Why Broadcast Journalism is Unnecessary and Illegitimate

Whenever I mentioned the fact that the media and all the major news outlets backed Gore during the last election people told me I was crazy and some even said that it was "illegal" for them to be slanted and other would ask "why would they be biased anyways".

But you know, it is illegal for broadcasting to be slanted. Just like it was illegal for Gore to use the government's phone to solicit political donations, and for Clinton to coordinate soft-money ads with hard-money ads . . . and the entire problem is belling the cat.

You see there are just so many ignorant people out there.

Common Tator is fond of pointing out that a third of the voters are conservative, a third are "liberal" (anticonservative) and a third can go either way. You nor I can readily identify with those that are liberal, or even with those who (as one guy told me) always voted for the candidate who won.
CT models them as people who want change when things make them unhappy, and gridlock when things are going OK. Political manic depressives. Thus FDR won 4 elections by his "all motion is progress" strategy during the depression and WWII. Without ever solving an important problem. Depressing, isn't it . . .

The media and the public school system are the two top reasons for the amount of liberals in the world. In fact the ONLY reason why I was not caught up in all the liberal BS out there is because of my religion . . . and naturally religion is banned in schools.

I followed the Bush-bash last night...and the WBBH-Reno fan club....so many long faces attempting to find a ray of hope amidst that bunch. The Democrats seem on a one-way trip into the sewer, all negativity and hate...when Americans need mature leadership and real can-do spirit from their fellow Americans.

Pessimism never won any battles.--Dwight Eisenhower
60 posted on 8/28/02 10:19 PM Eastern by Ragtime Cowgirl

FL Democratic Gubernatorial ~~Sedate~~ Debate

RG, Somehow this post piqued my curiosity, and I checked out your homepage. I like the cut of your jib! The Coyboy Bush" and Ashcroft pieces are inspiring.
I've been studying the question of the "one-way trip" the Democrats have been making; you made me wonder if it might not be cast in psychological terms as depression. Conservatives
see beyond the years
thine alabaster cities gleam
undimmed by human tears.
OTOH Journalists, by focusing on the moment, see mostly negative things with which to surprise and interest (entertain) the public. I see "Liberal" politicians as simply the political expression of the short-term, paranoid perspective of journalism. It's demagogery based on following and exacerbating the prevailing ideological wind of journalism.
Doesn't that tie in with the Eisenhower quote? Journalists (liberals in general) focus so closely on the dire consequences of the battle that they cannot see victory at its end. In that respect WWII was anomalous because FDR, precisely like x42, was sympatico with the ethos of journalism. FDR was after all allied with Joseph Stalin.

I see "Liberal" politicians as simply the political expression of the short-term, paranoid perspective of journalism.

Thank you for the kind comments, C_i_C.

I'm not sure that I'd describe the collective emotional/mental state of today's Democratic party as "depressed"....despairing, maybe....as a spoiled child despairs when he discovers he can't get everything he wants; or as a parent who makes careless promises to his children and finds that not only do the kids expect the promises to be kept, but they keep demanding more...or, even more frustrating for the party who sold it's soul more times than "The Producers" sold tickets to their show...the Dem. leadership is now stuck with appeasing an ever-increasingly vocal collection of motley groups who do the DNC dirty work (voter fraud in the inner cities, various rent-a-mob events, etc.)- groups who are now shaking hands with Arafat, condemning our CiC and are being exposed by their own actions to the rest of the American voters....voters who love God, family and country, their local police, McDonalds, NASCAR, SUVs, traditional marriages, freedom and truth. Tough for the party of fearmongering and global governance, victimhood and B.S. disguised as wisdom on the daily Tom Brokaw/Rosie Show (imho,(^:).

a complex situation, young people too often ask others to chew it, swallow it and digest it for them, and then tell them in absolute terms which side is most appropriate to their general belief structure.

It's not just young people, my dear. Most adults, I fear, are precisely that way.
Think of how many people inhale when journalists (self-marketing journalism) tell them that "objectivity" is just a dial-click away. The mercy is that most of them, most of the time, don't trouble to vote the convictions of the journalists.
If you're in doubt of that, just ask how many journalists disagree with the notion that journalism exists to "comfort the afflicted--and afflict the comfortable." Hardly any would strongly object to that. But then, how do they hope to accomplish that if not by influencing politics? And just what political influence would trying to get the government to "comfort the afflicted--and afflict the comfortable" be?
In the mouth of a journalist, "objectivity" is a codeword for socialism.

I know that not looking to see what the latest inhuman insult is won't make it go away

Understand that. I post a lot of articles on here, some quite upsetting at times to me.

From my #59 (to which this is, FR-wise, a response; click "to 59" below):
If, heaven forefend, you were to find yourself in peril because the ice on the lake was thinner than you suspected and you are now in frigid water, you would draw my attention to your plight and earnestly ask me to venture in some way to help you escape. I on the other hand would be put in a different distress: lacking a rope I must now choose between behaving as a coward, and venturing into harms' way myself at the risk of sharing your fate.
Journalism creates certain emotional facts. It is not entirely clear that they are healthy for the audience.

It is time for a change to the Constitution. But it won't happen since liberal journalists will use their 'bully pulpit' to thwart it.

But my thesis is that the Constitution is good as written. It is only the utter lack of judicial application of it to the FCC which is a problem. And, as you note, "objective" (their codeword for liberal) journalists are hugely influential even on SCotUS. Only one justice has settled it in his mind not to care how he is portrayed in--does NOT read or view--the newspapers or TV News.
Congress has passed McCain-Feingold, and that will be reviewed by SCotUS. IMHO nobody will argue the case correctly; the defenders of the law will argue that it's fine for Congress to decide who can talk on the radio and who can't, the opponents will argue that the status-quo-ante was uniquely constitutional and Congress can't control the FCC.
Congress created the FCC and therefore could uncreate it; it certainly CAN control it. But that, of course, is a constitutional problem of its own; it reveals the FCC for what it is: a smokescreen for Congressional control of political speech in the venue of wireless.
There exists a category of constitutional law know as "strict scrutiny"; basically it means that if you are skating close to discriminating against blacks SCotUS will not give you the benefit of any doubt. The FCC deserves such treatment simply for existing, as a creature of Congress, for the constitutionally suspect purpose of regulating wireless communication in general and wireless political communication in particular. The history of broadcast journalism--simply amplifying the biases of print journalism--can be shown, IMHO was shown in Slander, to be so endemic, pervasive, and systemic that the FCC not only cannot withstand strict scrutiny, it cannot withstand any scrutiny at all.

I read your vanity, but not the thread. Perhaps someone else has already made my point.

I disagree with your premise that broadcast journalism is entertainment. My contention is that there has been a very serious communist/socialist core of believers in the U.S. since the 1930's who raised their children and grandchildren to be believers and who have recruited many others via the media and the schools/universities.

They are very intelligent and determined and committed, and they are not interested in entertainment except as they can use that medium to carry their propaganda, rather like a corporation doesn't carry about the entertainment in a show, only the ratings, the demographics of the ratings and their product placement.

These core communist/socialist believers are to the left what the Christians are to the right, the spiritual and religious focus from whom have derived all the planning for the last several generations to take over schools, universities, unions, politics, movies, news, entertainment to dispense their viewpoint and thus take over the country.

If you don't see this, I think you are missing the most serious threat to our Constitution and The American Way, and indeed, to Christianity as well.

If you don't see this, I think you are missing the most serious threat to our Constitution and The American Way, and indeed, to Christianity as well.

Whoever spoke of disagreement over that point?
My point is that we don't have to fight on that ground alone. That, in fact, although the usual suspects have the First Amendment squarely on their side (more firmly by far than we would like), that is applicable to print but not to broadcasting.
And that the affectation of objectivity--actually, the use of "objectivity" as a code-word for "Political Correctnes", aka socialism--is a false signal endemic to broadcast journalism. Theoretically at least, it's illegal to broadcast false signals over the regulated airwaves. That's only theoretical because the FCC is guilty of nonfeasance in not enforcing the prohibition against it.
My thesis commends to conservatives the concrete action of suing the FCC and its licensees who perpetrate the fraud of "objective journalism". Theoretically the case goes to SCotUS, where the defendants make an issue of the fact that Justice Thomas doesn't read the papers or tune in the news. Plaintiff replies that that makes Justice Thomas the only person who is not coopted by the flattery and derision of journalism.
Congress has sent a First Amendment political speech case to SCotUS in McCain-Feingold. Anti-regulation people would claim that Congress can't tell the broadcasters what to broadcast, and what to abstain from broadcasting. But if so, Congress can't tell you what you can and can't broadcast, FCC license or no.

There are lots of issues where one can be 100% correct, like you are about broadcasting and print and the Constitution. But you are wasting your breath and time and energy with shadow-boxing.

You will never get any traction with this in the public arena. Only the people who like to discuss how many angels can sit on the head of a pin will ever exchange more than two emails with you.

If you want to fight the good fight, I believe one needs to pick the fights and the issues where you have a chance of making a difference.

I sincerely believe your issue is not the issue nor the time.

Anyone can own a press, nowadays--you probably have a printer attached to the computer you're using to read this message. The internet, indeed, is the poor man's soap box, with global reach. This is really the practical realization of the First Amendment ideal--we-the-people assaying to transcend our individual ignorance, inexperience, and folly by pooling our individual knowledge, insight, and wisdom. But the seperation of the wheat from the chaff is for each of us individually to discern.
Broadcasting, and the high-speed press which is its Public-Relations progenitor, create a seperate PR universe. In that PR universe wisdom, insight, and knowledge come from the elite as an accomplished fact; we-the-people are mere consumers of the wisdom of our betters. In that universe the First Amendment right to speak morphs into the FCC-proclaimed right to be quiet and receive wisdom from on high.
The difference between the First Amendment paradigm and the Public Relations paradigm is the difference between we-the-people as decision-making adults on the one hand, and on hand "the masses" as subjects to be worked upon by PR technique.
NPR, being government owned as well as government licensed, is the purest form of big media. But although the rest of broadcasting is privately owned it is equally government-licensed. Lacking any other definition of objectivity, broadcasting takes its cue from print big media. Print big media avoids flame wars by defining objectivity as consensus. And since faddishness and demagoguey are what sells papers the easiest, big media's "objective" consensus is a continual denial of the lessons of history. Journalism is far too busy hyping its objectivity to ever focus seriously on the tendencies which inhere in its own business model.
The dirty little secret of broadcasting is that its evanescent nature makes it ill-suited to serious consideration. Even more than print journalism, broadcasting is "of the moment;" even more than print journalism it is therefore faddish and demagogic. An enduring medium such as a book or a self-archiving web site is the only tool we-the-people have to scrutinize journalism and broadcasting.
The salient comparison between commercial broadcasting and NPR is not its funding difference but the fact that both posture as being in the public interest--and though both interest people generally, neither in fact is in the interest of preserving the Constitution.

one can be 100% correct, like you are about broadcasting and print and the Constitution . . . [but] never get any traction with this in the public arena.

One might for instance discuss federalism vs. the central government we now have; I do understand your point. But I think that federalism vs centralism is widely if dimly understood (at least I for one have understood the original federal design from my youth).
OTOH I reached the age of 35 without so much as recognizing that journalism had a consistent political tendency, and 55 before I began to be clear on the nexus between that political tendency and the business model of journalism--and the disjuncture between First Amendment freeedom to speak (and implicitly to listen by choice and to individually decide) and the propaganda idea of a "right to know"--to shut up and listen to your betters.
Yes, people find it difficult to accept. But I understand that; it took me over fifty years to begin to figure it out. It's difficult precisely because the main propaganda thrust of big media is designed to make it so. And it is an interesting challenge precisely because of its difficulty.
Yes, like federalism First Amendment freedom is an endangered species which the SCotUS could scarcely vindicate in one sweeping decision outlawing all broadcasting. But at least I would like to think that Clarence ("high-tech lynching") Thomas could see holy land afar off. That attempted lynching wasn't "high tech"--nothing digital about it; it was simply the PR Establishment waging war on prudent judgement by we-the-people.
McCain-Feingold will go to SCotUS, and neither the plaintiff nor, certainly, the defendant will address the central issue. The central issue is the PR Establishment, and the impropriety of the government's contribution to it.

In an article on the silence of the Jews in Hollywood, the Los Angeles Times quotes writer-director Michael Tolkin, author of "The Player" and "Changing Lanes": "Liberals are on the side of the underdog. The people who've had their cities turned into rubble look like the underdog."

This is a very revealing statement. Many of us have long argued that leftists do not ask, "Who is right and who is wrong?" but rather, "Who is strong and who is weak?" in determining their positions on world and national issues. The substitution of power criteria for moral criteria is one of the reasons the left so often takes immoral positions. It is, therefore, helpful to hear such a candid acknowledgment of Hollywood liberals' moral confusion. Not to mention ignorance -- no Palestinian city has been "turned into rubble."

The tendentiousness of the Politically Correct movement is most stark in the case of journalism, which hypes itself as "objective" but actually makes its living delivering entertainment to audiences--and, thereby, audiences to advertisers. But that begs the general question, "Why does entertainment default to anticonservative values?" This seems to provide an answer.
Rooting for the underdog on Monday Night Football is "passion without consequence." But in a political context, rooting for the underdog is rooting against the powers-that-be, against tradition and those who prosper under that tradition.
The irony of rooting against American tradition is that our tradition is to give the individual a chance to try new ways of doing things. Conservatives look at an individual who prospers because of the leadership he assumes by dint of his own efforts and see the little guy as compared to the government. PC thinking, OTOH, looks at that same prosperous leader and sees only a fat cat as compared to the poor.
The truth is that in America "the poor" is to a remarkable degree a phantasm, an aprocraphal construct. The so-called "poorest quintile" of the American economy is neither a quintile (only about 15% rather than 20% of the population) nor a static group of people without much money. Although it includes truly poor people it is loaded with young, upwardly mobile people.
The "richest quintile" does include rich people, and its aggregate income is large. But that is partly because it is not a quintile but a full quartile (25%), not 20% and certainly no merely 15%, of American incomes. And even the 80th-percentile (say nothing of the 75th-percentile) income is scarcely rich by American standards. Top-quartile Americans know all too well that it is no trick at all to descend to lower quintiles--which may explain why they work twice as many hours in a year as is typical of the lowest "quintile."
PC is all about emotionalism, excitement, and superficiality. It is the domain not of the little guy who posts logical analysis on a low-cost web site but of the true fat cat who can make money with huge investments in production values--and who is deathly afraid, not of being shown to be illogical and unscientific, but of being out of step with others similarly situated. Mere logic can usually be trumped by good PR, but a flame war with other people who buy ink by the barrel is--horror of horrors--bad PR.

Denis Preger, JWR

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