Posted by
Doctor Demex on Thursday, January 18, 2007 7:56:47 PM
Here are some thoughts on my interview with the seasoned professional print journalist.
The advocacy method of discovering the truth in our courtrooms has developed into a situation in which the individual "officers of the court" have lost interest in their own role in discovering the truth. They are more interested in winning. The system is supposed to reveal the truth, so whoever wins must be right.
This concept has bled into the so-called mainstream media, which considers itself, in the words of the late John Chancellor, the fourth branch of government. To the extent Mr. Chancellor's haughty characterization was true at the time, it was true only because the mainstream media were the major source of information people used to learn what their government was doing.
On each issue, news reporters attempted to gather enough information to tell a coherent story readers would understand. That process naturally required some "interpretation," and the individual biases of reporters and editors along the line would sometimes color the story no matter how hard these journalistic professionals tried to maintain their objectivity. Well, getting at the truth does not win as many Pulitzer prizes as causing headaches for authority. Just as the more one promotes hatred and ideas that are sure to get innocent people killed, the more likely he is to win the Nobel Peace Prize, so too will a journalist who causes trouble without any positive results likely win the Pulitzer.
When the government says that we are winning the war, it is the journalist's job to find any and every opposing opinion to show that we're losing the war. In this way, the reader will be able to ascertain the truth. But the reader doesn't want to have a do-it-yourself truth kit, with instructions written by a judge. If that's what people wanted, they wouldn't try so hard to avoid jury duty.
People want to know what the truth is, they might even want an interpretation of the truth, but they don't want to pick up a paper or watch a broadcast just to have to review a list of evidence that shows that the government is lying to us. Even if the news reporter knows that the government is not lying, he feels it is his obligation to write the story in as unsympathetic to the truth as possible to avoid charges of bias. This of course invites just as many bias charges from the other direction.
As a result, however, people who read newspapers quickly come to the conclusion that the world is full of gloom and doom and the forces of good stand no chance again the forces of evil. Fomenting despair might be big business, but it also encourages suicide—national, if not individual.
The assumption is that the newsmakers—the people being written about—are lying. We know they're lying because they're moving their lips, and no one ever makes a statement without "spin" that artificially favors his side of the story. Negative spin, no matter how outrageous, must always be applied by the paper to get to the truth. This model promotes leftist bias because it fails to take into consideration that there are some people who tell the truth. I say leftist bias because most people in the field of journalism are anti-capitalist. They believe that capitalists get rich at the expense of the poor, so capitalists must be cut down to size whenever possible. I believe this is a suicidal failure in our educational system.
If the president of the United States made the following statement, "The enemy is at the gates, run for your lives!" Papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post would report it thus:
"The enemy is at the gates," the President said, as though the enemy were at the gates. He also added, "Run for your lives!"
Others disagree with the President about the need to run. "I think the president is overstating the urgency of the situation," said an unidentified man lying on the sidewalk outside the offices of this newspaper. "He's the President and he's a Republican, and everyone knows that's a deadly combination that only leads to one thing: lies, lies, and more lies. Actually, that's three things, isn't it? He's worse than I thought!"
The President's statement is the latest in a series of allegations that the United States is at war with people he says have declared war on the United States. Many people believe that the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, were part of a larger conspiracy by foreign militants.