This is just about the most long winded and pointless blow I’ve read in a while.
Longwinded, Im afraid youre right. And if it seemed pointless, I expect its length would contribute to its opacity. And it doesnt go from point A to point B as smoothly as Id like. Perhaps I can achieve a Cliff Notes version:
We all know the problem called bias in the media; what to do about it is the topic of this thread. TheZMan, perfectly on target IMHO, focuses on the bias in journalism, because you cant actually insist on neutrality in fictional storytelling without absurd censorship. IMHO. And we do not, as TheZMan emphasizes, wish to destroy the village in order to save it. We want to keep the First Amendment intact. Full stop.Im sorry, Im long again. We live in a world of Newspeak, not English, and that means that it is difficult to be clear and concise. You may have thought that you would get a flame war response to your criticism - but I want criticism. I want to clarify my understanding of this exact issue, and promote thought in others as well. And you at least responded.The overarching problem is how to constrain government to be small enough, and humble enough, to allow for the maximum freedom consistent with public order. It is human nature for the people in any organization to want to make that organization more important. This applies to government, and it applies to journalism. In American polity, it takes big journalism to enable and justify big government. The bigger (more unified) the journalism, the bigger it will enable and justify the government in becoming.
Historically our journalistic institutions were small, and they didnt agree on much of anything. There was freer ideological competition because the various journalistic institutions were independent. Then, along came the telegraph. The telegraph, and - hard on its heels - the Associated Press. The AP was aggressively monopolistic in nature - it cut exclusive deals with telegraph lines to preclude the existence of competitive wire services, and it insisted that journalists were objective.
Trying to be objective is of course a laudable pursuit. But ironically, when it comes to objectivity the situation is the opposite of what Star Wars Yoda declaimed. Yoda said, Do or do not. There is no try. The situation with objectivity is, Try, or try not - there is no do. Because you can never know that you have done it, that you have achieved full objectivity. Thus, when you claim to be objective, the claim denies itself - if you think you are objective, you do not understand yourself, and you are sure of something which is not true.
The result is that an organization which tries to - indeed, fabulously succeeds at - convincing the public that its reports are all objective not only is not actually objective but it is hypocritical about it. Logically, all objective reports would be non-contradictory, and the AP definitely achieves that. It achieves unity, but not objectivity. The unity it defaults to is, inevitably, self interest. Journalisms interest is in simultaneously being perceived as representing the public interest, and at the same time interesting the public. How many times have you heard a journalist claim that journalism is objective in reporting the sensational story because doing so "follows the rules - and yet those rules are designed to interest the public and have nothing to do with the public interest?
I am saying that journalism as such is inherently not conservative, even is inherently opposed to conservatism - and that is no cause for shame to conservatives. I am saying that you can hold the First Amendment as sacrosanct and still make a very legitimate case against the Associated Press. And when I say, Associated Press I do not merely mean the institution itself. I include in that, the members of the Associated Press. Membership in the AP corrupts the member news organization.
And I am saying that there are laws against that. Anti Trust Laws. Tort laws enabling civil suits against organizations conspiring against the rights of citizens to equality before the law. And there are laws which are unconstitutional because they conflict with equality under the law. McCain-Feingold, for example, abridges freedom of speech and press - unless of course you are a member of the AP. Journalistic shield laws give special rights to journalists.
I am saying that the FCC assigns a license to broadcast that you or I cant get, and assigns the licensee with fiduciary responsibility which is never enforced. And the standard for a homogenized journalism should be impossibly high, which is another way of saying that the AP must be broken up. It would take a civil suit, appealed to SCOTUS, to accomplish that.
I am saying that an objective journalism will always be an anti conservative journalism, and that a conservative voice must be an explicitly, and can be unapologetically, conservative.