> I’m surprised The Star Ledger is reporting this.
Local papers near events like this DO report these local stories. What does not happen is the Associated Press and other wire services picking up these stories, sending them to the thousands of news outlets around the nation, and these thousands of other outlets reporting this local NJ story.
Until we topple the small number of wire services and networks who control this phenomenon, we are doomed.
We can vote out Hillary, and elect Trump, but he is all but powerless against the small number of root sources in the MSM and the effect of the MSM news and entertainment on the passively interest middle of voting America.
It’s the media. Until they are stopped and changed, we are doomed. The current politicians are irrelevant.
Until we topple the small number of wire services and networks who control this phenomenon, we are doomed.
Hear, hear!!
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). . . and the wire services have been conducting a virtual meeting of all major journalism outlets (note the term “outlets,” that’s mostly what they are) since memory of the father of living man ran not to the contrary.The AP started out as the New York Associated Press in 1848 - four years after Morse’s demo of the Baltimore-Washington telegraph in 1844. The AP was claiming objectivity for itself before 1880.
By now the central “conspiracy against the public” by journalists is, IMHO, their common consent that all will be considered to be objective - and that anyone who challenges that will face overwhelming propaganda in opposition. They will loudly proclaim that their opponent is “not a journalist, not objective.”
All journalists know that “if it bleeds, it leads” - that good news doesn’t attract an audience like bad news does, so focusing on bad news is good business. Journalists therefore know that they are negative - and their claim of their own objectivity therefore amounts to a claim that “negativity is objectivity.” But such a claim is the very definition of cynicism, is it not?
And cynicism has an obverse: if you are cynical about “A” you are perforce naive about the opposite of “A.” Journalism is cynical about society, and journalism is naive about government (and if you think question whether society and government are opposites, read the opening paragraphs of Common Sense). That toxic combination is the root of all socialist thought.
Since the problem is collusion against the public, the solution can be antitrust action. The wire services are a Nineteenth Century solution to a Nineteenth (and early Twentieth) Century problem. They conserve scarce, expensive bandwidth in the dissemination of news. But bandwidth is now plentiful and dirt cheap. The wire services are no longer “too big to fail.” They should be sued into oblivion.
Accordingly although I’m delighted that Nick Sandman’s lawyer is going after his persecutors, I think that “the AP and its membership” would be a far better target than individual miscreants.