"Truth and news are not the same thing."
-- Katharine Graham, the late owner of
Newsweek Magazine and The Washington Post-
Observations on Journalists
______________
.
"Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the 1st, Truths; 2nd, Probabilities; 3rd Possibilities; 4th, Lies." -- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Norvell, June 11, 1807
"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed." - Mark Twain
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." -- Thomas Jefferson
"What ISN'T in the news is often more important than what IS." -- Ed Biersmith, 1942
"Newspaper editors separate the wheat from the chaff -- and print the chaff." -- Adlai Stevenson
"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast."-- Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman
"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another." -- G. K. Chesterton
“Whenever the media covers anything I know about in intimate detail ... they always get it wrong. True on the left, and true on the right. Sigh. Double sigh.” -- Don Luskin
“[I'm too old to] be influenced by newspaper arguments. When I read them I form perhaps a new opinion of the newspaper but seldom a new opinion on the subject discussed.” -- George Santayana in a letter to his sister, 1915
"... good people doing good things. But let me tell you, you'll never find it if you just follow the Washington media. You'll never know the good. All you get is controversy, crap and confusion." -- Fmr. Sen. Alan Simpson, 2-19-2006
“The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.” -- David Brinkley
"I used to be employed as a field engineer servicing [a major broadcast network's] distribution equipment, specifically their affiliates' satellite dishes. I've had many talks with TV newsmen. The most telling was one who confessed that he didn't think he could continue his job and live with himself because he daily saw 'the difference between what I am forced to report and what's really happening.' He told me that, at the first meeting with 'corporate's' news director [from the corporate holding company that owned the station, not the network], the ND told them that 'our job as reporters was to shape public opinion.' When someone protested that their job was to discover and report the truth, the ND responded, 'Whatever the public's perception is is the truth and it's your job to make sure that they have the proper perceptions.' That man's statement is always in the back of my mind whenever I see or read anything in the 'news,' that the job of reporters today is not to report hard, verifiable facts but rather to shape public opinion using selected facts presented in carefully arranged fashion." -- Chris Meissen
.. and in case you're tempted to believe the myth that all these news directors are Republicans, check this out and this too!
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
..
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
..
.
Just how pathetically stupid IS your traditional-media journalist, anyway?"...the hard-charging newshound editors at several major newspapers concede that they dropped the ball on this story because the wire services didn't explain that it was important." -- Tim Cavanaugh
"...America's news media and largest periodicals don't have it [that tiny grain of knowledge]. They work by the T&P (trust and parrot) method. They may differ in whom to trust and parrot; but they share a common inability to evaluate." -- Access to Energy Newsletter
"Maybe when they no longer receive Sierra magazine in their mailboxes, journalists will understand how campaign finance reform abridges free speech." -- Matt Welch
"You're right about the people in the media; they have never 'worked'. So many kids studying journalism, when asked why, say 'I want to change the world'. They live in a myopic world where they wish they were rock stars or famous actors who believe they are destined to imbue us with their newly acquired 'wisdom'. ... Most of us lose these delusions early in adulthood; the rest are in entertainment, journalism or holding 'Bush is Hitler' signs at some rally." -- word warrior bob
One of the primary joys and responsibilities of journalism is to point out all the choices people have. And to warn about any dangers and misleading statements brought about by bad products, bad services, bad companies, bad organizations, bad government programs and bad politicians. Why don't journalists and columnists revel in this instead of working hard to help the power-hungry acquire more and more power (which endangers the futures, even the lives, of journalists as well as of everyone else)? Nowadays it seems as though journalists have appointed themselves lobbyists for the preservation or enactment of more and more and more laws about every conceivable subject. Not only in the misguided belief that such laws do more good than harm, but apparently without concern about how they lessen the lives of people -- of decent, sane, far-sighted productive people. They even seem unconcerned about how it tends to put them, the journalists, out of a job (apparently hoping to reach a condition of affairs where no one needs to be warned of anything any more -- as the nanny state tries to mandate "total safety ... through totalitarianism"). Apparently they're so short-sighted they really do want, and would trust, the political directors of a "nanny state."
As Michael Wells has said, "Under the First Amendment (theoretically), governments can't interfere with the press: no licenses, regulations, taxes or other political nuisances. Newspapers jealously guard this freedom while editorially advocating taxes, controls and nauseous government on the rest of us--what hypocrisy!"* To which I would add: if they think somehow they themselves will remain free after all that, then they really are the short-sighted retards they deny they are. See: "A Phone Call From The Idea Police", "About Campaign Finance Reform" and "McCaffrey's Ministry of Truth."Journalists and reporters ought to see themselves as, and take pride in being, the permanent watchdogs of civilization, using, advancing and extolling the virtues of PERSUASION to right any wrongs, and even warning of the dangers of COERCION.
Always remember: "In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance." --Thomas Jefferson, 1824"The creation of the world -- said Plato -- is the victory of persuasion over force... Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals... Now the intercourse between individuals and between social groups takes one of these two forms: force or persuasion. Commerce is the great example of intercourse by way of persuasion. War, slavery, and governmental compulsion exemplify the reign of force." –- Alfred North Whitehead inAdventures of Ideas
"The notion of editorial independence from ownership only dates back to the 1930s. Prior to that time the media was openly biased and that includes the Press that the founding fathers dealt with. Some of the founders like Hamilton and Franklin had actually ran media outlets that were very biased. You used to have things like Newspapers that openly proclaimed they were a Democratic or Republican or Whig or a Federalist newspaper right on the banner. The concept of an independent and allegedly neutral was and still is mainly pushed by people from the left who do NOT want anything remotely neutral, but who instead want to make sure those "evil" business interests don't have a means of getting their side aired without it being filtered by their idea of what a neutral press consists of." -- John Dobbins
"Dividing the political positions into liberal versus conservative is itself a leading example of [an old conceptual framework that organizes the world into categories and stereotypes] shared by journalists and media activists alike. As a result, it has taken decades for libertarians in the United States to break through this conventional view of the political spectrum and gain recognition as a distinct point of view. Over and above any hostility journalists had to free-market views, there was no conceptual space within their conventional wisdom for a political philosophy that combined free markets and free minds." -- David Kelley
. .
"When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, 'there ought to be a law,' you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap." -- Thomas Sowell "The United States was supposed to have a limited government because the founders knew government power attracts demagogues and despots as surely as horse manure attracts horseflies." -- Rick Gaber
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." -- Plato (427-347 B.C.)
"Give a good man great powers and crooks grab his job." -- Rick Gaber
"Nannyism is fascism on training wheels." -- R. L. Root
"Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is." -- Thomas Sowell
"Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own. The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others - with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means." -- Henry Grady Weaver"The talkers and writers resent being left on the sidelines by the doers." -- Thomas Sowell
"The cultivation -- even celebration -- of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint." -- George Will
"Let the governmental camel stick its nose inside the broadcast tent, and the entire camel, foul smell and all, may follow." -- David Shaw
.
Poynteronline media industry news Free Market Editorial Pages Media Research Center Mediacrity ... .
.
.
.
..|..CNN's Record as Propagandist for Saddam..|..CNN's "utter moral corruption"..|..
"A friend who just returned from a Mexico cruise told me that she could not believe the anti-American vitriol spewing forth from CNN International..." -- Hugh Hewitt, 1-7-2005
One of the worst of CNN's stagings of the "news"
"Could someone please put CNN out of its misery?" -- John Hinderaker
"Now remember ... the founders of CAIR have openly expressed their desire to see the U.S. under Islamic Law. You won't hear that from CBS or CNN." -- Neal Boortz
..
Find an example of how SeeBS
corrupts news stories HERE.
.
.
When the networks announced THIS on election day in 2000:
-- the polls in the Florida
panhandle were not even closed yet; an estimated 10,000 voters stayed home or went home instead of waiting in line as a result.
.
.
.
"If there is a gaff tainting my column, I take full responsibility for it. It is NOT the fault of the editors; I'm sure they never saw it. Modern newspaper editors don't have time to read the newspaper; they spend their days in lengthy 'brainstorming' sessions with other editors wherein they try to decide what to do about the Internet." --Dave Barry
"Adhering to principles, and taking personal risk to maintain them, is a totally foreign concept to most of today's chronically smug media members -- who posture as brave, defiant truth-tellers but are the most banal and conformist people you'll ever meet in your entire life." - Michael Tracey
"The media love to wrap themselves in the mantle of 'the public's right to know' but there is no such dedication to that right when it goes against the journalists' own prejudices." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"I would not be fooled by the old myth that reporting is about objectivity. Deciding what is news is the most subjective of acts and it is probably the most important thing that we do." -- Carl Bernstein
"In the past, in the days of ink-stained wretches and typesetting, it was the editors and publishers who set the news agenda. A small coterie of journalists decided what was most important, what went on page one, what was to be emphasized day after day." -- David S. Hirschman, Editor & Publisher"... we live now in the Age of Post-Journalism. All that was before is now over, as this generation of journalists voluntarily destroyed the hallowed notion of objectivity and they will have no idea quite how to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again." -- Victor Davis Hansen
"It's impossible to comprehend how corrupt and embarrassing the US media is until you get a front-row seat to how it works." -Michael Tracey
"Too many journalists see their work as an opportunity to promote their own pet political notions, rather than a responsibility to inform the public and let their readers and viewers decide for themselves." - Dr. Thomas Sowell
"Journalists cannot serve two masters. To the extent that they take on the task of suppressing information or biting their tongue for the sake of some political agenda, they are betraying the trust of the public and corrupting their own profession." - Dr. Thomas Sowell
"Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving." - David Burge
"When I was in school journalists investigated the government. Now they just worship it." -- Robert Ditmer
PACK JOURNALISM IS A FORM OF GROUPTHINK
... journalists think too much along similar lines and rarely give non-conformist narratives a voice...Consequently, such co-orientation endangers diversity in the news...
- Folker Hanusch & Daniel Nölleke
"The single most failed institution in America today is the press." - Dick Armey
"'The Newsroom': A show about journalists so self-absorbed and self-righteous you can't believe it wasn't written by a journalist."- Jeff Salamon
See: How the Mainstream Media Misses the News HERE
Find "The word journalist has a distinct smell to it." -- Alicia Colon, HERE"...one of Taranto's Laws of Journalism: When it appears in a news story, the word some is a first-person pronoun." -- James Taranto, 6-3-2009
"When the Media cites 'unnamed sources,' that is code for, 'complete bullsh*t we just made up'." - Bill Mitchell
"Many Western journalists, in contrast to revolutionaries, do not treat ideas seriously, and therefore fail to recognize the power of ideas in action. They don't realize that chaos and brutality must accompany a determined effort to implement ... thorough-going socialism." -- Prof. Morgan O. Reynolds
"Anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total state. That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals." -- Lew Rockwell
Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.) ...
If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.
If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis. ...
So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?
Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for? ...
... tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.
This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.
If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.
-- Novelist Orson Scott Card, a Democrat, HERE
"It is not just bias -- the vast majority of media people are truly ignorant about economics (as well as history, the military, etc. etc.) They are mostly privileged white libs who went to liberal arts colleges, where they majored in English and were indoctrinated by left-wing professors. They then went off to J-school for further polishing into the little gems we see today. They have rarely had to engage in critical thinking or the use of logic to support their positions. The MSM is a hive, with a hive mentality. The swarm is dangerous, but the individual worker bee ain’t that bright." -- Phineas GageCheck out THIS example of "economics reporting" which goes beyond embarrassing to the incredibly bizarre.
"It's hard for the media to ignore a good 'racism' story, even when the definitions don't fit." -- Neal Boortz
"Journalists, being simplistic by nature and trained to seek melodrama, almost always screw up science stories. They simply hate to add all the qualifiers, conditions and uncertainties because it detracts from the drama."-- Charley Reese 6-19-2001"When covering what scientists say, reporters are particularly prone to getting the story wrong. Most of us have little training in science, little understanding of how it works, and too much faith in any one given scientist. ... Businesses often twist science to make money. Lawyers do it to win cases. Political activists distort science to fit their agenda, bureaucrats to protect their turf. Reporters keep falling for it." -- John Stossel, Give Me a Break.
"The Global Warming alarmists are the anti-science religion that is trying to forcibly indoctrinate and convert everyone while suppressing dissent. And the news media are their patsies, their stooges, their puppets. Right now, let's start demanding that whenever the local newspaper or TV stations say anything about Global Warming, they back it up with actual data that takes into account the solar oscillations, the real climate history of the earth, and the facts about what CO2 actually does in the atmosphere. ... It's time to stop letting them pass along other people's lies. It's time for the news media to stop doing cocktail party 'research' and dig down into the science and get it right." -- Orson Scott Card
"Journalists are no better than other liberal-arts majors at doing regression analysis with infinite variables." -- P.J. O'Rourke, Wall Street Journal, 4-16-02
"As the twentieth century drew to a close, the connection between hard scientific fact and public policy became increasingly elastic ... in great part because of the decline of the media as an independent assessor of fact." -- Dr. Michael Crichton
"...America's news media and largest periodicals don't have it [that tiny grain of knowledge]. They work by the T&P (trust and parrot) method. They may differ in whom to trust and parrot; but they share a common inability to evaluate. They will find two opposing viewpoints and manufacture a 'controversy;' for they think objectivity lies halfway between the truth and a lie (or worse, between two lies)."-- introduction to the Access to Energy Newsletter
"I operate under the assumption that the mass media will never be accurate. ... It operates with the objective to simplify and exaggerate, which is exactly what Walt Disney told his cartoonists." -- Dr. Michael Crichton, 1-28-05
"The case we made is: with most reporters, the understanding they have of most issues has the depth of floor wax." -- Cal Thomas, 9-18-04“Framing is a process whereby communicators, consciously or unconsciously, act to construct a point of view that encourages the facts of a given situation to be interpreted by others in a particular manner.” -- Jim Kuypers, Assistant Professor of Communications, Virginia Tech
"... political reporters love to write about politics as if they are merely disinterested observers of political events and the public's perceptions of them, when in fact they play a very key role in shaping those events and perceptions." -- Greg Sargent, a liberal columnist for the Los Angeles Times
"This is what passes for journalism today. Participate in contriving a story and then report it contrary to the facts." -- Jed Babbin
"Some folks in the media are quite willing to lie to you." -- D. J. Drummond
"Once you realize many so called journalists are in fact far-left political activists, everything makes sense." - Peter Sweden
It turns out that the entire Valerie Plame scandal was a hoax from the beginning, blown up and perpetuated by the agenda-driven mainstream media. Check it out HERE
"Deborah Solomon's weekly short interviews in the New York Times Magazine are the most irritating possible example of the snotty, smarmy, smug and holier-than-thou attitude that pervades the entire enterprise that is the Times." -- Don Luskin
"What a difference three days make. 72 little hours. In that time, a New York Times reporter went from tolling the death knell of real wage growth to reporting a 7-percent wage jump over last year after inflation." -- Ken Shepherd
“The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates. The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling.” -- Michael S. Malone
"... press conferences ... [have] become a customary courtesy over the years, but courtesy is a two-way street, except for those in the media who act like spoiled brats, as if they have some inherent right to whatever serves their institutional, career, or ideological purposes. ... The media love to wrap themselves in the mantle of 'the public's right to know' but there is no such dedication to that right when it goes against the journalists' own prejudices." -- Thomas Sowell
See::How to "report" a phony civilian body count:HERE
"There once was a time when reporters took pride in their courage. Now, however, they take pride in their 'political correctness.' That's one reason why people don't trust the press any more." -- Tony Snow, 3-30-2000
See how students at a "prestigious" J-School cheated on an ETHICS test HERE.
Public Evaluations of the News Media: 1985-2009"I’m no longer surprised that journalists lack an internal regulatory mechanism (sometimes called 'ethics' or another quaint old-fashioned term that no longer applies, 'patriotism') to prevent the release of information that could damage their own country. On the contrary, they actively search for that information and release it with great relish." -- Charles Johnson, in "The Media are the Enemy," HERE
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - Eric Blair, AKA George Orwell
> How the Media Enable Terrorism
"A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self- preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property, and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means." -- Thomas Jefferson to John Colvin, 1810
"We are now, my friends, in a situation where the majority of Americans get their news and information about what is going on with their government from entities that are licensed by and subject to punishment at the hands of that very government. Nobody can truly believe that this is what our founding fathers had in mind." -- Neal Boortz"In politics, the truth is strictly optional and that also seems to be true in parts of the media." -- Thomas Sowell
"America's free press is supposed to be one of the guardians of our freedom. But while the press is free it must also be responsible, and in this it fails comprehensively. ... If a free press is not responsible, it cannot be a defender of freedom. It can become the enemy of all who fight in defense of our way of life." -- Jed Babbin
"The New York Times is now reeling from so many huge mistakes by reporters and management that people are saying it's one of the worst newspapers in America." -- Donald Trump, 10-28-2005
"What is this morbid obsession that liberals have with Fox? It's as if Democrats, pampered and spoiled by so many decades of the mainstream media trumpeting the liberal agenda, are so shaky in their convictions that they cannot risk an encounter with opposing views. Democrats have ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time and 98 percent of American humanities professors to do their bidding. But no, that's not enough -- every spark of dissent has to be extinguished with buckets of bile."
-- Democrat Camille Paglia"Bigheaded lectures for the umpteenth time about the 'century-old standards' at The New York Times, the 'legacy' of Edward R. Murrow or the 'prestige' of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism do not cut it anymore in a world of Jayson Blair, Eason Jordan and Dan Rather." -- Victor Davis Hanson "Not only is the media biased, but it's biased in the way it even covers itself." -- Neal Boortz
"...there's a difference, even in publishing, between the lies we tell about ourselves and the lies we tell about others. It is a rare publisher that troubles to fact-check an author's claims, especially in times when proofreading can seem like too much trouble." -- New York Times Editorial, 1-13-06
"Recently two highly respected journalists -- one on the left and one towards the righht -- tried to make a case for saving the business that has been their bread and butter: newspapers. They both failed. ... '... people in the newspaper business try to make me feel better about working in the newspaper business,' Pitts wrote." -- Paul Chesser
TimesWatch presents the Top 10 Lowlights of the New York Times of 2005
"We certainly don't view government with the same awe we felt before Watergate broke, or journalism with the same respect it had before Dan Rather struck, but all available evidence suggests that it was our earlier attitudes that were misinformed." -- Glenn Reynolds
"All is woe and darkness in the house of media. If you were measuring journalists' public standing on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best, right now we're in less-than-zero territory ... The great flaw of media-scandal coverage is that it's so intramural: journalists covering other journalists in trouble ... this is a bit like assigning a second cousin of the Gambinos to cover The Family's latest criminal trial. ... The real lesson of the Times scandal is ... that the Age of Media Arrogance is over." -- William Powers
"But I stopped watching [CBS] some time ago. The unremitting liberal orientation finally became too much for me. ... A large swath of the society doesn't trust the news media. And for many, it's even stronger than that: They abhor the media and perceive it as an escalating threat to the society."-- Van Gordon Sauter, former President of CBS News, in the Los Angeles Times, 1-13-2005
"Look Bernie, of course there's a liberal bias in the news. All the networks tilt left." -- CBS NEWS President Andrew Heyward, to six-time EMMY award winner Bernard Goldberg
National Journal's Hotline Blogometer interviews Polipundit 6/16/2005: Q. How often, or do you ever, read a newspaper in its dead-tree (i.e. print) form?
A. What’s a “newspaper"?Q. How do you see the new media and old media affecting and influencing each other in the next five years?
A. Dinosaurs and asteroids. Nuff said."The MSM [mainstream media] is very defensive of its credibility, and is loathe to point out serious errors no matter who points them out. It’s all the worse when upstart media competitors like bloggers point out the errors." -- Don Luskin "Newspapers do have a few things going for them....you can't line the bird cage with the Internet or wrap fish in a cable news channel." -- Neal Boortz "It is kind of ironic when you think about it. I mean the internet was begat by the old Arpanet which was created to keep the flow of important data moving through alternative nodes when one or more of them became disabled or nonfunctional. ... Not just ironic. Delicious." -- Jessica's Well "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- John Gilmore "Decades of state censorship have yielded a mastery of euphemism and allegory so subtle the Chinese government ends up promoting films meant to mock its rule. If any culture will find a way to discuss freedom while routing around [the censorship of] the word freedom, it's China's." -- Kerry Howley "What's even more laughable is those in the press (like the amazingly pompous and inane New York Times) who are now tut-tutting about how awful it is that these independently funded groups are allowed to be heard. Oh, what is it you're afraid of, Mr. News Editor Man? That you don't get to be the gatekeeper of what people are allowed to hear about any more? ... The Internet has detected the mainstream media as a form of censorship and simply routed around them." -- Dean Esmay "A sudden loss of status and influence is a profound shock to most people who have spent their lives aimed at the acquisition and enjoyment of socio- political standing. Relieved of the ability to shape the consciousness and behavior of others, a certain number unburden themselves of the inner restraints which kept them from openly voicing the condescension and scorn they have for those whom they regard as their social, intellectual, and moral inferiors." -- Thomas Lifson "The real luxury [of the internet in general and the blogosphere in particular] is not having someone like you [MSM people] misrepresent what people are, do and mean by your selective 'fact-sifting', out of context quoting, and sloppy reporting. ... I am targeting the entire profession here. I am an equal opportunity ranter." -- Adriana Lukas "A bunch of amateurs, no matter how smart and enthusiastic, could never outperform professional neurosurgeons, because they lack the specialized training and experience necessary for that field. But what qualifications, exactly, does it take to be a journalist? What can they do that we can't? Nothing. Generally speaking, they don't know any more about primary data and raw sources of information than we do -- often less. Their general knowledge is often inadequate. Their superior resources should allow them to carry out investigations far beyond what we amateurs can do. But the reality is that the mainstream media rarely use those resources. Too many journalists are bored, biased and lazy." -- John Hinderaker
"Journalists are no better than other liberal-arts majors at doing regression analysis with infinite variables." -- P.J. O'Rourke,WSJ, 4-16-02
Guerilla Media on the rise"Question: What does the stock market know that the mainstream media [MSM] do not? Answer: almost everything." -- Larry Kudlow "The power of the blogosphere (more properly, the internet) does not lie in a handful of bloggers with well-read sites. It resides in the hundreds of thousands, or millions, of smart, well-informed, engaged readers who, collectively, have amazing knowledge and expertise in just about any area you can think of. What is new is the ability to bring together these disparate sources of knowledge, analyze them, and disseminate them in real time. We help to do this, but on a big, fast-breaking story like this one, the real impetus comes from our readers--a point we make in every interview we give." -- John Hinderaker "The people in the MSM don't think of themselves as liberal. They're just in favor of collectivism and against individualism in general -- without using many labels (or mucch thought) of any kind. They go out of their way only to mention a minority group if they can. Groupism is what they believe in." -- Rick Gaber
"World Ends; Women,
Minorities Hardest Hit"
-- headline parody by James Taranto, HERE., 6-6-03
"Report: Tsunami Hit Women Hardest" - headline, CNN.com, 3-26-05"The MSM's avoidance of the individualist perspective is now routed-around." -- Rick Gaber
.
See how "editors and policy wonks on the left are so obviously up to their old tricks already" HERE.SHAME on the media for burying this story about Louisiana authorities preventing the Red Cross and Salvation Army from delivering food, water, medicine, and care to the people trapped in the Superdome, Convention Center and all of New Orleans.
.
"Remember how CBS News spiked a poll showing 67 percent of Americans supported George W. Bush's tax cut plan? It didn't stop there. Now ABC News has poll results it doesn't want to handle. An ABC News/ Washington Post poll found that 58 percent think Bush's tax cut is 'about right' or 'too small.' Only 36 percent said it was 'too big.' Did these results make it to air? Of course not!" -- Neal Boortz, 3-29-01"The media seem to have come up with a formula that would make any war in history unwinnable and unbearable: They simply emphasize the enemy's victories and our losses." -- Thomas Sowell
.
"Headlines from Afghanistan always read 'Five Soldiers Killed and Wounded,' not '150 Taliban Killed.' If today's journalists reported the Battle of Midway, we'd read 'U.S. Aircraft Shot From Skies,' with a brief mention of the destruction of the Japanese carrier fleet buried at the bottom." -- Ralph PetersDomestic spying? The Clinton administration spied domestically on the Conference of Catholic Bishops, Jerry Falwell, the NRA, Cardinal O’Connor and others, none exactly international terrorists. You remember the unrelenting uproar about it in the nation's press and airwaves, don't you? You don't? Oh, yeah, right. Never mind.
"I’m no longer surprised that journalists lack an internal regulatory mechanism (sometimes called 'ethics' or another quaint old-fashioned term that no longer applies, 'patriotism') to prevent the release of information that could damage their own country. On the contrary, they actively search for that information and release it with great relish." -- Charles Johnson, in "The Media are the Enemy," HERE
"Sometimes the fourth estate seems more like a fifth column."-- Dr. Thomas Sowell, HERE and HERE
"It's the enemedia." -- Fred Nerks
"Suppose that American media were really funded and supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, and openly opposed to the United States. How would the coverage differ? Answer: not at all." -- Charles Johnson
"Why do 'they' [the editors of The New York Times] hate us?" -- Michael Barone
Journalists invite terrorist to a party, yuk it up with him, and now The Guardian actually hires a supporter of terrorism. (How chic. Vomit.)
“Muslim Community Leaders Warn of Backlash from Tomorrow Morning’s Terrorist Attack.”-- parody of a Guardian headline written by a commenter on Tim Blair’s website in Australia
"Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush -- sophistry washed down with Chardonnay." -- Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
"Caught up in the hidden marxist agenda of their postmodern rhetoric, ... the graduates of these journalism schools march in lockstep with ... the poor victimized terrorists and all the helpless and persecuted dictators and tyrants ..." -- Pat Santy
“Islamists who murder non-Muslims in pursuit of explicitly Islamic goals are airbrushed into vague, generic 'rebel forces.' You can't tell the players without a scorecard, and that's just the way the Western media intend to keep it.” -- Mark Steyn
.
The AP calls terrorist mastermind bin Laden a "dissident" here. Outrageous."Sheridan’s omissions are part of a larger problem of journalists who have wittingly or unwittingly become defacto public relations representatives for extremist Islamist groups. Taking their press releases at face value, journalists have helped effectively to cover up the larger, serious issue of the growing secret network of the Muslim Brotherhood in the US." --Andrew Cochran
See how "the last five years of relentless dishonesty and fecklessness in the American media" have made nuclear war a near-certainty here.
"The courts have given the news media carte blanche, in the name of the First Amendment -- but the media are no better than government at exercising unchecked power. When it's known that no one can punish you, a certain kind of person stops caring whether he hurts anybody. And such people tend to rise within any organization that doesn't work hard to have a conscience." -- Orson Scott Card
"... all of the major news outlets in this country, at this very moment in fact, have been ... scurrilous and malevolent." -- Kowalski
"There is corruption in our business [of journalism]," he said. "We need to get back to basics. This war should be studied and talked about. In the run up to this war, to my mind, there was a gross abdication of responsibility." -- John Burns HERE
.
"After rioters have been christened 'demonstrators' by the media, it was perhaps inevitable that terrorists would be christened 'militants'." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell“Kidnap and behead Westerners, or bomb schools, and the Associated Press will call you an 'insurgent.' At worst, a militant. ... But attack a dictatorial Ba’athist regime and suddenly you’re a terrorist, sans scare quotes...” -- Charles Johnson
"... how the Reuters 'news' service described its effort to treat terrorists and their victims 'on a level playing field'."-- James Taranto
."Is there any more cowardly class of Americans than journalists? ... the nation’s media professionals have lately demonstrated a kind of courage rarely seen outside a hamster cage." -- Tim Cavanaugh
"When our media has the testicular fortitude to report on terrorists honestly, then they will have gained the moral authority to lecture any White House on censorship and the responsibility of fully informing the public. Until then, such demonstrations as we saw this week by the White House press corps only stands as a perverse monument to the media's hypocrisy and venality." -- Ed Morrissey, 2-19-2006
"Refusing to even acknowledge the Santorum-Hoekstra announcement is another black eye for American journalism, and further evidence that the MSM is (thankfully) on its last legs." -- Spook86
The New York Times disorts Rep. Hoekstra's letter
.
"This cult of murderers [Iraq's terrorists] will kill some of their own women and children and then try to make it look like they were killed by American forces. The media, of course, will fall right in line with this anti-American game." -- Neal Boortz"I'm not so old as the Gray Lady, but it seems to me the working motto of the New York Times has always been 'All the news that fits our agenda,' not just since its various story-fabrication scandals came to light." -- Rick Gaber
.
“Anything negative, no matter how commonplace, can make the front page of the New York Times, while even remarkable acts of bravery or compassion are passed over in silence." -- Thomas Sowell"The Times' new motto: 'all the news that others find unfit to print'."-- Don Luskin
The New York Times is being sued over its motto. Check out The Fat Lady's Comical Self-Importance as well.
"Like the activist who loves The People but despises every actual person he meets, the Times’ editorial page takes liberal stands when the issue is safely abstract -- but when it comes to the paper’s profits and political battles, the Little Guy can get bent." -- Matt Welch
"The New York Times: It Just Can’t Stop Hating Success and the American Way of Life" -- Dr. George Reisman
.
"The press is hostile to the idea of liberty. Most people in the press are for big government ... [they] think that the solution to anything, whether it's health care problems, education, whatever it is -- it's got to be more government." -- Harry Browne, July 4, 2002
A new study of journalists' brain functioning reveals that they have a below-average ability to regulate their emotions, suppress biases, solve complex problems, switch between tasks, and show creative and flexible thinking.
"When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, 'there ought to be a law,' you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
"It seems as though you can't go a week without some idiotic myrmidon yelling, 'there oughta be a federal law!' " -- Neal Boortz
"It's gotten to the point where relying on journalists to be government watchdogs (to protect liberty against demagogues), is like relying on pedophiles to be inspectors of daycare centers (to protect toddlers against abuse)." -- Rick Gaber
"The purpose of the government is to provide the service, and the purpose of the media is to provide the vaseline." -- old libertarian joke
"The time is long overdue for schools of journalism to start teaching economics. It would eliminate much of the nonsense and hysteria in the media, and with it perhaps some of the demagoguery in politics." -- Thomas Sowell"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance." – Murray N. Rothbard
"Never -- and I mean never -- blindly trust the statistics you read [or hear] about the economy." -- Don Luskin, HERE
“Americans are fed a steady diet of idiotic commentary and specious 'analyses' most of which flow smoothly down the gullets of unsuspecting nightly-news, viewers, newspaper readers, and National Public Radio devotees. But for those of us vexed with some comprehension of supply and demand, comparative advantage, the role of prices, the nature of money, and other economic insights, most of what is uttered or written by the news media on economic topics is so ignorant that it hurts to hear it.” -- by Donald J. Boudreaux
"Well, of course capitalism is the cause of prosperity. Given the overwhelming evidence of the 20th century, only a New York Times reporter would regard this as a surprising or controversial conclusion." -- Robert Tracinski
"As a leap of faith, let us assume that the New York Times is telling the truth about the facts. What does this one woman's story prove in a country of more than a quarter of a billion people? ... The Timesstory gets around that problem by simply declaring her to be like 'millions at the bottom of the labor force' who are part of 'the hidden America.' This unsubstantiated assertion is crucial to the point that they are trying to make. But what if your faith can't leap that far?" -- Thomas Sowell
See "how the process of straining political events through the standard journalistic narrative templates - especially the right-vs.-left narrative -- can simplify a story so greatly that it emerges as a different story, perhaps even the wrong story" HERE.
"What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion."-- H.L. Mencken
"The mainstream media is to information what American Idol is to real talent and ability." -- Mike Hu
"It used to make me incredibly angry anytime I saw a story like this reported in such a sloppy and dishonest fashion. It still makes me angry, but it comes as absolutely no surprise anymore. I have come to expect this kind of crap from the mainstream media. The only nice thing I can say is that at least they are consistent ... just imagine that your local newspaper, read by everyone you know, wrote a story saying that you were accused of some horrible act -- let’s say rape for the men, child beating for the women. Imagine that the headline and opening dozen paragraphs of the story herald the accusations made against you. Then in the thirteenth paragraph of the story they say that DNA tests have cleared you of the rape (for the men) or that an investigation had found no evidence of child abuse (for the women). Let’s say that your local television news picks up the story, and reports the accusations, but doesn’t bother to report the DNA or investigation results." -- Lorie Byrd
"If you haven't been under a rock the last few weeks, or relying on the mainstream media as your sole source of news [which is even worse], you are likely aware of some of the questionable circumstances surrounding the organization Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)." -- Jeff PoorJournalists conceal Julian Bond's crazy talk here.
"Large sections of the international media are not only misreporting the current conflict in Lebanon. They are actively fanning the flames." -- Tom Gross, National Post"Following a precision strike by bloggers from around the world, the mainstream media's reputation can be seen going up in photoshopped smoke in Lebanon." -- Perry de Havilland
"Now that the wire services and their photographers have been called out on it, they're all dancing on the head of a pin trying to explain away the discrepancy. They've been nailed as willing participants in the Islamic terror propaganda efforts." -- Neal Boortz, HERE
