Former Emmy-winning CNN reporter Amber Lyon blows the whistle. That she has to do so to Alex Jones is a sad testament to the current state of a feckless, timid GOP, the presidential candidate for which has embraced a “no whining about the media” strategy, which as I’ve pointed out has the practical effect of saying that his campaign’s image of remaining above the fray (which will be subverted by the very media he pretends to stand above) is more important than is informing an electorate whose being informed is truly a precondition for making our constitutional republic function as it should.
And evidently, all the major “conservative” outlets honored such a strategy of high-minded decorum, else I wouldn’t be grabbing this video from Info Wars.
In a representative constitutional republic, we rely on an informed electorate. Granting the news media the status of referee — that is, neutral arbiters and objective observers who speak truth to power — was a sure way to lead to its infiltration by those who rely on the cover of such a status to propagandize most effectively.
Part of retaking this country will be to retake the media. We don’t necessarily need an unbiased media. But we do need a competitive and equal one. The internet and talk radio has helped begin that process.
The next step is to permanently and deliberately bury the myth of journalistic neutrality as it is currently attributed — and one way to do that is to expose the curricula of the various schools of journalism from which the most prominent mainstream media organizations draw their reporters and, as importantly, their editorial staffs. The media lives under the cover of a kind of neutrality that, as a practical matter, they are taught in their training to reject, often as a matter of principle: anybody can report facts; your job is to report significance — and what comes to count as significant is of course dependent on your personal world view. And that world view is reinforced structurally through incoherent (but pleasingly populist) ideas of language along with the various other successes embedded in our epistemology by the left’s carefully-planned long march through the institutions.
Of course, not every journalist is an activist hack. Many people resist indoctrination.
And yes, to answer the post structuralists, true objectivity is impossible, given the limits of language and the necessity of agency: bias of some sort will always leech in at some point, try as we may to prevent it.
But the answer to that pedestrian fact — and this is where the anti-foundationalists hope to defeat you — is not to suggest, as they do, that the implicit fact of a kind of linguistic relativism gives us leave to do as we please with respect to fashioning “truths.” Rather, all that fact does is necessitate in us a concerted effort to be as objective as possible, which is, outside the realm of philosophical theorizing, more than adequate as a means of informing a population.
The left’s trick has been to, on the one hand, sell us on the idea of truth’s contingency (all narratives are relative; they are owned by those whose authenticity allows them to produce them from that group consciousness; consensus, then, stands in for truth, because real truth is unknowable; and therefore truth is a function of power, not metaphysical certainty); and on the other, to assert control over an institution that argues for its own neutrality and adopts a pose as protector of the very kinds of truths its defenders in other instances decry as merely motivated human constructs meant to stand in for the metaphysical ideal of truth.
To reestablish Enlightenment principles — even if only because to do so is to reaffirm the founding principles upon which our social compact is based (you don’t need to believe philosophically in the Enlightenment paradigm, but you must agree to accept it as the working model inside which the American experiment operates) — we need to root out from language and from linguistic assumptions, both of which build an operative epistemology, all the sophistry the left has planted there.
The roots are deep. But they are also fragile.
So. Let’s pick up the shovels already, shall we — and stop pretending that all that matters is how we prune the resultant weeds?
(h/t JHo)
Is there any way for a CNN viewer to get standing to sue, so as to use discovery to find evidence to corroborate what she’s saying here?
I wouldn’t be eligible, of course…
A quotable quote. serr8d where are you?
Malkin, bless her heart, is probably not entirely pleased that Infowars has jumped the shark. This stuff also complicates the narrative on the Mideast. Rico did too.
That CNN is a whore for dictators is not news.
Related: Media Incest
Why I should stop reading National Review.
Remember when that was a conservative magazine?
OT: I went ahead and put myself in hock for 1000 rounds of 7.62×51. Didn’t want to chance and executive orders coming along shortly after the election, whichever way it goes. Also picked up an extra 500 rounds of 45 ACP.
I think that puts me here for now:
22LR ~ 5300 rounds
308 / 7.62×51 ~ 1400 rounds
45 ACP FMJ ~ 1000 rounds
45 ACP premium defense ammo (+p, +p+ JHP, etc) ~ 400 rounds
Is that a good number, or should I be hoarding more and more? Because I’m going personally broke preparing for going broke national.
And by the way, thanks so much to David K, whose contribution today allowed me to pick up the extra 45 ACP. I really do worry about what could happen come Nov 7 or thereabouts. Not so much a zombie apocalypse as a rash of new gun control laws pushed through by a lame duck President who doesn’t much care what Congress thinks.
About the only thing Obama could do without Congress is order the various executive departments to keep driving up the cost of ammunition by purchasing every round they can lay hands on.
And that’s only because the Harry Reid’s Senate decided that budget authority was more in the line of a suggestion than a Constitutional mandate.
I have OCD tendencies, so I’m not a good person to answer the question about how much ammo to have around. Someone saner can likely help.
How much ammo do your really need for SHTF?
Enough to get you into the National Guard armory.
Looks like I’m right around where I should be for now, Ernst. Lots of practice rounds for the 22LR, good quality stuff for the pistol along with my practice rounds, and enough military surplus ammo for the big gun. I only have two boxes (40 rounds) of premium stuff for the SCAR, but I figure a FMJ .308 is likely to put down most anything, even without an expanding bullet. (Though as you know I do keep one mag of frangible stuff).
My plan is to bug in, not bug out, if possible. Got prairie behind me and am at the top of the street which curves downward at each end from my house. So I’m not much worried about how much I have to carry. I am worried about getting a generator and maybe some motion-sensor lights for the back yard.
I haven’t stocked up much on food, but I have enough to last several weeks if it comes to that. Or maybe I’ll just start eating the more plump neighbors.
Forced to hike with my gear, though, I’ve been doing two mile walks/runs with a 50 lb weight vest for years.
I don’t have a chest rig, nor do I have ceramic body armor plates. Maybe those will come next.
I was at a local gun store Monday and they finally had some small pistol primers in stock. Other types and sizes have always been there but small pistol primers have been hard to find. I asked what was the problem and was told that the Federal government is buying up so many that there isn’t much left for retail. Don’t know if that is true but they have been scarce.
Because I’m going personally broke preparing for going broke national.
Not to go all JHo on you, but you are most decidedly not going broke. You are exchanging a rapidly-depreciating form of currency for a form which holds its value much more reliably.
One way or another, you will be able to exchange your
armorytreasury for goods and services, just as well as you could with a debit card. Better, in fact, since it doesn’t lose value each month, and since you always have the option of taking your currency out of its box and using it in a way that gives you a great deal more leverage in a transaction.You’re not broke. You’re just holding a lot of hard assets.
OT: John Nolte over at Big J opens a column with an argument that some here might recognize:
He then spends the rest of his column totally not questioning CNN’s totally cooked numbers. God bless ’im.
Silly. You’re thinking of that time when we had a Constitution.
Alex Jones asserts that he’s not afraid to be a whistle-blower, to expose the truth.
But he can blow as many whistles as he wants: they’re not going to come after him, because the very fact that Alex Jones “exposes” something makes it that much easier for The Man to laugh it off as tin-foil hat stupidity. This is the reputation that he’s crafted for himself by being way too eager to believe (or air) any and all conspiracy theories. He’s as promiscuous as Art Bell and George Noory with UFOs and paranormal stories: no vetting, no questioning, no skepticism.
Granted, the purpose of their radio shows is to accept all comers in a non-critical environment, but like the National Enquirer‘s exposure of the John Edwards affair (or alien stories in Men in Black), the only outlet for the truth anymore are the whack-job outlets.
Because they’re the only ones outside the circle of corruption anymore.
We are beyond screwed.
Since I firmly believe arms are for hugging and that guns are dangerous to children and cute fuzzy animals and all that jazz, I can’t say I’ve put a lot of thought into it, but off the top of my head, if I were to stockpile ammunition for a tactical rifle/carbine (or a sporticle or a sport utility carbine), my feeling is I would want to take the max load I could carry and multiply it by three. One third reseved for shtf, one third for practice/practical fun, and the remaining third to make sure I wouldn’t shoot into my shft reserve.
But that just seems commensensical to someone like me.
Someone who hasn’t thought about these kinds of SHTF HD/SD WORL TEOTWAWKI scenarios hardly at all.
Except to make (light) fun of Jeff.
Yeah Di, we got the societal cancer, and we got it bad. It’s spread all through the body, invading every organ, gland and corpuscle. Electing Romney is like having chemo; maybe stop the spread and buy some time. It’s a long shot, but really the only therapy we have right now.
Left untreated, ie Obama is re-elected, the great experiment is dead within two years.
“I wouldn’t be eligible, of course [to sue CNN]…”
Well, McG…If you’ve visited an airport then you’ve no doubt been forced to watch CNN (or at least to it). Which makes them the perfect choice for foreign propaganda.
I’m glad she’s come forward, but didn’t she hear about CNN’s skewed coverage of Iraq in oredr to secure their great coverage of the 1st Gulf War?
Sometimes an organization learns from its mistakes. Sometimes it’s too stupid to learn; sometimes it doesn’t want to learn, because it’s just acting according to its nature.
You might want to also figure in some hunting. Unless you’re a godless vegan.
Little wonder that the event went exactly as expected. This is not to say that there were bald declarations of support for Occupy or straightforward denunciations of the Tea Party; MSNBC zealotry aside, that’s not how the media mainstream operates. The conversation was reasonable-sounding and often good-humored, laced with anecdotes drawn from the speakers’ front-line experience. Yet what would strike many outsiders as stunning is what Gitlin, his panelists, and most everyone in the audience—composed largely of journalism students—seemingly take for granted: that the Occupy movement, its occasional excesses and counterproductive tactics aside, is at its core good, decent, and noble; while the Tea Party, for all its successes, is fundamentally malign. In the real world, such assumptions are, to put it mildly, matters of fierce contention, with millions of thoughtful Americans holding exactly the contrary view—that Occupy is anarchic and deeply destructive, and that the Tea Party is part of a long tradition of democratic engagement. Throughout the two-hour session, this inconvenient fact received not so much as a passing nod. And so, obviously, the question that should be at the center of such a discussion—to what extent does ideology distort media coverage of contentious issues?—was not even on the radar.
link
Look GOP, between you and me, NOT whining about THIS media makes you looks like a bunch of scared and/or stupid, ineffectual little schmupkins.
“Silly. You’re thinking of that time when we had a Constitution.”
Now we have at last two of the things depending on who’s got the most power at any given moment. A living constitution is a virtual quantum constitution that can be a particle AND a wave.
Re: nr @4:45, Occupy breaks shit and gets arrested. The TEA party wins elections.
BEHAVE YOURSELVES! STOP RAPING PEOPLE!
#war
That’s a good point. I suppose that falls into the practical category of the practice/practical fun third of the ammo supply.
If you’re planning on being able to hunt with your shtf carbine/rifle after the fit hits the shan.
I wonder how much of the squirrel is left after you hit in the eye from 75 yard with a .308 Winchester.
We’re not screwed.
What makes you think the news was ever straight up? Who sold magazines like hotcakes back in the 40s and 50s? Yeah, the fanzines: Confidential, Police Gazette and the like. Later, on there were new media like Rolling Stone and satirical magazines like MAD and Cracked. Now we have blogs and the supermarket mags are teetering on being respectible journalistic outfits because they report many stories that straight news won’t touch because it’s yucky, tawdry, shocking or all three.
TV news has been smiley news chat and celebrity gossip for years. The NYT, WaPo and many of the other flagship dailies are a joke. The same wtih Time, Newsweek and until relatively recently US News and World Report was in that barrel, too. All were ‘respectable’ news outlets at one time and may be so again. Most people don’t pay any attention to the news at all, unlike us and we seem to find plenty of information out there.
Take a deep breath, already.
Who are you talking to, leigh? Who needs to take a deep breath?
The fact remains that most people still get their “news” from the mainstream press, and though they know on an intuitive level that there is indeed a bias, they’ve been conditioned to believe that the news is at least striving for objectivity, evenhandedness, etc.
Evan Thomas famously said the news media could be worth 15 points to a candidate.
Perhaps the problem isn’t that people like me are too concerned about the problem; it’s that people like you are too blase about it.
“Take a deep breath, already.”
’cause liars what lies are the bestest fudge sundae. hey look video over here and SQUIRRELS
Most people don’t pay any attention to the news at all,
yea the fed gov’t psas do the propaganda
I don’t think either of us is wrong, Jeff. Far be it for me to tell someone else how to run their own blog. If I am coming across as blase, that is not my intention.
If I sound unconcerned, that isn’t true either. I apologize for any misunderstanding.
The fact remains that most people still get their “news” from the mainstream press, and though they know on an intuitive level that there is indeed a bias, they’ve been conditioned to believe that the news is at least striving for objectivity, evenhandedness, etc.
Whose fact? Most people? Conditioned?
Why you sound like a Social Psychologist, you rascal.
Why you sound like a Social Psychologist, you rascal.
what a credentialed bullshit title. you go ivy grrl.
hardon/yale/higher edu university is a fraud. like baracky.
I went to Duquesne,bitch. Right inyou backyard.
indeed i would ax the high iq types: how fucking smart is it to vote for baracky 2012?
went to Duquesne,bitch. Right inyou backyard.
wasted time and money hun
“The Taliban Is On The Inside Of The Building” At State Dept
Scholarships and assistantships, sweetheart.
I saw that today, geoff. Stunning that the lies keep coming in spite of eyeball witnesses.
Scholarships and assistantships, sweetheart.
stupid stuff wins ax hillarity. good allan the university crowd are the stupidest.
leigh: hi i know stupid find it in big edu.com. go baracky!!11!!
a Social Psychologist
yea that’s deep soviet no?
Put dahn the arns, bro.
Yinz kin vote for Obama, ‘nat. I’m not.
Put dahn the arns, bro.
” a Social Psychologist
yea that’s deep soviet no?”
leigh don’t do the credentialed shit ok?
leigh take your stupid psycho credential and shove it. the “university” is dead and you be a deadhead accollade.
leigh don’t do the credentialed shit ok?
I’d love to ask you why I shouldn’t do that, but I’ll have to do that another time.
Say ‘hi’ to the guys at the Union Hall.
Jeff wrote: …We don’t necessarily need an unbiased media. But we do need a competitive and equal one. The internet and talk radio has helped begin that process.
Exactly.
Up until mid-20th Century, there wasn’t any such thing as ‘objective’ media – and no one expected them to be. What media outlets existed were owned by men who wanted and made their companies reflect their opinions. Most cities and even towns had multiple newspapers that each represented a different spot on the philosophical spectrum. All the big cities had their Establishment and tabloid versions of conservative and progressive papers, their ethnic and race-targeted papers, their obligatory Communist rag. This was the norm.
This whole idea that media outlets must be ‘objective’ is the anomaly.
My theory is that this idea was started by the Left as a way to give cover for their subtle propagandizing [see: Murrow Edward R. and His Boys].
The Internet is fueling a restoration of the norm. I wish more conservatives would understand this and act on this knowledge.
[…] Please do take the time to click here and read the whole post. […]
Whose fact? Most people? Conditioned?
A fact is a fact; doesn’t matter who promotes it. Each night, 21.6 million watch the evening news on one of the broadcast networks; another 5 million or so watch the evening news on one of the cable nets, and another million watch the PBS News Hour. On the web, most people are reading a news aggregator like Google or Yahoo, or visiting one of the big news outlets like CNN or Fox. In any event, the content they read comes mostly from wire services like AP, Reuters, or AFP.
We can observe that outlets like AM radio or the Pajamas guys give us a few new ways to spread an alternative message, and it’s arguable that increased public scrutiny is forcing some of the big broadcasters, newspapers, and wire services to get a little less blatant with their biases. That doesn’t change the fact that this is a guerrilla action against an entrenched foe.
And finally: look around. Talk to friends and neighbors and cow-orkers and people at the bus stop. To the extent that they discuss political events, they’re talking about whatever it is the big dogs are talking about. One of those big dogs is Rush; he’s one out of a hundred. And to the extent that they’ll agree with you when pressed about the inaccuracy and bias of the news media, they still tend to accept what they are told without a lot of skepticism or deep analysis on their own part.
So yeah — the agenda-setters still set the agenda. Is this really a battle you want to fight? Wouldn’t you rather focus on setting up new agenda-setters, and getting the word out?
[…] Luckily, nobody listens to the media or gets their information from it — at least no information that they take to be fact, at least not consciously — so, you know, relax. Take a deep breath already. […]