Journalism and Objectivity

The MSM is not the propaganda wing of the Democrat Party.

The Democrat Party is the political wing of the MSM.

If you’ve been saying that for 5 years, it seems like we would have crossed paths before now. Very surprising that I don’t recognize your handle.
My daughter, as a young adult, was amazed to learn that I had listened to an “all news” radio station for years, because for all of her life she knew me to be treating news broadcasts as if they were advertisements for something I wouldn’t buy on a bet. Which is precisely what they are - and, knowing that, I quickly became bored with people breathlessly pointing out one more example illustrating the same twice-told tale.

So I began to analyze why journalism was so anti-conservative. My conclusion is that journalism is anti-conservative because journalists don’t do things, they only talk - and yet they want to be influential. So they promote the conceit that they are the only people you can trust, and they attack the reputation of anyone who provides food, clothing shelter, or security. And they give positive labels - any positive label except “objective,” which they reserve to themselves - to Democrats. And they give negative labels to Republicans, in proportion as Republicans defend the producers against the attacks of journalists and Democrats.
Rather than inveighing against “the media,” I prefer to focus exclusively on journalism because fiction, in whatever medium, would have to be censored in a most odious way to effect any change at all. Which is entirely unacceptable, so I prefer to let fiction pass without notice. Journalism, OTOH, is nonfiction, in fact presumes to be objective as well as true. It therefore is a far juicer target, and - were it brought to heel - would temper the leftist tendency of so much fictional entertainment.
But focusing on journalism, it seemed necessary to me to figure out why journalism has been so monochromatic over my lifetime, whereas I took it that journalism was far more variegated and idiosyncratic before the Civil War. When I saw the title of a book in the library, I was stunned at how obvious the reason actually was. In fact, it’s so easy to say it, that people don’t take my point seriously if I just blurt it out. The title of the book was, “Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails, and the reason I sought was the telegraph. The telegraph, and the wire service - chiefly the Associated Press.
Why should the AP give journalism a single, leftist slant? Adam Smith explains:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Wealth of nations, Book I, Ch 10
And the member newspapers of the AP have been in a continuous virtual “meeting” - not for “merriment or diversion, but specifically about business - ever since the middle of the Nineteenth Century. In consequence of which, journalism has been a conspiracy against the public since the memory of living man runneth not to the contrary. The sordid story of the development of the Associated Press is discussed in the following book:

News Over the Wires:
The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897
by Menahem Blondheim
Within the chalk lines of their respective stadiums (sp), the Yankees and the Red Sox are fierce competitors. But they are also fellow members of Major League Baseball, and they cooperate in hiring umpires and in much else. Just so, all journalism outlets compete, and yet there are boundaries to their competition. Most notable is the taboo against questioning the objectivity of a fellow journalist. Which means that a Dan Rather can go on a jihad against a GW Bush, airing fraudulent “Texas Air National Guard Memos,” secure in the expectation that the rest of journalism would abstain from questioning his objectivity no matter how damning the evidence might be.
Presumptive objectivity, whether of journalists or anyone else, is oxymoronic in nature. It is possible and admirable for a person to attempt objectivity by scrutinizing his own motives and interests as they may relate, however tangentially, to the subject about which he is writing. But it is inherently impossible for that same person to know that he has achieved objectivity. That being the case, it is the height of arrogance for any person to join an organization which claims objectivity for all its members. While you are claiming objectivity (or suffering others to claim it for you) you are not subjecting your own possible biases to scrutiny, for you have prejudged the result of that “scrutiny.” And if you aren’t doing that, you aren’t actually trying to be objective, whatever window dressing you may employ to obscure that fact. You can give “both sides of the story” - but without examining how your own incentives relate to your understanding of the topic you cannot actually give a full account of whatever side you disagree with - because in your heart of hearts, you don’t actually believe that there actually are two sides to the story.

I’ll see your five years, and raise you six:
Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate
Journalism and Objectivity
The Real Enemy
American Thinker ^ | October 1, 2012 | Bruce Walker

George Stephanopolous of ABC News used to be a strategist for Bill Clinton and even after becoming Chief Washington Correspondent still engaged in regular conversations with Rahm Emanuel, James Carville, and Paul Begala from the Clinton days. (Ironic, isn’t it, that John Harris wrote that story)
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-sheffield/2012/10/10/vp-debate-moderator-martha-raddatz-friends-obama-wedding#ixzz28taWWfqY
Journalism has a perspective. Journalism’s interest lies in promoting itself at the expense of the people who work to a bottom line - those upon whom we depend, not for mere talk, but for food, clothing, shelter, security, fuel, etc. Those people are "the man who is actually in the arena,” and journalists are merely critics. So why do journalists cozy up to “liberal” politicians? The question answers itself - socialism is nothing other than the political expression of the sentiments which journalists are inherently motivated to promote.
Whoever signs up to be a “liberal” is cozying up to journalism. And is rewarded with positive labels such as “moderate,” “centrist,” “progressive,” or “liberal.” All of which belong in scare quotes, because what a journalist calls “liberal” has nothing to do with promoting liberty, what the journalist calls “progressive” has nothing to do with progress (at least, not progress of, by, and for the people, as the Constitution contemplates) and so on. All those labels are mere euphemisms for socialist. The only positive label journalists do not assign to socialists is “objective.” That label they reserve to themselves. But it is a distinction without a difference, as the above description of George Stephanopolous amply illustrates. It is only a question of what hat a particular socialist happens to wear. And of course “objective” belongs in scare quotes, because in the nature of things no one can know that he or she is actually objective.
A diligent effort to attempt to be objective is of course laudable - but then, any actual effort to attempt objectivity must begin with openness about one’s own motives and interests. And discussion of journalists’ motives - to interest the public and to promote themselves - is politically incorrect, and taboo. It follows that a journalism which calls itself “objective” is anything but objective about itself. There is no reason in logic why I should accept journalism’s self-hype about “objectivity.”
The alert reader may object that I have spoken of journalism in the singular, and take no account of diversity of journalism outlets, and of the (very few) newspapers with conservative (in American political context, a negative label) editorial pages. My answer to that is that

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Wealth of nations, Book I, Ch 10
And all major news outlets belong to wire services, principally the Associated Press. The newswire represents a virtual “meeting” of all major journalism outlets - one which has been running continuously since the Civil War era. I do not pretend that all newspapers express the exact same attitude on their editorial pages - but on the front page and the body of the paper, they do. And they call their uniform and politically correct slant “objective."
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2942683/posts

Anyone have a link to a good, short article that explains why communism is bad? I’d like to give it to come college students who have spent most of their education being brainwashed by idiot leftists.

Obviously people who have been "brainwashed” cannot be convinced by a short article. FA Hayek wrote his classic refutation of socialism/communism during WWII, and it was a sensation in America (Hayek wrote in Britain) when The Road to Serfdom
(Link to the Readers' Digest Condensed Version in PDF!) was published while Hayek was sailing to America for what had been expected to be a routine author’s tour promoting his book - but which played to overflow audiences everywhere.
Serfdom is filled with topical references to people who were famous at the time but are now little remembered - but you could focus on the chapter entitled (IIRC) “Why the Worst Get on Top.” It treats a fundamental fallacy of Communism - the bland assumption that a dictatorial government will naturally be run by well-meaning people. The Black Book of Communism - Crimes, Terror, Repression is a validation of Hayek’s thesis on this point.
The Wikipedia link above also mentions the similarity of Communism and Naziism; Serfdom hammers the similarities, and discusses the nuances of difference, heavily. Writing before the death camps were public knowledge, Hayek predicted, on the basis of the public knowledge of the Gulag (as Solzenitsen later styled it), that revolting systematic crimes by the Nazis would be come to light.

Of course propaganda is central to communism and other forms of socialism, including our own “democracy” in which shocking portions of the public at large can be systematically diverted from significant facts about the government, and can be convinced of fantastic improbabilities like the idea that Mitt Romney is a criminal. My own theory on the “brainwashed” problem is that our journalism is propagandistic because it can be, no other explanation is necessary. Why wouldn’t it be, if it had opportunity? And my theory on the reason journalism has the opportunity is because journalism is unified. Journalism it is unified because
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book I, Ch 10
And of all people, journalists “meet together,” at least virtually, more than anyone. The Associated Press newswire is nothing but a continuous, 24/7 virtual meeting which determines what is, and what is not, news.
IMHO propaganda always has to begin with sophistry. The term “sophistry” comes from the Greek word “Sophist” denoting a party which claimed superior wisdom. Such a claim leads to very short, very unsatisfying arguments: I am wise, you are not. Therefore I am right, and you are wrong.” Claiming wisdom came into very bad odor on that account. The school which rose up in competition with the Sophists was the Philosophers. Philosophers eschewed a claim of wisdom, but claimed only to love wisdom - thus, to be open to arguments based on facts and logic. AP members claim “objectivity” for all AP members - and IMHO “objectivity,” as they use the term, is merely code for the Sophists’ claim of “wisdom.” Another way of saying that is to assert that it is inherently impossible to know that you are objective, and that anyone who claims actual objectivity - instead of having the humility to limit oneself to claiming to try to be objective - is guilty of arrogance. And a claim of trying to be objective must be backed up by explicit admission of the known reasons why you might not be objective. Sincere admission of the possibility of failure in the quest for objectivity, of course, is logically incompatible with membership in an organization - Associated Press, exhibit A - which you know will claim that you actually are objective.
Why is journalism’s propaganda leftist? My theory is that the internal logic of any institution which does nothing except criticize, condemn, and complain is and can only be socialism. Socialism is simply the theory that the complainers should be in charge. Whereas capitalism takes for granted that people should have authority only to the extent that they get things done of, by, and for the people.
The word “progress” appears once in the Constitution - as a good to be promoted, and in the context of creativity of the people, not politicians. One of the ironies of “progressives” is that they oppose progress. Drill for oil? It is “progressives” who will oppose it, and “conservatives” who will support it. Which only tells you that our political labels are Newspeak. As does the fact that the meaning of the term “liberal” was (according to Safire’s New Political Dictionary) inverted in the 1920s - but only in America. Note that Serfdom was written in Britain, by someone who learned English in America before the 1920s. He uses the term “liberal” heavily in the book, and in its non-inverted sense. It is a confusion factor which he acknowledges with sorrow in a later edition.

Note that this copy of the original has the correct current (as of this date) link to the condensed version of Serfdom. The (now broken) link I originally used came from this old FR thread I had authored years ago announcing my delighted discovery of the PDF of that famous version of the classic.

The uncondensed version has seen multiple printings, including a 50th anniversary edition and multiple translations. Yet more people read that Readers Digest version, which came out near the end of WWII, than have read the original. Of course the Readers Digest magazine has been around a long time, and has AFAIK had a condensed book in every edition, all of the other books were the last thing in the magazine. Serfdom was the only condensed book which the editors ever featured by starting the magazine with it.

I think he’s right, but one of the real difficulties is that one party now profits of this mindset and does not want blacks to change and get ahead.

Bad enough, it were only the official Democrat Party. The lynchpin, we all know, is “bias in the media.” The unofficial Demo Party. We must set “the media” back. I have a concept for doing it, but it would obviously take some heavy lifting to make any headway with it. We have to understand that:

Granted that fictional TV and Movie entertainment is slanted strongly to the left, on First Amendment principle we should direct no legal effort against it.

We have to do only with nonfiction “media,” and even then, books and documentaries are not the real problem. The real problem, bluntly, is journalism. “Objective” journalism which is anything but objective.

Before the middle of the Nineteenth Century, journalism was very different. Newspapers had postal subsidies to facilitate the interchange of news among themselves, but otherwise they were relatively insular, weekly or even sporadic, and in short were more about the slant of the printer than about current events - IOW, more like talk radio than like The New York Times. Then, “journalism” was not a unified entity. Now it is.

The reason for the unification of journalism is staring us in the face - it is the telegraph. The telegraph, and its natural offspring, the wire service. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Associated Press. Editors routinely print major stories now without ever having met, much less vetted and hired, the stories’ writers. In order to vouch for those reports, the editor has no choice but to sell the line that “all journalists are objective.” So much for ideological diversity in reporting.

The homogenization of journalism reduces the perspective of all journalism down to its elemental nature - people who want to be influential through mere talk, without having and meeting the responsibilities entailed in actually doing important things. If you want to make your way by criticizing those who perform to a bottom line without taking responsibility for making and implementing decisions on a timely basis, you are a leftist. And that is what journalism is. But journalism insists that it is objective, just as it insists that those politicians who go along and get along with journalism are virtuous “liberals” or “moderates” or “progressives.” Any positive label, IOW, except “objective.”

The claim of journalistic objectivity is actually an oxymoron, since no one can know that he is himself objective - and since therefore a claim of one’s own objectivity is arrogant and cannot be objective. Anyone who is actually trying to be objective must be open about possible reasons why he might not be objective - which expressing a belief in own’s own objectivity obviously moots. And this objection pertains equally to belonging to an organization, such as the AP, which you know claims objectivity for you.
In light of these facts, the AP is vulnerable to being held in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and the FCC and its licensees are vulnerable to being sued for licensing broadcasters on the basis that pseudo-objective journalism is “in the public interest."
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2961325/posts?page=9

There is a third issue without which the first two mentioned here could not have happened:the lack of a free press.

We actually have a free press. That’s actually the problem. What we need are free and independent presses. And that, we do not have.
Journalism consisted of many independent presses in the founding era, and up to the Civil War. By 1900, that was pretty much a thing of the past. The only question I for a long time had was why. I thought it might be the high speed press, but that really didn’t explain it. But one technology does: the telegraph. The telegraph, and the Associated Press.
The Associated Press was founded in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, and it did what suited its business model - it sold access, called membership, to its newswire to printers who needed to be able to compete on the basis of providing current information from distant places (including Washington, D.C.). And the member newspapers supplied their local copy to the rest of the net. Reporters, already eager to be published, were doubly eager to be published nationwide. It was win-win for the newspapers and the AP. For the news business, nirvana had arrived.
But the AP membership cost money, and to justify the expense the editor had to be able to sell a lot of that newly-available copy to readers. Problem was, how does an editor justify to readers that the news from the wire is reliable? The editor doesn’t know, hasn’t even met, and certainly never vetted and hired, the reporter who wrote that article about what happened in Cleveland. So how can that editor promote the reliability of that copy? The AP had the answer - sell the idea that all journalists are objective. Of course if you engage in some philosophy and logic, you might find the skunk in that woodpile - the fact that although anyone can try to be objective, no one can know that they are objective.
In order to seriously attempt to be objective, you must be open about the reasons why you might not be objective. In the case of journalists, that would include the fact that their need for attention is a motive to exaggerate the significance of any report they make, and the fact that they report on things which happened very recently is a motive to denigrate the significance of things which do not change quickly. Which leads to a temptation to exaggerate the importance of mere novelty. But of course, even as admitting that you are subject to all those temptations makes you more objective, it makes you appear to be less objective. And since journalists are in the PR game, the choice between substance and appearance is no choice at all. Appearance is what matters to people in the PR business, and appearance is what journalists go for.
Claiming objectivity - or even merely belonging to an organization which claims objectivity for its members - is entirely inconsistent with openness about any motives which might interfere with objectivity, and therefore is inconsistent with a serious attempt at objectivity. Thus we see that journalists working for members of the Associated Press are not even trying to be objective. They may claim to “give both sides of the story” - but if they believe that they actually are objective, they do not seriously believe that there actually might be another side to the story than the one that they identify with. So their description of the other side is practically certain to be a straw man.

Journalists claim not to be “liberal” - but given the fact that journalists are critics rather than actors performing to a bottom line, they are inherently simpatico with socialist politicians who also are mere critics. Critics who, if given power, cannot function as effective executives and so obtain terrible results - but who are great at excuses and demands to be judged only on their self-proclaimed “good intentions." So journalists assign positive labels such as “progressive" to socialists, and negative labels such as “conservative” to their opponents. Socialists have no principle above getting good PR for themselves, and journalists have no principle against giving good PR to people who go along and get along with journalists. So they exist in symbiosis, de facto if not de jury as a single organism.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2962783/posts?page=37#37

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H. L. Mencken
The whole aim of journalism is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be further warned of danger) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Amazing how those things coincide, isn’t it!!
The interesting thing, though, is to observe that it is only socialist politics, and not so-called “conservative, right wing” politics which is promoted by journalism institutionally and which has a revolving door relationship with journalism. There is no example of a “conservative” political activist ever having obtained a job as an “objective” journalist. George Stephanopolous is a working journalist in good standing, but he has not changed a bit from when he was a Clinton political hack.
So when Mencken spoke of “the whole aim of practical politics” being to alarm the public with imaginary hobgoblins, he was either being cynical, or he meant that politics aligned with the interests of so-called “objective” journalism was and is the only kind of politics which is practical. And after this last election, who can dispute the latter interpretation?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2962914/posts?page=31#31

"Repugnant and cowardly?"

Why that’s a perfect description of our Kenyan in chief, now isn’t it?

It’s also, by no coincidence, a perfect description of the “Wolf!” crying industry that is wire service journalism, known under the alias “mainstream media.” Just as “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” to a reporter every sheep looks like a wolf. In fact, calling journalism "the ‘Wolf!" crying industry” understates the case, because of journalism’s “‘Man Bites Dog,’ not ‘Dog Bites Man’” rule, which expresses journalism's preference for the unusual/atypical.
Under that principle, journalism would rather decry a “wolf” which is apparently actually a sheep than to report the presence of a an actual menace. A phenomenon which is on full display in the persecution of George Zimmerman, as it was in the case of the transparent Duke Lacrosse “rape” hoax. Even as, today, the “evil” we are told to hate are the hundreds of millions of insurance policies against violence known as privately owned guns.

And then we wonder why journalists are “in the pocket of” Democrats - for them both, every tragic aspect of the human condition is a “problem” to be “solved” by a Gordian knot cutting “solution” portending worse misery than the original complaint. Democrats have no principle other than going along and getting along journalists. "Surprise, surprise,” journalists promote Democrats and give them positive labels - they started calling Democrats “liberal” in the 1920s, when “liberal” was what all traditional Americans understood themselves to be - and what socialists will never be. Before that, socialists were called “progressive,” because progress of, by, and for the American people is the pride of the success of “the American experiment.” Journalists also call socialists “moderate” or “centrist,” too - and moderation is classical virtue.
It’s why “liberalism” is, as Rush puts it, “a gutless choice.” Repugnant and cowardly.

The one thing that really bugs me about McCarthy is how he made the case for George Marshall as an objective communist, if not a paid agent. And I don’t even particularly like Marshall. Butchers made a similar claim with Eisenhower, and it’s stuff like that which forever marginalizes them.

If you read Ann Coulter’s Treason you will see that our journalists - who were “objective” even back then - systematically ridiculed and distorted McCarthy’s views and statements, putting him in “heads you lose, tails I win” situations. They demanded that he name names, when all he had said was that there was reason to investigate to learn names, if any - and then if he did name a name, they condemned him for smearing the person named. When in fact the name corresponded, history shows, with an actual communist.
I don’t pretend to know the details of what you are referring to - but the odds are long that McCarthy had a legitimate, if too nuanced for him to be able to burn through the fog of journalistic obfuscation, point.
I put “objective” in scare quotes above. To me, the most powerful case against “objective journalism” is to be found precisely in their claim to be objective. Because, in the nature of things, it is impossible for anyone to know that they themselves are objective. So if you say you are objective, that just proves - conclusively - that you are not objective about yourself. Which is to say, you are not objective about anything.
It is of course possible, and laudable, to attempt objectivity. It even is legitimate to say that you are trying to be objective (if in fact you are). The catch, for the “objective” journalist, is that any good-faith attempt at objectivity must start with self-examination, and an open discussion of any reasons you can think of why you might not be objective. Which is, of course, precisely the opposite of claiming actually to be objective.
I’m sure that some people claimed to be objective - just as the Sophists of ancient Greece claimed to be wise - before the advent of the Associated Press. But the AP institutionalized the claim of actual objectivity in the late Nineteenth Century in response to the alarms which were raised about the concentration of propaganda power which the Associated Press represented. The AP justified that claim on the basis that it was composed of dozens (at the time) of newspapers which individually were notorious at the time for not agreeing about much of anything (source: News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897 by Menahem Blondheim).
It has been an unspoken premise of membership in good standing within the AP, including within any newspaper which belongs to the AP, ever since. If you go to work as a journalist you are signing on to the premise that you will claim that every other journalist is objective - and that you expect every other journalist to claim that you are objective. Thus, by becoming a journalist for the AP or one of its member outlets, you are de facto claiming that you are objective. Which excludes having the humility to admit to any subjective impulses.
And that implies that you are not even trying to be objective. Oh, you will go along with the “rules for objectivity” such as “giving both sides of the story” - but the trouble is that you have already ruled out the possibility that there actually are valid perspectives other than your own. So even if you “tell the other side of the story" until the cows come home, the version of the “other side of the story" which you tell will always be a straw man. Anyone who considers himself to be the arbiter of what is objective will be extremely subjective.
Journalists systematically agree with “liberals” for the simple reason that “liberals” have the same motive that “objective” journalists do - namely, to get attention and credit for importance, without having to actually work, and without the constraints of a bottom line. “Liberal” politicians and “objective” journalists profit from their symbiotic relationship. “Objective” journalists and “liberals” cooperate in finding ways to embarrass people who are trying to gain their sense of importance by actually doing needed things.
http://www.robertmundell.net/NobelLecture/nobel3.asp
Jhttp://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2983733/posts?page=5

There is one “network” which is the sine qua non of the others. It is the “objective” journalism network. The linchpin of that network, the thing which made it a network, is the Associated (telling word) Press.
Journalism was an entirely different animal before the advent of the telegraph and the AP in the mid-Nineteenth Century era. Before the AP, each newspaper was primarily about the opinions of its printer, much as the EIB is about the opinions of Rush Limbaugh. A cause, and an effect, of the lack of news sources which the public did not in principle have access to was that newspapers were mostly weeklies.
With the advent of the AP, newspaper reporters might work for, say, the LA Times - but they write for the AP as their hoped-for audience. The upshot is that the AP “wire” is a continuous virtual “meeting” of all the major journalism outlets. And Adam Smith told us what to expect from that:
"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices."
The AP, and all “objective” members thereof, constitute a conspiracy against the middle class. That conspiracy attacks the middle class for the simple reason that that is where the competition is: that is where things get done, and that is who tends to get the credit for getting things done. And it is precisely the desire for the credit for all the good things getting done which journalism lusts after. Journalism applies whatever labels it thinks are positive - e.g., “liberal,” “progressive,” “moderate,” “centrist” - to politicians who put PR above all else, and who therefore cooperate continuously with “objective” journalism.
“Objective” belongs squarely in scare quotes for the simple reason that while it is possible, and creditable, to attempt objectivity, anyone who claims to actually be objective is not objective about himself - or much of anything else, in reality.
You are more correct than you know. In a previous life, I was a journalism major and saw these people in their formative stage. To say that they were lazy and arrogant would be an understatement. There is a reason that they hate Sarah Palin with such an intensity and it has even more to do with her intimate knowledge of their profession than her core value conservatism.
But these people don't only go into journalism; they are a major source of new state department hires. The revolving door between journalism and government is legendary. What other two professions share such a common contempt for traditional American values while hypocritically posing as the neutral arbitrators for all that is just and fair?
People like George Stephanopolus are not the exception; they are the rule. We simply do not hear about most of them because they have much lower profile jobs in media and government.
18 posted on February 22, 2013 2:07:10 PM EST by Vigilanteman
Ping to a thread you may find of some small interest.

no one in the GOP will stand up to MSM slander.

That’s why I suggest a civil action, not depending on a Karl Rove to give a President Bush a spine and get him to use the Justice Dept. And I don’t suggest that the Republican Party do it, either - they never will. The plaintiff needs to be the class of people who wish the Republicans were their defenders because we know that the Democrats and the journalists with whom the Democrats exist in symbiosis, are systematically abusing us.
So, say I, we go to court alleging that:

”journalism” functions as a single entity, because of the unifying effect of the continuous contact among journalism institutions which is the purpose of the AP. Those institutions, and the reporters and editors who work for them, conspire against the public precisely as Adam Smith could have predicted.

This conspiracy against the public manifests itself in the promotion of propaganda to the effect that journalists can, indeed must, be trusted implicitly as the “first draft of history," and

This conspiracy against the public manifests itself in the promotion of propaganda to the effect that they, and “liberals” who go along and get along with them, are the only ones who can be trusted at all. This manifests itself in the systematic slander of people we count on to get things like production and distribution of goods and services done, and indeed of anyone who does not go along to get along with that conspiracy - or who simply are convenient targets to pick on. Examples, being legion, include but are far from limited to the AGW hoax, and other alarmism including the Alar “poisoned apple” scare, just about every artificial sweetener scare, overhyped oil spill scares, the fraudulent "Texas Air National Guard memos,” the smear of the SBVT, the “government outting of Valerie Plame” hoax, the promotion of the Nifonging of the Duke Lacrosse team, the smearing of Joe the Plumber, witch hunting through Sarah Palin’s emails, etc, etc. Including everything in Ann Coulter’s Slander and a great deal of Thomas Sowell’s writing.

The AP and all other wire services have the same unifying effect on journalism, and what little competition they have among themselves does not mitigate the fact that ideological competition among them is essentially completely suppressed. The members of those services individually cooperate through the mechanism of the wire services, and each, tacitly or openly, claim that all are objective.

The FCC promotes broadcast journalism, placing its imprimatur on the so-called objectivity of that journalism conspiracy, and assisting journalism’s promotion of paranoia among the public by the implication that the public should be paying attention to journalism’s reports every waking hour. And accepting at face value claims that journalism is objective, when it is merely unified in promoting its own interest at the expense of the public - and in particular the plaintiffs’ - good.

Plaintiffs demand restitution for damages in the amount of the cost of enough advertising to counterbalance the dolorous impact of the aforementioned fraud on reputations, great and small, over the history back to any applicable Statute of Limitations. And plaintiffs demand triple damages under RICO because of the extent, duration, and damage to the public and to the reputation of the Republic caused by this vast conspiracy. In the era of satellite, microwave, and laser/fiber optic communication, the justification of the wire services’ “association” of nominally independent presses - the conservation of communications bandwidth - is an anachronistic issue. And the claim of objectivity, being functionally equivalent to a claim of wisdom, is and always was sophistry and must be expunged from all communication which has the imprimatur of the government. Open advocacy is legitimate, but fraudulent self-promotion must be something which is disinfected with maximum daylight. The government must not in any active or passive way suggest or insinuate otherwise.

It’s hard to blame politicians. They can’t help themselves; they can’t let a good crisis go to waste. But we ought to be able to expect a little more from our media – something a little closer to real life than the political agenda of far-left members of Congress.

The voice of the low information voter. I’m serious. Here is this guy, he knows the score, but he cannot connect the dots. For those of you keeping score, the dots are as follows:

The First Amendment does not require journalists to be objective. The words “objective” or “fair” appear nowhere in the Constitution.

To the contrary, the First Amendment limits the ability of the government to regulate journalists (it does not completely eliminate that ability, unless you think that enforcing laws against libel is unconstitutional).

It is impossible to require that the news be balanced; nobody would have the time or patience for truly comprehensive journalism. Anyway, if you emphasize everything, you actually do not emphasize anything.

It follows that the First Amendment protects a journalist who commits politics. Nobody should be surprised when that actually happens. But there is no reason to expect that a journalist who commits politics will always, or even ever, explicitly admit that that is what s/he is doing. In the present instance, journalism has been committing politics by saying nothing about a case which, were slight details changed, would be an enormous dustup.

There is such a thing as “national” journalism because there are wire services. But “national” journalism based on wire services is homogenous journalism. The primary wire service in America is the Associated Press. Note well the term, “Associated.” The members of the AP are not independent.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Book I, Ch 10)

The AP newswire is a virtual meeting of all major American journalism institutions. Therefore AP journalism is, after a century and a half of continual “meeting,” little else but " a conspiracy against the public.”

AP journalism promotes AP journalism, labeling itself “objective” and libeling anyone who threatens journalism’s self-image by earning a good public opinion by actually doing things which the public needs. Journalism is criticism and second guessing. Journalism assigns positive labels to those who join in their criticism of those who accomplish things, and negative labels to those who defend them.

That is why AP journalism is inherently anti conservative.

My perspective: left/right orientation is strongly correlated with population density where someone grew up. The countryside produces humble self-reliant people, the city produces vain/envious government-reliant people. Demographics do not matter, the city creates leftists out of any demographic.

In the countryside it can normally take a government police car, fire truck, ambulance a hour to show up, so people live largely on their own and fend for themselves, while response times in the city can be minutes. In the country if someone buys a brand new tractor or builds a big new barn, it's mostly out of sight and out of mind of their neighbors, while in a city if someone buys a new SUV or builds a McMansion the neighbors go bonkers with envy seeing it every day

In the old days newspapers were balanced because America's population density was less. You can read very old New York Times articles at their archive and they are amazingly balanced. Today they are over the top leftist. What changed? The city grew until all newspaper workers within commute distance grew up in high population density. They couldn't hire a balanced newsroom if they wanted to.

Today most news is produced by city slickers, so the news has a heavy leftist bias. The internet though is a game changer. Cities no longer serve as the information hubs they once were. News can be gathered and distributed from anywhere now, and more cheaply so away from high density population centers. Conservatives need to build news businesses outside of the cities and out compete the vain urbanites.

You can read very old New York Times articles at their archive and they are amazingly balanced.

When you say, “very old,” I assume you mean “very, very, old.” Per Wikipedia:
In 1896, Adolph Ochs bought the New York Times, a money-losing newspaper, and formed the New York Times Company. The Ochs-Sulzberger family, one of the United States' newspaper dynasties, has owned The New York Times ever since. . . .
The Times has been criticized for reporter Walter Duranty's, who served as its Moscow bureau chief from 1922 through 1936, series of stories written in 1931 on the Soviet Union. Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his work at that time, however he has been criticized for his denial of widespread famine, most particularly the Ukraine famine in the 1930s. In 2003, after the Pulitzer Board began a renewed inquiry, the Times hired Mark von Hagen, professor of Russian history at Columbia University, to review Duranty's work. Von Hagen found Duranty's reports to be unbalanced and uncritical, and that they far too often gave voice to Stalinist propaganda. In comments to the press he stated, "For the sake of The New York Times' honor, they should take the prize away."

Von Hagen found Duranty's reports to be unbalanced and uncritical, and that they far too often gave voice to Stalinist propaganda.

Von Hagen would find the whole paper that way now.

You are far more optimistic than I; the NYT never did renounce Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize, and they undoubtedly influenced the selection of the person who critiqued him in this instance. So I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Van Hagen to denounce the whole paper root and branch. If Van Hagen did in the historical case, it is only because the evidence is excruciatingly plain that Duranty was a flak for Stalin. And only after a generations-long effort by “conservatives” (scare quotes because “conservative” is intended by journalism as a hostile label for those of us who believe in liberty and progress, unlike “liberals” or “progressives”) to call the Times to account for Duranty’s fraud.
Of course, the evidence is there to critique the Times now, too - but the entire weight of the Associated Press and each and every individual member thereof is against any attempt to generalize. Just as, when I demonstrated a trick with matches that Dad didn’t like, he snorted, “Once in a million” to my rebuttal that the trick had worked. I repeated the trick, and he replied, “Twice in two million!”
. . . . . . . .
I read that old article you posted the link to. Cute. Quaint. It would never pass the Associated Press Style Guide criteria now. That’s the thing about the Associated Press - they change the public discourse with their rules on what can be said how, and they do it in broad daylight. They have been colluding so continually for so long that they actually have no shame over the fact that there is no intellectual competition within journalism. None. They are a herd. Precisely as you would predict if you read
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Book I, Ch 10)

The AP has always been aggressively monopolistic, but my brief is lot limited to the AP but extends to wire services in general. There could be a dozen wire services and they would all tend to homogenize journalism, because they would all have the same incentives and the same mechanism. “The medium is the message.” The FCC even has the same effect, because it respects the ersatz “objectivity” of the wire services and calls parroting it “in the public interest.”
Our only hope, dim as it is, is to sue the AP and its members individually for monopoly. And most of all, we should sue the FCC because it cultivates the broadcasting of journalism - without which we wouldn’t have had timely information about 911 and, well, 911. It is ridiculous paranoia to suppose that it is worthwhile to try to keep up continually with the news, when in fact the news is a bias in and of itself.

At the time the Bill of Rights was verified, journalists were not credentialed in any serious way. - FredZarguna

They aren’t now, either. They have “Codes of Ethics,” it’s true - but they claim to be objective. Now claiming to try to be objective is entirely unobjectionable, even laudable if it is sincere. But claiming actually to be objective is sophistry. Why? Because “sophistry” comes from the term “Sophist” - Greek for “wise man.” The Ancient Sophists used claims of their own superior wisdom to suppress debate. Debates are pretty unsatisfactory if they go, “I am wise and you are not. Therefore I am right and you are wrong.” The classical response to this line of “argument” was to claim to love wisdom but to eschew claiming actually to be wise. That’s the source of the term “philosopher” - philo = "lover of," sophy = “wisdom."
The philosopher did not claim wisdom, only to love wisdom - accepting the existence of truth, and seeking after it. That is, the philosopher’s position was, “Spare me the ad hominem attacks and the arrogance, and let’s get down to the facts and logic as they relate to the issue at hand.” And that is the appropriate response to the journalist’s claim of objectivity, which is intended to suppress your willingness and ability to stand up for the truth when the journalist is (whether by commission or by omission). lying.
De facto, a claim of objectivity is no different from a claim of wisdom. Either one constitutes sophistry.

There is no such thing as a low risk, high reward strategy for a politician - except to be a “liberal." The reason for that is simple; there is a notional distinction only, and no difference, between a “liberal” and an “objective” journalist. Journalism is criticism; journalists never are responsible for getting anything done, all they do is report what went wrong when others had authority. Consequently journalists are the natural political enemies of the people who actually try to do things.
And journalists are the natural allies of anyone else whose forte is criticism. Therefore journalists assign to their fellow critics positive labels such as “moderate,” “progressive,” or “liberal” - labels which are actually descriptive of those whom they malign as “conservative”).
All major journalism outlets have behaved in this manner ever since the advent of the Associated Press in the mid-to-late Nineteenth Century. The wire services in general, and the AP in particular, transformed Nineteenth Century journalism from a cacophony of independent political voices into a politically homogenous left-wing institution. Which it has been, since memory of living man runneth not to the contrary.

If ANY part of the Federal government gets involved, that's a direct violation of the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment.

The fundamental issue is not freedom of speech - nobody, yet, is talking about censoring Rush’s speech, only his ability to broadcast it. And most people - even conservatives on SCOTUS - don’t have a handle on the difference, calling money “speech.” But the real deal is that

While it costs nothing to flap your gums, nobody who isn’t allowed to spend money on paper, ink, and printing presses has freedom of the press.

Of course, broadcast/cable/satellite transmission is not a literal printing press - but the Constitution explicitly authorizes Congress to create the Patent Office " To promote the progress of science and useful arts.”
Since broadcast/cable/satellite communication is clearly an enhanced capability of doing what the printing press does, it is unconstitutional to regulate the expenditure of money to communicate opinions - whether religious, political, or other.

The First Amendment is not only an explicit bar to some government regulation, but is suggestive of the rights of freedom of communication in media perhaps not imagined when the First Amendment was proposed. The Ninth Amendment invalidates the idea that the First Amendment limits the rights of the people in any way whatsoever.

But apart from the First Amendment strictures against censorship, there lies its stricture against an establishment of religion, and thus of a government-sanctioned official priesthood. In coordination with the Constitution’s strictures against titles of nobility, those strictures rule out constitutionally sanctioned special communication rights for special people. This is the actual crux of our censorship issues.

There is not much tendency for the government to censor Establishment wire service journalism, for the simple reason that journalism and the Democratic Party are in cahoots and will scratch each others’ back on any occasion. Rather, the tendency is precisely the opposite - Democrat and Journalist promotion of censorship of the right of the people at large, apart from the journalism monopoly, to freedom to publicize their opinions without being members of the Associated Press.

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