In Kansas City there was the famous case of a number of reinforcing steel fabricators meeting for lunch once a week. The meeting turned into a session where it was allegedly agreed which fabricator got which project allowing for price fixing.
I assume your point it that in the salesmanship of leftist dogma, the journalists are doing the same— the bottom line of Fake News is set at Hillary and everyday something to the left of Hillary is sold at a fixed degree of socialism.
I assume your point it that in the salesmanship of leftist dogma, the journalists are doing the same— the bottom line of Fake News is set at Hillary and everyday something to the left of Hillary is sold at a fixed degree of socialism.
Yes. IMHO the only thing that had to happen to turn the AP and its membership into a “borg” of likeminded people all selling the same thing was a fait accompli before the turn of the Twentieth Century.In the mid-late Nineteenth Century, people started to question the concentration of propaganda power which the AP constituted. The AP’s defense was that it was comprised of its members, and (at the time, it was true) those member newspapers didn’t agree on much of anything. Therefore, the AP itself was objective.
That argument succeeded, because it had the ring of truth at the time. But ironically, the very act of claiming objectivity subverts any realistic effort toward objectivity. The trouble is that trying to be objective is a tough discipline, which is unnatural to even attempt. We all believe our own opinions, or they wouldn’t be our opinions. Attempting objectivity means scrutinizing your own motives, to see how where you stand might depend on where you sit. No fun at all.
So there you as a journalist are, being told that you are objective. And you realize that everyone who has any propaganda power at all will keep on saying you are objective - as long as you go along and get along with them. Nirvana! You don’t have to examine your motives, you just have to never question any other journalist’s objectivity, as long as no other journalist questions yours or any other journalist’s. If they do, you are duty bound to join in the mob of journalists who will “stone” the offender to (career) death with charges that the offender is “not a journalist, not objective.”
IMHO the “If it bleeds, it leads” rule for commercial success in journalism suffices to explain that journalism is negative - and the paradox of the self-negating claim of objectivity changes mere negativity into cynicism. That cynicism, directed at society, translates into naiveté towards the institution which exists to limit evil in society - government. Nothing else can come of that but a propaganda wind at the back of socialists.