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Worth repeating

Just in case you missed it the first time: an activist media that is granted the presumption of “objectivity” and then uses that pretense of objectivity as a shield to advocate for — and, worse, to protect — a given political ideology and its agenda, is a corrupting influence in a democratic republic.

And like it or not, most people still get their news from those who have the power to frame narratives — and so in a very real way, to swing elections.

Journalism.

Journalism.

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related.

40 Replies to “Worth repeating”

  1. happyfeet says:

    exactly. Like CBS giving Timmy the Tax Cheat an unchallenged platform to tell business leaders across our little country what will happen if they’re stupid enough to get in the way of the Obama Soros agenda.

  2. Ginger says:

    It’s not media bias, it’s a moral imperative [insert picture of President of the World with strong, super-hero jaw (or is it his nose) held High]. I’m so proud, I could cry. Well, I could cry.

  3. Jeffersonian says:

    Every time I start to feel a little sorry for the folks at the NYT, they do something to remind me why I was so very wrong to have the slightest pity for them.

  4. The Ninth Circle of Hell is too good for them. Race-baiting, rumor-mongering, self-serving, and every other nasty hyphenated epithet I could conjure up, (but I’ll leave that to the excellent Velociman).

    I saw it 30 years ago for the first time, when a black cop killed a black suspect and the local rag interviewed me about it– and somehow turned it into a racial issue. I began to question everything in print from that day forward, began to see the pattern.

    They WANT race riots and chaos and anarchy. They are the vilest of the vile manipulators, sorcerers of socialism and every public evil.

  5. The Pragmatic Republicans says:

    Ssshhh, if we’re supine enough journalists may pretend not to hate us.

  6. U-238 says:

    I’m totally just spitballing here but do you think that some of this is effected by the media dynamic of needing the news to be dramatic in order to pedal sales time? I’m not saying that it’s an exclusive factor, but I wonder if thier is a bias towards the liberal agenda because it’s more emotive.

    I just ask because I can see how a persona could be more compelled to sit trhough a comercial when the pre comercial tease is ” Dynamic Congressman fights evil business to give you more of other people money” as opposed to “A concerned Senator gives you advice on how to manage your wealth.”

  7. The Pragmatic Republicans says:

    And that will validate us.

  8. George Orwell says:

    Yes, this is extraordinarily perilous. The fiction that major media is objective has been indoctrinated into the culture since the sixties, at least. Now, while the birth of alternative media, mainly the internet, has exposed this as the rank lie it has been for decades, it’s only exposed to those willing to look. What so many conservative pundits ignore, to this day, is the signal, primary lesson of the last two electoral years. The MSM still calls the shots. I’ll name names… people as smart as Ed Morrissey, Dennis Prager and even that fat entertainer who embarrasses all pragmatic Republicans will sometimes chuckle and crow that the MSM has lost its authority. Well, look at the results of our elections and try to sell me that conclusion. The facts are out there if you’re willing to look. If.

    To be fair, Rush probably doesn’t belong on that list. But back-slappers and fair-weather conservatives like H. Hewitt do.

  9. mojo says:

    First ones up against the wall after the revolution, Comrade!

  10. Hadlowe says:

    What do you do when you’re in a fight where the other side bought the referee? Can we do this?

  11. Bob Reed says:

    Just the typical partisan hacks, masquerading as unbiased observers…

    These MSM idiots think that they are some kind of sainted intelligentsia; our wise and knowledgable betters, who really know what’s good for us

    They don’t realize that they’re just a bunch of useful idiots, in the same vein as those that helped accomplish the Bolshevik revolution…

    I guess they’re not too strong on their world history though, since they can’t seem to recall what happened once those same folks suddenly lost their utility…

  12. kelly says:

    You know who is a crack journalist? Meghan McCain, that’s who.

  13. Old Texas Turkey says:

    crack

    She qualifies as having plenty of that.

  14. alppuccino says:

    I think Letterman said it best, though he doesn’t realize he’s talking about his own kind: Aren’t they smart enough to not believe this crap?

  15. The Pragmatic Republicans says:

    George,

    These far weather conservatives are finding it hard to destroy the corrupt organization they desperately want to join, or in some cases have joined.

  16. geoffb says:

    “Journalism.”

    No, Journolistism. The new improved, government approved, way of the living, breathing, 1st Admendment.

  17. geoffb says:

    “since they can’t seem to recall what happened once those same folks suddenly lost their utility…”

    Everyone’s been “promised” a job in the Ministry of Truth. Honest, swear to Allah or something.

  18. SarahW says:

    ” granted the presumption of “objectivity”

    Who grants this? Who holds such a presumption? Why would he give it?

  19. Jeff G. says:

    “We” do, Sarah.

    Because “we’ve” been taught to.

  20. happyfeet says:

    I grant presumption of dirty socialist propaganda usually almost always. Even those little inserts in your utility bill will try and brainwash you with climate change stuff what that dirty socialist guy at NASA is always on about.

  21. George Orwell says:

    #20
    “Fresh coons?” RAAAAACIST!
    You can’t parody this stuff.

  22. Mr. Pink says:

    One thing I love is how quickly so called journalists internalize leftists talking points. “Bush’s war in Iraq” “Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy”
    http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0409/Cantor_Dems_overreacting_to_the_economic_crisis.html

  23. Ginger says:

    Journobulimia:
    Whenever I ingest Journalism this is how I self-talk: “This was half the story; and half of that were lies.” Then I barf.

    I teach children to do this.

  24. SarahW says:

    Who’s “we” Jeff?

  25. Jeff G. says:

    “We” is “we.”

  26. SarahW says:

    Perhaps the little children are taught by adults in authority what journalism ought to be. But that notion is at once both very new and already obsolete. The best Jschools will beat those notions right out of pretenders to the priesthood. It’s their duty to decide.

  27. SarahW says:

    Thanks for my share of the favor, but I think I”ll stay out of that club.

  28. kelly says:

    – I, for one, would never want to be a member of a club that would have me in it.

    Marx (Groucho, not the other one, Obama’s hero.)

  29. Cavuto’s okay, but so long as he receives a paycheck for what he says, he should still be judged separately for each thing he says.

    For a media employee, that is as generous as it should ever get.

  30. dicentra says:

    “We” grant them presumption of objectivity because decent people have a hard time believing that someone would sit there on TV and lie lie lie through their teeth while having a stentorian voice and authoritative manner.

    Or that someone would have the temerity to knowingly and deliberately put a lie in print.

    And because reporters used to be blue-collar, suspicious of all politicians, and not exactly crypto-marxists from Ivy J-schools.

    The older generation is too trusting because they weren’t as thoroughly lied to as we are today. It will take awhile for people to catch on, if they ever do.

  31. dicentra says:

    From the Small Dead Animals link (which goes to the Columbia Journalism Review, of all places), we get this indictment of the reporting on Columbine:

    Most journalists portrayed the slaughter along identical lines. On a whim, went this scenario, two outcast teenagers carried guns to their high school and started shooting, aiming at the jocks who had tormented them but killing others along the way. This bloodbath was the ultimate revenge of the so-called “Trench Coat Mafia,” a Goth splinter group with an affinity for automatic weapons. As Cullen notes, reporters “filtered every new development through that lens.”

    The reality is far different. Although quirky, neither Harris nor Klebold was an outcast. They came from loving, two-parent families. They inhabited nice homes in pleasant neighborhoods. They made friends, worked part-time jobs, earned high grades in their classes, planned to attend college, and harbored no special animus against jocks. The killers, contrary to media coverage, were not part of the Trench Coat Mafia, were not Goths, did not celebrate Adolf Hitler’s birthday, and were not born-again Christians.

    Nor did the attack stem from a whim. Harris, the primary predator who more or less gave Klebold his orders, had been planning mass murder at the high school for years. He left behind detailed documentation, which he meant to be discovered. Most journalists never reported that horrifying reality.

    In fact, most journalists failed to grasp that Harris and Klebold had devised a plan far more deadly than anything they could have accomplished with their arsenal of automatic weapons. They had built propane bombs—fifty-pound explosive devices concealed in duffel bugs, which they planted around the building, undetected, in the middle of a busy school day. If the bombs had detonated as planned, the school building would have collapsed, crushing hundreds and possibly thousands of individuals. The two teenagers were planning a mass murder far surpassing the number of fatalities at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

    Part of the Lefty narrative is that people don’t do bad things unless provoked by an oppressor (though they never explain what provoked the oppressor to oppress).

    Some people cannot wrap their minds around the fact that some people do bad things because they enjoy doing them. They enjoy the payoff, the rush, the thrill of being transgressive, of wreaking havoc, of watching the world burn.

    There is no logical reason to want to blow up the entire school except that Harris and Kebold thought it would be cool, and it would appear that Harris was enough of a sociopath that he didn’t care about hurting anyone else.

    And the Left just doesn’t get that. That’s why all their plans are so off: their initial premises about human nature are wrong, so everything that follows is also wrong.

  32. dicentra says:

    Oh, and a comment in the above-linked post:

    Can’t say it better than the late Michael Crichton:

    “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

    “In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

    “That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.

    “But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t.”

  33. The Monster says:

    Crichton was right.

    Every time I’ve heard on the radio or seen on the TV news, a story of which I have personal knowledge, I’ve caught them making errors. Every. Single. Time.

    A local TV reporter interviewed The Bride of Monster for a half hour and used three words of her for the report. Apparently another interviewee had more material that fit the template.

  34. geoffb says:

    “And the Left just doesn’t get that. That’s why all their plans are so off: their initial premises about human nature are wrong, so everything that follows is also wrong.”

    That failure also leads them to always end up with a leadership composed of sociopaths, charismatic ones. Those guys know where the good hunting grounds are and flock there every time.

  35. “Facts?! People can get their facts off computers! I deal in infotainment-like journalistic-like art product!” Phil Foglio

  36. Sdferr says:

    Mike Yon bucks the trend in journalism today. For that service, he ought to be closely read. Here he has a bit to say about Pres. Obama’s stance on Iraq and Afghanistan. A snippet:

    Most Americans know that Mr. Obama did not support the invasion of Iraq. But what should also be acknowledged, as long as some are dwelling on the past, is that Mr. Obama did not support the surge. Had we followed his advice, we would have lost the Iraq war. Other members in his current crew wanted to partition Iraq, an idea met with incredulity by the Iraqis.

    This is a major point. Not only was Mr. Obama and crew appallingly ill-informed about the state of progress and possibilities in Iraq, but as late as July 2008 he was still opposing the troop surge, still trumpeting his wisdom in opposing the war, and in fact seemed to want Iraq to fail. Today he is careful in characterizing any success in Iraq, lest it be interpreted correctly that he was wrong about the facts, or worse still, understood the facts but misrepresented them. This administration carries severe credibility burdens concerning issues of foreign policy and national security.

  37. “THE HERODOTUS COMPLEX: NOTES BY P’OILGOF LIVY

    Chapter 6; The Fourth Estate:

    In the Prime Mover’s comprehensive overview of sentient and semi-sentient life within the sphere of the Gallimaufry: Why We’re Better Than All Of You Put Together, there are various appendices which deal with predators that feed upon sentients. Journalists are placed within this category.

    Despite extremely bad reviews, these concepts were eventually accepted, and the number of journalists a healthy civilization could support was worked out by the mysterious (and, incidentally, scandal-ridden) Mathemagicians of FftFwand, with a very complex and practically incomprehensible formula involving such things as ergs of information multiplied by the number of stress points divided by the intensity of greed waves generated within a specific civilization, et cetera and so on.

    Nobody really understood it, but as it called for the euthanasia of vast herds of journalists, nobody really tried too hard.

    When the last editorial writers had been shipped off to the re-cycling vats, it was noticed that things seemed a lot quieter, a lot less tense, and things weren’t nearly so bad as people had thought they were. Stress levels went down, and the new system was dubbed a success.

    Most planets do quite well with a single journalist. Some of the Hub Worlds found that they required as many as one per economic zone. Occasionally, unscrupulous governments have to be chastised for allowing too many journalists to congregate in one spot. This is foolish, although understandable, as their almost constant internecine squabbles are usually a vast source of amusement for the rest of the populace.

    Sometimes a journalist will wish to migrate to a different venue. This is permissible, as long as the journalist already occupying the niche in question is either displaced or disposed of. When the challenge is an amicable one, the two journalists compete to capture the heart of the public by each releasing a series of news stories about the area they wish to control. The incumbent usually has an advantage here, as they “know where all the bodies are buried.” The smart journalist usually keeps some juicy scandal buried in their files for just such a challenge. The newcomer, on the other hand, can view the system with fresh, unjaded eyes, and has the additional advantage of being a stranger, and thus a being sentients are still willing to talk to.

    These news series are intermittently dumped onto the local infowebs, and the winner is the one who has the least number of “delete” key programs written against them, divided by the number of fresh death threats. In the case of a tie, the rivals sit around a table and attempt to force their opponent to drink themselves to death.

    In a hostile takeover, such as in the face of a Hot Story, the newcomer usually just challenges the resident news hawk to a duel to the death, usually by bludgeoning each other with their typewriters. It is interesting to note that as long as the winner registers the kill with the Journalism Guild, most major law enforcement agencies, including the Law Machines, will not treat these killings as murder, but recognize them as a necessary part of the journalist’s life-cycle.

    Some civilizations have declared all journalists to be vermin and eradicate them whenever possible. This is unwise, both because they serve a legitimate and vital function within the body politic, but also because, when excessively oppressed, journalists tend to become very dangerous.” — Phil Foglio

  38. Jones says:

    or you could say they lie because they want their side to win

    ends justify means

    all that matters is power

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