Or perhaps in choosing not to identify them as “the press.” There are good philosophical reasons for believing the U.S. has not had a genuine press in many years.
Or perhaps in choosing not to identify them as “the press.” There are good philosophical reasons for believing the U.S. has not had a genuine press in many years.Today’s MSM, to the danger of this country and its future, is making a good case for not having the Freedom of the Press. - Chgogal
Our problem is not freedom of the press - it is the lack of free and independent presses. The US had that up to the middle of the Nineteenth Century; Samuel Morse demonstrated the Baltimore-Washington telegraph line in 1844, and in 1848 the New York Associated Press - later simply the Associated Press - was founded. The very name “associated” press tells you that “the press” has become singular, united.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 NationsTheodore Roosevelt famously said, “It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belong to the man who is actually in the arena . . .” You would not expect critics to agree wholeheartedly with that assessment, tho. And in fact, the critics do not. Who are the critics? Critics see only the bad. Who sees only the bad? People who make their living reporting bad news. Understand, bad news sells. It actually does. Bad news interests the public - which is quite a different thing from being “in the public interest.”It is objective to say that bad news sells, because it does. But that does not make a focus on bad news “objective.” A whole city could be built, and yet you would never know it directly, if the only information source was bad news, and you took that bad news at face value. In reality, of course, you would know the city existed from advertisements - and you would know it from the reporting of the houses that burned down, which would first have to exist before that could even happen. But certainly, bad news is never the whole story - except in the newspapers. And the fact that the Associated Press newswire represents a virtual meeting of all those journalists merely sharpens their focus on the bad news, helping elevate negativity into the heights of cynicism. Thus, “the conversation” results in the “conspiracy against the public” which we know as “liberalism."