly laziness, political groupthink, and a tendency to condescend to their audiences -- and those are starting to cost them. I don't know if they will actually die out, though the numbers for newspaper circulation and readership aren't very promising, but they are certainly threatened. (Things aren't quite as bad in the TV world, but television news is approaching the demographics of Matlock pretty fast.) For those armies of Davids, of course, there's no guarantee that they will prosper over the long term either. The march of media evolution won't stop for the benefit of blogs, and I predict that within a few years blogs as we know them today will have changed dramatically. But there's much more to new and alternative media than simply blogs -- and, regardless, it seems clear that the media world of the next decade won't look much like that of the 20th Century. Given the disappointing performance of the media Goliaths, that's probably just as well.
MEDIA TIPPING POINT Where Free Markets Meet Technology
TechCentralStation ^ | 04/27/05 | TechCentralStation
By Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Common Tator posts:

The Democratic elites do not understand who belongs to their party. To get a handful of elites they are driving their base away

My response:

Lebedoff's book cites a book which said that this "New Elite" (better term for it is "arrogant") class is growing - and that if you add their numbers to the blacks &c you come out with a Democratic lock on the 2004 election. Democrats were in ecstacy and the Republicans were seriously worried.
But Lebedoff's theory of postwar electoral history is that backlash against the Arrogant Class is what turns elections . . . and that sometimes the persuadable electorate get more of those vibes from a Gerry Ford, a Newt Gingrich or a GHWB than they do from a Jimmy Carter or a Bill Clinton.
In my reading of the book it is miraculous that Lebedoff managed to write the whole thing with screaming,

"BUT OF COURSE A CLINTON OR A CARTER
OR A DUKAKIS OR A GORE OR A KERRY

WOULD HAVE A SNOWBALL'S CHANCE IN HELL
IF JOURNALISM WERE NOT THE ARCHETYPE OF THE "ELITE" CLASS."
David Lebedoff on why Kerry lost
Power - Line ^ | November 06, 2004 | David Lebedoff

even if the report were true, the magazine was highly irresponsible when it published the report. It could have only one effect: inflaming the wrath of hundreds of millions of Muslims against America.

If an American interrogator of Japanese prisoners desecrated the most sacred Japanese symbols during World War II, it is inconceivable that any American media would have published this information. While American news media were just as interested in scoops in 1944 as they are now, they also had a belief that when America was at war, publishing information injurious to America and especially to its troops was unthinkable.

This is not a particularly good example; a better one would be allegations of war crimes by Americans in WWII. And I cannot but think of the sacking of General Patton on grounds of slapping a couple of shellshocked American soldiers at a hospital. Reporters made that a cause, and got Patton taken out of the planned landing at Anzio. As a result the landing, which achieved surprise initally, was not pressed aggressively enough and instead of being a victory the operation was allowed to degenerate into a bloody stalemate costing 100,000 American lives - as much as the whole war in the Pacific consumed.

Such a value is not only not honored by today's news media, the opposite is more likely the case. The mainstream media oppose the war in Iraq and loathe the Bush administration. Whatever weakens the war effort and embarrasses the president raises a news source's prestige among its domestic, and especially foreign, peers.

I am put in mind of Michael Medved's point about Hollywood: Hollywood feigns cultural innocence on the one hand, and on the other hand it glories in making films hostile to American tradition and culture. Hollywood would rather give an Oscar to an R-rated flop than a G-rated profitable hit.
The obvious point of drawing that parallel is that "the media" - but not including "talk radio" and the Internet - promotes an external rationale and an internal rationale, and the two are different and inconsistent. The external rationale of journalism is "satisfaction of the public's right to know," and the external rationale of Hollywood is "satisfying the public demand for entertainment." But those turn out to be half-truths; "the public" doesn't have a "right to know," there is only a right of individuals to hold and promote their ideas, beliefs, and ideals without discrimination by the government.
And examples keep cropping up - CNN's "Tailwind" and its admittedly propagandistic coverage of Saddam's government, CBS News' use of obvious forgeries purporting to be TANG memos (and its earlier hit pieces on the US military in Vietnam), an intentionally sabotaged exploding truck gas tank in another famous network hit piece, you name it - that journalism "would rather climb a tree to tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth." That is what it means to "make a difference."
The Republican Party is slandered as "the party of the rich" but it is not really that; the Republican Party is the party of responsibility and of bottom lines. The rich (and, as Eliza Dolittle's father in My Fair Lady illustrates, also the poor) can in their own ways evade responsibility; it is the middle class which is driven by hope and fear to adhere to self discipline and the discipline of the bottom line. The Republican Party is the party of the military officer who must make life-or-death decisions in the fog of war, and of the entrepreneur and the small businessman - and of everyone who respects the discipline and value that such professions represent.
The Democratic Party is the party of the second guess, the party of symbolism over substance, the party of PR. It is the party of the natural allies of establishment journalism. And of those who, for whatever psychological or seemingly practical reason, are willing to be patronized by them.

Newsweek and the rioters - (of all world religions, only Muslims can riot without being criticized!) TOWNHALL.COM ^ | MAY 17, 2005 | DENNIS PRAGER">Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate

He certainly rips a strip off of Newsweak.

Yes, Rush was really on a roll yesterday! He came right to the edge of adopting the philosophy on Objective Journalism^TM which my #7 reflects, and which I've been developing since 9/11/01 in the ongoing thread,
Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate
The transcript referenced by this thread will become "subscription only" around 6PM today when today's transcript goes up, right? I read the whole transcript, and it was very good as spoken English but not tightly structured as written English. That's natural, that is life. In the same way that it's natural for FR postings to have typos in them sometimes, even tho we do edit them. It's informal. But I read the whole transcript, and it defied easy summarization.
In a different part of his program he referenced a NY Times writer (Friedman?) who said that the MSM had become a political party. And that is my take, exactly. It's not a problem that a given newspaper has a political perspective, that's what the First Amendment protects. And that is exactly what the founders of the Republic actually engaged in - Hamilton and Jefferson waged their political contests in newspapers which they sponsored. In a very real sense those newspapers were the vanguard of political parties (which the framers of the Constitution had actually hoped to avoid).
But, as I noted in #7, the reality today is that the MSM coheres as a single Establishment, and that is an unfair and virulently tendentious political party. That political party is the actual leadership of the Democratic Party. And that is the real Establishment - the one which put "protesters" on TV during Vietnam in order to mouth the ridiculous notion that "the Establishment" was something which opposed the MSM.
I sincerely hope that McCain-Feingold will prove to be the Gettysburg of the MSM, its high water mark. Feingold is unconstitutional, root and branch, and I hope that it will implode before the next election and be swept away, and perhaps most of the preexisting CFR legislation with it.
Newsweek Lies, Who Dies?( America's Anchorman)
Rush Limbaugh.com ^ | 5/17/05 | Rush Limbaugh

A worldwide campaign begun in 1988 to eradicate the polio infection was on the verge of success when, early in 2003, a conspiracy theory took hold of the Muslim population in northern Nigeria. That conspiracy theory has single-handedly returned polio to epidemic proportions. fear of polio vaccines caught on, explains a doctor with the World Health Organization, because of the war in Iraq. “If America is fighting people in the Middle East,” goes the Islamist logic, “the conclusion is that they are fighting Muslims.” Local imams repeated and spread the sterilization theory, which won wide acceptance despite vocal assurances to the contrary from the WHO, the Nigerian government, and many Nigerian doctors and scientists.
The polio-vaccine conspiracy theory has had direct consequences: sixteen countries where polio had been eradicated have in recent months reported outbreaks of the disease – twelve in Africa (Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Sudan, and Togo) and four in Asia (India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen). Yemen has had the largest polio outbreak, with more than 83 cases since April. The WHO calls this “a major epidemic.”
This is what a public-relations campaign can do to people. And not only to backward people in third-world countries. It can happen here. Only instead of parents not giving a vaccine, here we give Hillary control of the production of vaccine to make it cheap and plentiful. With the result that the vaccine becomes unavailable - until suddenly there's a glut of it, after people have been convinced that they won't bother trying to get it.
Daniel Pipes: A Muslim Conspiracy Theory Keeps Polio Alive
Frontpagemagazine ^ | 5-24-05 | Daniel Pipes

The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN. All hyped the startup, none featured the scandal of Air America.
Which is OK, under the First Amendment. But does the First Amendment apply?
What a silly question! Does the First Amendment apply to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Time? Certainly - at least to the extent that it is not subordinated to McCain Feingold.
What a silly question! Does the First Amendment apply to ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR? Not remotely. Those institutions exist only due to the sponsorship of the Federal Government in the form of exclusive licenses to "speak" at particular frequencies in particular locations. In principle Bill Gates could start a nationwide newspaper or magazine tomorrow, printing only his opinions - and the government has no authority to censor him. But unless the government favors him with a broadcast license, Bill Gates cannot so much as start a 10-watt college broadcast station.
But the hyping of the startup and the subsequent suppression of the funding scandal of the "liberal" Air America by all those journalism outlets clearly indicates that the political independence of The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Time, and ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and CNN - and Air America - is illusory.
Of course, The Rush Limbaugh Show doesn't even pretend to be anything other than conservative - what's the difference? From a philosophical perspective there is no difference between the open partisanship of Rush Limbaugh and that of Al Franken; both lay their cards on the table. And from the First Amendment perspective the print media are unambiguously free to be partisan - even to the extent of claiming that they are not partisan.
The egregious malfeasance lies in the fact of de facto government sponsorship of ABC, CBS, and NBC - and of the de jure government sponsorship of NPR - none of which are politically independent of Air America or of the Democratic Party. But all of which disingenuously claim full political independence. They perpetrate the fraud, that is, that a mere consensus of those whose business is attracting attention is "objectivity." In claiming objectivity, the propaganda organs are guilty of claiming the virtue of wisdom - and claiming virtue is arrogance.

Omitting Air America
Townhall ^ | August 17, 2005 | Brent Bozell

Mind-numbed Robot posts:

To: conservatism_IS_compassion

Interesting essay.
I suppose that truly free speech has no obligation to be true or objective. It is the moral and ethical purists who see journalists as reporters of truth and accurate information. Libel laws keep the media somewhat in bounds.
My fundamental point is that First Amendment journalism inherently tends toward superficiality, negativity, arrogance, and cowardice:

deadlines make journalism superficial, not only by forcing the journalist to finish under time pressure but by requiring the journalist to start writing under time pressure. Which means that the article may be about fluff in the first place.

negativity is natural to people; it takes work to put things in perspective instead of merely complaining.

as long as there is no true competition in ideas on the front pages of newspapers, newspapers can all claim the false "objectivity" of concensus with each other. The claim of objectivity, like the claim of any virtue, is arrogance.

but since that power position of being able to talk down to the rest of us depends on concensus, each individual journalist is intimidated by the collective. Therefore you need not expect courage from a journalist - only the claim of courage.

However, the public looks to the media for truth and depends on them to be honest and accurate. Pushing a particular political or moral philosophy is accepted as long as both sides are presented and so long as what is presented is accurate.
Unfortunately, being honest takes courage, and that is not common among journalists. In fact, if you are actually courageous you will be read out of journalism as "not objective." I mean by that, for example, that everyone in journalism must have known the reality that CNN could not have a Baghdad bureau without kowtowing to Saddam Hussain. A true, accurate, honest assessment would have told the public that CNN was flacking for a tyrant, as CNN's Eason Jordan ultimately admitted The News We (CNN) Kept To Ourselves [must read] after our coalition deposed said tyrant.
Yet no other journalism blew the whistle on CNN. Why? Either because they were all too stupid to know it - even though they know why they didn't have Baghdad bureaus - or they knew a significant derrogatory truth about CNN and withheld it from the public out of fear of the repercussions of criticizing someone else who "buys ink by the carload."
When that fails the public starts looking for alternatives. That is what gave birth to the internet and talk radio as popular purveyors of information.

News as entertainment? I disagree that that is the driving force for audiences. Complete truth and accuracy are what drive audiences for news.
Don't misunderstand when I call news "entertainment." I do not mean that the reader of the front page of the newspaper thinks he's reading the funnies; indeed, the reader of the front page thinks he is performing a civic duty by informing himself as a voter.
But what the reader thinks he is doing and what he is actually doing are two different things; the superficiality and negativity of journalism are there not to inform but to attract attention. What the reader is actually doing is satisfying (more or less idle) curiosity - and flattering himself that he is doing more than that.
That is why I say the MSM is moving ever so slightly toward a more balanced approach. They are losing their reason d'etre, money.

23 posted on 08/17/2005 11:10:37 PM EDT by Mind-numbed Robot (Not all that needs to be done needs to be done by the government.)

I like your tagline; my analysis of it is that leftists so habitually employ "society" or "public" as a euphemism for "government" that they are all like my uncle, and cannot tell you the difference in the meanings of the words. Thus the leftist will say, "society should" (e.g., provide vaccine for the children), and mean nothing other than that the governement should do it.
What is the difference between "society" and "government?" Nothing. Nothing but freedom, that is . . .
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1465165/posts?page=23#23

NEW YORK -- The four Democrats competing in next week's mayoral primary found themselves trying to explain in a debate seen live on NBC4 and WNBC.com . . .

. . . The hour-long debate did not allow for lengthy answers. The candidates were asked about education, affordable housing, terrorism, crime, race relations, gay marriage, unemployment and disaster preparedness and in most cases had just 30 seconds to respond . . .

You see, that is just the trouble. They have, understandably enough, four candidates to winnow down to one nominee - and they have no principled way to choose among them, since the one who polls the worst could in principle be the one who is the second choice of the all the voters in the primary. So what do they do? They run a "first past the pole" race with a runoff against "second past the pole" if the winner doesn't get 40% of the vote.
And how do they inform the public on the candidates and the issues? They broadcast a brief live, competitive joint TV ~~debate~~ press conference among the whole lot of them.

Let's just suppose that what they actually wanted to do was inform the public enough to get a good candidate for mayor. What would they do? IMHO they should:

conduct actual debates, without the presence of any "moderator" other than a chess timer to allocate equal time to the microphone of each participant in each debate.
Conduct the debates on radio, so that
- the facts and logic of the debaters are more important than their hairline or waistline, and
- cost considerations do not limit the number and duration of the debates unduly
allow candidates to use notes and/or laptop computers in the debates.
strictly limit the number of participants in each debate - preferably to two.
conduct enough debates to vet each candidate against each other candidate
make each debate long enough that the no candidate can hide their actual agenda

IMHO that process would seperate the wheat from the chaff - candidates who aren't ready for prime time would probably realize it by the time they got their clock cleaned by three different people in three seperate three-hour radio debates.
I thintk that method of debating in the general election would enable Republicans to blow Democrats away - Democrats depend so heavily on being protected by journalists (see Hillary Clinton, poster child).
Democrats Debate, Asked 'Why Is Bloomberg Popular?' (NY) WNBC Television ^ | 9/8/2005 | Puppage