Oldgringo wrote:What is the liberal media getting in exchange for its obvious bias? There has to be some sort of quid pro quid story there. What is it?
They're getting the reelection of a president who shares their anti-liberty socialist values and who will not have the tempering effect of needing to be reelected for a third term in order to moderate his behavior. They will get a president whose second term will make his first one look like a piker. That is what they want. Remember, we are talking about a press which is 80% or more registered democrats. Look no further than that simple fact. They are clinically and categorically unable to report in neutral terms on anything political because they have a dog in the fight, a stake in its outcome.
100 years ago, the press were just as political as they are now. There has never been anything like a neutral press at any time in our history. However, what has changed is that the press back then was evenly divided politically between left and right, and was more or less an accurate snapshot of the general population's political makeup. That has
not been true of the press since about the end of WW1 and the press's infatuation with Woodrow Wilson—an ardent progressive even by today's standards, and the first president who embodied the notion that our national salvation would come from the body of academia, rather than the body of the citizenry at large.........a notion that was in no small part aided and abetted by the establishment of the Columbia School of Journalism in 1912, just 2 years before the American involvment in WW1.
I recently saw a History Channel story about FDR's handling of the Pearl Harbor attack and the runup to a declaration of war against Japan. By 1941, the press was definitely leaning left, but they still had a sense of allegiance to the national survival. Will Durant of the New York Times notwithstanding, the
average American reporter was probably as patriotic and concerned about America's uniqueness in the world as the average American. The night of December 7th, 1941, FDR had dinner alone late that night with Edward R. Murrow. FDR told him everything. Murrow was literally the first person outside the president's cabinet to know all of the details of the attack and just how devastating it was. FDR had ordered his cabinet to not speak of it to anybody. The nation knew about the attack via radio news reporting, but they did not know the actual extent of the devastation, the number of killed and wounded, the fact that with a few exceptions the air assets never got off the ground, the fact that the navy was nearly paralized, etc., etc. In other words, the nation had no idea how bad it really was.
FDR told Murrow he was going to deliver a speech to Congress the next day—what would become know as his "day of infamy" speech. He did not ask Murrow to keep quiet about everything he had told him. But, Murrow seemed to understand that it would be a serious breech of national security if he were to rush to the studio and pound out the details of everything he had been told, before FDR had had the chance to go to Congress and ask for a declaration of war. So despite what must have been a raging desire to go to press with the biggest scoop he had ever been given, Murrow respected the national implications and he kept all of it to himself, never revealing what he knew until well after those events were behind us. In that sense, Murrow was a patriot; not at all like George Clooney's silly depiction of him.
Compare that to the New York Times, both of the pre-war years and since. In the pre-war years, they published, in serial form if I recall correctly, the "reporting" of Will Durant's about the "success" of the "socialist experiment" in Russia. He led the nation to believe that Russians were well fed and cared for and that socialism was the answer to the question of how to maximize agricultural and industrial output for a nation and thereby render its citizens comfortable. In actuality during that period, Russia was experiencing one of the largest famines ever in the thousands of years of the region's history, and Stalin's managment of it had led to literally millions upon millions of deaths due to starvation. But Will Durant withheld that information, and tried to persuade us through his writings into adopting such a system. In retrospect, it turns out that Durant was more than just a useful idiot parroting whatever his commie masters told him to. It turns out that he was actually aware of the Russian famine; so he was consiously trying to deceive his own nation.
And then one wonders what the NYT times would have done with Ed Murrow's information. Would they have sat on it the way Murrow did, in the national interest? Given their long history of publishing anything labeled "top secret" as quickly as they can, damage to the national security be damned, it seems inconceivable that they would sit on a story like that until the president had the chance to go before Congress for his declaration of war. How do they pull this off? What special access do they have to these secrets? The answer is easy: Democrat politicians. I may be wrong about this, but I cannot recall ever in my lifetime a Republican politician blowing the lid off of a national security operation—
particularly not for the purposes of trying to wreck a Democrat president's presidency. But the NYT did it to George W. Bush several times, and everything they got was leaked to them either directly by Democrat politicians, or indirectly through the staffs of Democrat politicians.
And since the NYT is "the paper of record" in journalism and political circles (which are often indistinguisable one from the other), it has become the model for the media at large. In fact, as has been reported many times by Bernard Goldberg, TV news anchors often take their story cues from the New York Times, instead of using the network's assets to drum up stories or do their own investigating. By the 1980s/1990s, broadcast journalism had largely abandoned doing their own investigations, taking the NYT's stories and rewriting them to fit the anchor's personal verbal style.
So, to return to the original question, what do they get? They get a president who shares their belief that capitalism is wrong; that the state is good; that government is the answer to all of our problems; that the more problems we have, the more government we need; and that if there are not enough problems, then we need to manufacture some (never let a good crisis go to waste) so that we can have more government solutions. That's what they get. Plain and simple.
I have a
profound distrust of the media AND its motives. They are NOT in any way trying to keep government honest. They are involved in overtly trying to influence outcomes like never before. They know that it is very hard to win an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel, and they are using that fact to try and mold the nation into one consistent with their own vision—a vision which happens to be shared by the current charlatan in chief. Consequently, when he promised to remake American into that vision which they share, they
believe him, and they ardently support his mission.
In the old days, there were no "journalists," only reporters. The vocational title of "journalist" is a 20th century invention, chiseled into marble by the establishment of "journalism schools" at the nation's most promient (and most liberal) academic institutions. In fact, so-called journalists actually look down at "reporters." Journalism is academia's 5th column, intended to extend the alleged benefits of academia's "superior wisdom" to the masses.
I have no use for it, and I regard the vast majority of journalists and no better than traitors.......because treason is the net effect of their product.
