Friday, February 13, 2004

The first warning is the phrase, "Change for America

At what point did "liberal" become synonymous with "the same old political promises" and "progressive" with "failed ideologies repackaged"? Liberals have had a new idea since 1930 and even then they didn't work. Yet here we are four score years later and they're promising us more change that looks a whole lot like "The New Retread Deal."

Do you want something new? How about a news industry that delivers straight objective facts without the sleazy spin? One that doesn't peep and mutter endlessly over an insubstantial innudendo of Bush being AWOL 3O years ago, but self-righteously defends its ethics when a scandal against his opponent with just about as much evidence behind it gets studiously ignored. Wouldn't it be nice to have a source that cuts through all the spin and just points to facts; where reporters didn't view readers as morons who need spoon feeding; and opinions were kept to the OpEd page? I'd love to see a paper where reporters' biases were known, acknowledged and balanced by others with offsetting slants, without all the phoney pretenses. As citizens and voters we need two things, facts and interpretation. The plain facts are what we need news media for. The interpretation can have all the spin they want, as long as we have a whole spectrum to consider. It's when the plain and the spun are mixed, where facts are presented selectively and one newspaper decides what is news for the whole nation, that the media fails its responsibility. In most of our history, the best we could get was a spectrum. There were lots of papers and their points of view were known and understood. Now the papers have dwindled down to one or two per city and they are all manned (or womanned) by people whose views were preformed in J-school, with the exception that the smart ones, like Michael Kelly, Brit Hume, Bernard Goldberg and others figure it out and start following the facts where they lead. That's why Fox News, for all of its tabloid tawdriness, is so popular--and so hated by the left. I don't know if FNC is really fair and balanced, but I do know that the vast majority of news operations aren't.

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