Quake3World

True, but the key word in your post is "national." All the "mainstream" media has ever been good for is creating a nationalist ideology. Bearing that in mind, the notion of a virtuous free press protecting your rights is a little bit misleading. I think of mainstream journalists assailing the establishment as an isolated incident

If you want to read a really good and pretty short book about the place of print capitalism in western society, take a look at this: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... s&n=507846

That's true, and I believe a lot of people either forget or don't realize that Woodward and Bernstein were the exceptions, not the rule, even in their day.

Still, today you have a government who is directly paying reporters for major news institutions to report favorably on their policies. Not only that, we find out about Judith Miller's level of involvement in the leak case, and the NYT management has to protect her, because it was not interested in fact-checking the reasons to take us into a war.

Basically, beyond supporting nationalism, we have an institution that is trumpeting support for White House causes - but the worst part is that a large percent of the population believes everything they say, because they believe this ideal of a quote-unquote 'free and independent press' extends to the places where they get all their news.

So it's really quite damaging to the republic, in the sense that it misleads our voters without them knowing it.

A large department in our government that has a very direct impact on all of our lives, has now been officially accused of spreading propaganda by its own Inspector General, in order to support the sitting president's agenda, yet a majority of the public doesn't even know that.

Dave wrote:

seremtan wrote:indeed

the whole "get the government off our backs" bandwagon is a joke. if state intervention ended tomorrow, business would go bust, with no tax-funded roads to transport their goods, no tax-funded education for their workforce, no recourse to tax-funded judiciary to pursue their property erights, no use of tax-funded police or other emergency services, and especially no use of the tax-funded military to prise open new markets

externalities = free ride

So, who wins when business goes bust?

no one. that's precisely my point.

R00k wrote:That's true, and I believe a lot of people either forget or don't realize that Woodward and Bernstein were the exceptions, not the rule, even in their day.

That is what I've been telling people for ages: The mainstream media has NEVER had a backbone.

I have no idea why people are saying,"I wish the media would get back to being critical of current events". They've never been. Ever.

Reporters that are critical are marginalized or labeled conspiracy theorists and ignored by the general public.....usually.

R00k wrote: So it's really quite damaging to the republic, in the sense that it misleads our voters without them knowing it.

A large department in our government that has a very direct impact on all of our lives, has now been officially accused of spreading propaganda by its own Inspector General, in order to support the sitting president's agenda, yet a majority of the public doesn't even know that.

That's because of the sad fact that 99% of mainstream media - in any country - is government propaganda packaged as news.

Like a punchline in a joke...it's all in the delivery.

Dave wrote:

seremtan wrote:

Dave wrote:Oh and just remember... Everyone picks on the US for the same reason people write viruses for Windows and not Mac OS X. It's not because the BSD base of OS X is inherently secure, but because no one pays attention to it.

well, if bill gates sallied forth from redmond every few years to destroy the codebase of all rival OS's, and wrote viruses and trojans to hack said OS's on a regular basis, this would be a good analogy

You're fooling yourself if you dismiss the 2nd part of my post so easily

i didn't dismiss it, it's just that it's very old news to me. debates about national sovereignty in the EU have been going on for quite a long time now, at least since Maastricht (i.e. 1992)

seremtan wrote:

Dave wrote:

seremtan wrote:indeed

the whole "get the government off our backs" bandwagon is a joke. if state intervention ended tomorrow, business would go bust, with no tax-funded roads to transport their goods, no tax-funded education for their workforce, no recourse to tax-funded judiciary to pursue their property erights, no use of tax-funded police or other emergency services, and especially no use of the tax-funded military to prise open new markets

externalities = free ride

So, who wins when business goes bust?

no one. that's precisely my point.

heh.. you started out sarcastic, but ended rather serious so i wasn't sure what your goal was with that post

Dave wrote:True, but the key word in your post is "national." All the "mainstream" media has ever been good for is creating a nationalist ideology. Bearing that in mind, the notion of a virtuous free press protecting your rights is a little bit misleading. I think of mainstream journalists assailing the establishment as an isolated incident

that sounds a lot like the is/ought fallacy. the media are not a natural event, like weather or an ecosystem, that can be merely described, non-judgementally. stories are pursued or ignored as a result of decisions made by various people, hence judgement of those decision-making processes applies

i'm not sure what you mean by saying the notion of a "virtuous free press" being "misleading". if you mean that's a misleading description of the actual mainstream press, i'd say yeah, and that's an understatement. on the other hand, if you're saying such a thing is some kind of utopian fantasy (i.e. being a 'pragmatist') then you're certainly at odds with the Founders, who drafted the 1st amendment precisely because they realised that such a press was essential for liberty and democracy

Dave wrote:

seremtan wrote:

Dave wrote: So, who wins when business goes bust?

no one. that's precisely my point.

heh.. you started out sarcastic, but ended rather serious so i wasn't sure what your goal was with that post

my point was: if you scratch an 'anti-statist' what you find underneath is *drum roll* a statist - someone who is quite happy to take from the state (i.e. taxpayer) but grumbles when something is demanded in return. all the things i listed are externalities - costs of doing business not borne directly or entirely by the business in question, i.e. a free ride

It's not at odds with the founders of this country, it's completely central to their intent. Newspapers and pamphlets created and coordinated an American nationalism where none existed before in the decade before the Revolutionary War. No print capitalism to create a sense of nation, no sense of intracontinental trust to bind people in disparate parts of the colonies together, no revolution.

In the end, Newspapers are funded and created by people with agendas.

Edit: I use "newspapers" because they contrasted with the pamphlets of the day in terms of who was putting them out, who was reading them and on what scale. Newspaper publishers were usually wealthy and had the capital for wide distribution. They're representative of any kind of mainstream, widely read or watched type of media you'd find today. On the other hand, I'd liken pamphleteers to bloggers... anyone with a few bucks to print a bunch of leaflets or rent space on an ISP, not huge corporate interests.

It seems to me that newspapers generally represented business interests and pamphlets were more aimed at political ideology. But since newspapers were the primary source of advertising of goods arriving from Britain and most common people didn't read pamphlets, they became the primary tool for getting everyone, rich and poor, on the same ideological page.

damn, that's not all i have to write, but i have to start my 20 minute walk to work

GONNAFISTYA wrote:That's because of the sad fact that 99% of mainstream media - in any country - is government propaganda packaged as news.

Like a punchline in a joke...it's all in the delivery.

Yep. The reason it is worse here in the States, is because a majority of the population will argue vehemently that they have a free and completely objective press, which tells them everything they need to know on a daily basis. i.e. they think they are completely informed - which not only makes matters worse because they vote on those facts; it also causes them (a majority of the population) to put down real investigative journalists as wackos or conspiracy nuts, simply because they think they are getting the real, objective, whole-and-nothing-but-the-truth.

The myth that "free and independent press" is a de-facto definition of all of our media outlets is one of the most destructive things in the country, IMHO.