Posted on 09/14/2001 7:02:19 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
As it is today (as it's always been) employees are loyal to the muckety-muck who signs the paycheck...they tow the company line or else lose that high-priced, high profile status; as well as those coveted "press credentials" and any semblance of prior access.
Of course, today (with all the mainsteam media mergers) those who sign the paychecks are an increasingly small, powerful cabal of men on the mountain who can dictate what they deem as newsworthy topics. Reporters and reporterettes (for lack of a more descriptive adjective) prostitute themselves for the check signer in leiu of objectivity, unbiased content and newsworthiness.
To put this into context, Thomas Jefferson referred to the running of a newspaper in 1791 as a "polluted enterprise"...and today he is surely spinning wildly in his grave.
Yes, traditionally "correspondents" were literally people who wrote letters to newspapers back home. The decision whether or not to print a given letter, of course, would lie with the newspaper editor--who is responsible (to his employer, the owner of the newspaper) for the effect publishing a given letter has on the image and the salability of the newspaper. And of course the sales of the paper, and the advertising revenue dependent on that circulation, are in the long run what enables the presses to run. So the paper must successfully entertain . . .
The most important thing about journalism's "bias" (it is such, but for tactical reasons I prefer the word "perspective") is not that it has cropped into a pure and noble profession, but that bias is the natural product of the forces which created journalism.Nothing is more natural than that people all have their own individual perspectives. You have one, I have one, adults take that for granted. So the interesting fact is not that journalists their own perspectives, but that they all have such similar perspectives--and that they claim to have no perspective at all.
Think about the conceit which claims not to have a perspective! It is that conceit which makes journalism's perspective truly a "bias" in my eyes. Apart from that conceit, I would just say that "One man's 'perspective' is the other man's 'bias'."
But of course the homogeniety of journalists' perspective is in part a consequence of their claim of being unbiased (which would have to imply that they have no perspective). If one journalist projected a markedly different perspective from all the rest, he would thereby imply that the others were "biased"--or else that he was. That would theoretically be an option, but think how much less work it is to just go with the flow! Accordingly projecting the homogeneous perspective which is the journalistic "bias" has a job-survival value to the individual journalist.
Bernard Goldberg's career is a case in point: he was a journalist until he pointed out that the emperor has no clothes; now he is a nuisance but certainly not a journalist. He has been drummed out of the club. Back in the Vietnam era, journalists loved to broadcast students' railing against "the Establishment." Well, guess what--journalism is the Establishment if such a thing exists in America.
Do I then rail against freedom of the press? On the contrary I think it would be a good idea, and we should try it sometime. Indeed with the Internet in general and FR in particular, I think we are trying it to a (so-far) limited extent. On the Internet there is no guarantee of accuracy, so runs the critique of journalism. It is the "guarantee of accuracy" which is journalism's homogenizing factor--the factor which subverts freedom of the press. The press was free when Hamilton and Jefferson were sponsoring competing newspapers with which to wage their political battles. It is far less so when, for marketing reasons, all position themselves as nonpartisan paragons of "objectivity."
But journalism is not, after all, the whole of "the press;" books and magazines have First Amendment protection, and books especially are not subject to the tyranny of "objectivity"--and are to that very extent far less biased.
It is one thing for print journalists to hew to a homogeneous perspective--"go along to get along"--but it is quite another for the government to create an amplifying system which aggressively "goes along to get along" with print journalism. Broadcasting is a creature of the FCC, and could not exist as we know it without it. And the FCC makes broadcasting as we know it possible by censoring the many and licensing the few in a way entirely inconsistent with First Amendment freedom. Broadcast journalism is journalism on government-issue steroids.
Why then is the particular bias we observe in print and other journalism anticonservative? That is to be understood by reference to the marketing techniques of the genre.
Journalism markets itself not only as "objective," but also as fast. Emphasis on being the first to tell you any given report tends to deemphasize reliability, most evidently in the twice-withdrawn "calls" of Florida and the national election within a few hours on election day 2000. Compared to the most topical book imaginable, then, journalism is by nature superficial.Conservatism is essentially faith in the institutions of society. Commercially successful journalism is negative and superficial, and that makes it border (at least) on cynicism. Journalism is essentially an acid test of those institutions, and thus of conservatism."Man Bites Dog" is news; "Dog Bites Man" is not. That is, journalism emphasizes what is unusual. It makes mountains out of molehills. This is another source for the tendency toward superficiality in journalism.
"If It Bleeds, It Leads." That is, journalism emphasizes the negative as a way of scaring people into not ignoring its reports.
Commercial journalism should be understood to be inherently "liberal." So long as it has any perspective at all--and it would be dishwater-dull if it had none--journalism cannot assure that it is nonpartisan. In point of fact, liberal politicians systematically align themselves with journalism's cause celebre du jour, assuring themselves of a propaganda wind constantly at their back. Journalists would have to do the sort of heavy lifting--which, as we have seen, they normally abjure--in order to create space between themselves and liberals.
Each individual's right to print and profit from journalism is enshrined in the First Amendment. But journalism should not set the national agenda as it now does. Broadcast journalism should be abolished by eliminating broadcast licensee's ability to be topical. All broadcast programming except weather, sports, and traffic reports should be recorded a week in advance.
People who want fast news (including business news) should log on to the Internet. And (if they are conservative) they should log onto FR, exercise their own right to communicate nationally, and DONATE!
The New York Times claims "All the News that's Fit to Print", and no competing newspaper or broadcaster disputes the claim. Conservatives (e.g., the Media Research Center) critique journalism's tendentiousness on a daily basis but the signature of the journalist is a get-along-to-go-along posture with respect to the credibility of any other journalist.
The prospect of competitive advantage to be gained by undermining the credibility of a given member of the competition is outweighed by the prospect of defending against a reply in kind by all of the competition. It is a case of "mutually assured destruction." Any journalist (e.g. Bernard Goldberg) who breaks the tabu on discussing "Bias" is instantaneously "not objective . . . not a journalist." As Ann Coulter (Slander) clearly understands, journalists cannot start using that technique on a conservative; they would have to stop first to be able to do that.
the signature of the journalist is a get-along-to-go-along posture with respect to the credibility of any other journalist.Say rather, the signature of the "liberal" is to never challenge a journalist's credibility, and never to accept someone who challenges a journalist's credibility as a "journalist."
. . . but I think if you read this thread you might agree that I have some clue . . .There's an early flame war in the discussion, but otherwise the whole thread is edifying IMHO. See especially #50 by hadit2here . . .
Journalistic Rules for Ideological Objectivity:Rule 1: Never allow criticism of the objectivity of a journalist.
Rule 2: Never allow the sacred honorific, "objective journalist," to be applied to anyone of the left or of the right.
Rule 3: Never allow a specific, real existing human to be described as "left."
It is, however, completely unconstitutional. Our First Amendment freedom of the press (which is really the freedom for all of us to compose and distribute what we consider to be the facts, as well as our opinions) is near absolute. The FCC can regulate broadcast stations because the available spectrum is limited (and this is going to change in the not-too-distant future), but they cannot violate the Constitution in the process.
And they have very little say over cable TV, and zilch over the web. What does it really matter if we could order "NBC Nightly News" to be "just the facts," when MSNBC cable and MSNBC.com could go on just like they always have?
. . . who in turn presumably lived better than the slaveholders of the antebellum South. That puts a whole different light on it, doesn't it?In fact, by most standards, poor Americans today live better than average Americans did just 50 years ago.
. . . and some of us remember that as being O.K. . . .The larger point is that journalism's short deadlines systematically filter out the small day-to-day improvements which accumulated to such remarkable economic progress over the course of the 20th century.
Journalism's bias is hiding in plain sight:
journalism is superficial because of its short deadlines, and--as illustrated above, (only) partly for that reason--journalism is negative towards the institutions and people upon which we-the-people depend.That is sufficient, in-and-of itself, to explain why journalists are as anticonservative as Ann Coulter (Slander) says.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.