Shooting holes in agenda journalism

Lots of folks like to throw around the term “fake news” to describe stories they do not like or stories that are, well, fake. I prefer the term “agenda journalism” because it does not make a judgment on the veracity of the reporting, and it can be easier to spot than the fake stuff that always has an agenda. The Huffington Post ran such a piece last week called “Gun owners more likely to vote than non-gun owners.” Do not accuse me of journalism profiling, because I believe even the editors of the HuffPost would eagerly agree they have a decidedly leftward tilt in their views of events. So, yeah, the agenda was pretty clear, as was my need to lean way over to starboard while reading to keep from falling out of my chair. Here are some interesting nuggets that show the story and the results of the University of Kansas study that prompted it to be left-wing, anti-gun propaganda with no news or educational value. Any first-year statistics student could shoot holes through it, so to speak.

Journalism? What Journalism!.... the current state of journalism for investigating and conveying real news about real people is useless propaganda.

The work of propaganda is to condition people to get with their program.....Elites conscript journalists, and journalists can’t resist the bait.. power-mongers control all the outlets of communication particularly the media, Hollywood, and academia.

We learned that John Podesta confirmed that the media lavished all kinds of special favors on the Clinton campaign and Donna Brazile fed interview questions in advance to Clinton’s campaign.....Undercover Project Veritas interviews exposed how Clinton operative Robert Creamer bragged about inciting violence at Trump rallies, operations that had the apparent consent of the Clinton campaign....the list could go on and on and on. NONE of this was ‘investigated’ by the media.

So wherever power elites regulate the flow of information, you’re ONLY going to get propaganda instead of hard news.... that gets re-hashed and re-cycled ad nauseam..... Journalists as their messengers.

I don't think I like the premise here. If the NYT runs a story about illegal immigrants bringing disease into the country and spreading TB and measles and what not -- and then concluding that full amnesty and generous healthcare packages are just "common sense" -- I recognize this as "agenda-driven" and I also think that most of this is factually correct. Although I don't like agenda-driven journalism, it's an old, old tradition and I don't think it's going away.

Fake News is different.

Donald Trump is a racist.
Donald Trump is a Nazi.
Donald Trump doesn't care about children living in poverty.
Donald Trump is a sex offender.
Kavanaugh is a rapist.

These things are also "agenda-driven" but these happen to also be factually incorrect. This is Fake News.

Fake News is disgusting and, frankly, I think it should be illegal. The First Amendment should not allow national monopolistic media empires to willfully lie to the public as part of a political activist campaign.

Fake News is a useful term.

The fact that journalism is politically tendentious is none of the government’s business except to the extent that libel suits are enforced by the courts.
The reality is, as Adam Smith put it, that
The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires. - Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
Consequently tendentiousness in journalism is strictly a “Dog Bites Man” situation.
Where government does in principle have a role, IMHO, is enforcing the Sherman AntiTrust Act (although that could also be done via civil suit). You can’t name “the MSM” as a defendant, obviously - but you can name “the Associated Press and its members” as defendant. All wire services constitute virtual “meetings” of many journalism outlets, and
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. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
The implication is that you have to be “naive as a babe to believe” that - after well over a century and a half of continual virtual meeting, the members of the AP have not found any occasion to “conspire against the public.” They have, indisputably, systematically claimed to be objective. And yet, just as systematically, journalism is about bad news and they know it. This implies that their claim to be objective is actually a claim that 'negativity is objectivity.’ And that claim is obviously cynicism.
Journalism is cynical about society, but since government exists only to control the defects in society, cynicism towards society corresponds to naiveté towards government. And that combination is precisely the precondition for socialist propaganda, which is precisely what “the MSM” projects.

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