Repair-It

The laundry list is too long. I couldn’t even begin to compile it. The entire narrative is false—an entire tapestry of false conceptions built out of mostly true facts.

The only false conception that is really worth taking note of—largely because it feeds all the rest—is this idea that reporters report, i.e., that the news is a service to provide citizens with mere and unbiased information, i.e., that there is a impenetrable and unscalable wall between the reporting and editorial functions.

Such a vision is what those in the media want to believe about themselves, and so do promote it. This is an impossibility in our regime, where… as we were all taught… government is by consent of the governed. If government runs on consent, on public opinion, on what people think, then those who influence what people think are part of the government.

Now who carries the most influence over what people think?

Just as no one goes into religious ministry for the money, so too no one goes into journalism for the money. Sure there are some rich preachers, and sure there are some rich journalists. But in the main, few of either set get rich off the enterprise. But they do, both, however, get a lot of influence over what people think. And in this age of increasing secularization and decreased religious observance, I’d say the typical journalist has a much bigger pulpit than the typical clergyman.

The media are a major nexus of power, unmentioned in the Constitution and therefore all the more powerful because unmentioned. The power of the President is Constitutionally limited. The power of the Press is not. Come to think of it, the power of the Clergy is also Constitutionally limited. The power of the Press is not.

So when media aren’t telling people exactly what to think, they’re telling people what not to think, setting the bounds of “polite discourse”, creating false or misleading dichotomies, choosing what racially tinged crimes are worth reporting and which are not, proclaiming their virtuous neutrality, and so forth.

While reporters are typically pretty humble, and typically report facts, they are not merely humble reporters of fact. They participate in creating an illusion about what the world is like—an illusion that conforms to their narrative and their agenda. Kinda like religious ministers do. J-school is just another version of Seminary.

And the funny thing is, once you see the “liberal media” as primarily a world-view engine—a propaganda organ—you can read between the lines, hear and understand what was not said. You can tell when they accidentally tell the truth, and when they’re obfuscating. You can, in other words, actually understand the news.

Absolutely correct. I would just like to add a comment on the groupthink “bubble” that the mainstream media lives in. The mainstream media has traditionally been defined as the major TV network news operations, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the AP, Times & Newsweek, PBS, and more recently we can add websites like Huffington Post, Politico, etc.

The data on reporters for this bloc shows that over 3/4 of them graduated from the same 6 or so journalism schools, all located in the same region (northeast) and taught by the same relatively small group of professors who all think alike themselves. This creates a tremendously closed-off bubble that leads to facts like this: while the country is basically split 50/50 on abortion, over 90% of reporters are pro-choice. Regan won two huge landslides, but reporters voted over 90% against him. And many other examples show they are NOT representative of the country.

By the way, this bubble not only biases them against conservative ideas, but also against farther-left progressive ideas. They basically represent the Clinton style Democrat party line. “Democrat operatives with bylines” as a famous blogger coined the phrase.