Conservative Media Has Different Aims, Held to Different Standards

[babylonsister]

http://www.theygaveusarepublic.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=6245

Conservative Media Has Different Aims, Held to Different Standards
by: Ted Frier
Tue Jul 27, 2010 at 10:25:13 AM CDT

snip//


In the broadest sense, of course the American free press is "liberal." The whole point of a free press in a democracy, after all, is to empower the masses by giving them access to information that enables them to both exercise political power and to hold a society's business, professional, educational and cultural elites accountable. At the same time, a free press reflects the Enlightenment faith in human reason and the belief that truth is a journey and not a destination.

But what if you are wealthy far right reactionary, or a right wing movement, that doesn't believe in these basic principles of a free and liberal democratic society? What if you do not believe in the Enlightenment "search" for truth since your "Truth" has already been found and has been codified in the orthodoxy of some religion or in the tenets of some political or economic ideology?

What if you do not believe in giving the masses political power but believe instead in the traditional castes and hierarchies that conservatives have always believed in throughout history, with effective power confined within the hands of safe and reliable conservative elites?

And what if you are a rich reactionary willing to invest billions of dollars, and devote a generation or more, to carefully planting and nurturing these reactionary ideas. And all the time disguising the genuine anti-popular nature of these ideas behind a populist fog that exploits the masses' natural instinct against power by keeping the focus entirely on the power of the democratic state, that exploits their fear of strangers by provoking racial animosities, and that redirects the masses' natural hatred of "elites" who hold them in contempt by redirecting populist animosities to the liberal bi-coastal elites who might be the masses' natural allies.

If you believed all these things, your definition of journalism would be entirely different from one based on fairness, accuracy and objectivity. Your standard would not be how well your journalism kept the public informed about their world in a general sense. It would be how well your "journalism" advanced the right wing conservative agenda.

And since your journalism had this very specific objective in mind, you would not be concerned in the least about whether it was "fair" or "balanced" or if someone called you a hypocrite for attacking progressive writers and thinkers for informally communicating with one another while you sat down every Wednesday at noon with right wing political and business leaders to plan and coordinate the right wing takeover of the American Democracy. With standards for journalism like these the idea of a "double" standard is entirely without meaning.

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http://www.theygaveusarepublic.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=6245

[tanyev]

1. Why, you might even use "fair and balanced" as an ironic advertising slogan.

[lakers4life24]

2. Coservative Media has only one Aim and that it to Lie, Bend the Truth, and Manipulate..

Their viewers to the point that they believe such Lies and Misinformation are the Truths no matter how ridiculous they are. And the fact of the matter is that their viewers are Gullible and Stupid enough to believe it and that's just SAD.