Does anyone really need more evidence that the left wants a biased and agenda driven media? Yes? Ok, lets look at the writings of the Grand Poobah on the left, Mr. Glenn Greenwald:
Both in theory and in practice, The Washington Post — as the most influential newspaper in the nation’s capital — has been a vitally important check on the power of the federal government. Its greatest successes and contributions have been when it has acted as an adversarial force balancing abuses of power by national political officials. That is the core function which newspapers are intended to perform, and the Post has a long and illustrious history of performing it as well as any other newspaper.
There you have it. The core function of newspapers is be an adversarial force against the Government!
Silly me, I thought all along it was to report the damn news. But no….I had it all wrong. They are not supposed to report about events, they are actually supposed to attach an agenda to the reporting of that event and then introduce a smidgen of bias. All to balance the power of Government.
IN THINKING ABOUT The Great Greenwald Thesis (as history will no doubt come to know it), I’ve wondered if I would prefer newspapers that considered it their core mission to be sticking their collective thumb into the collective eye of domestic political forces that I don’t like. And you know what? I’d take a pass.
Don’t get me wrong. I love journalistic endeavors with an agenda like The Weekly Standard and National Review. I’m even thrilled to contribute to them when they give me the opportunity to do so. But they’re not newspapers. They don’t pretend to gather “all the news that’s fit to print.” They print analyses of whatever strikes their fancies in any given issue.
But for news, I just want the raw data. Frankly, I wouldn’t want a newspaper to consider its core mission over the next two years to serve as an adversarial force to Nancy Pelosi. And I certainly wouldn’t buy such a rag.
Anytime a reporter decides that he/she will add some of their own bias to a story it becomes an editorial. Editorials are fine, print as many as you damn like, but at least label it as such. Instead we get editorials labeled as news. No where in journalism school should they teach that their job is to be adversarial, rather they should be teaching them how to find and report the facts, minus the bias.
A comment made to Dean Barnett’s blog post was excellent in summarizing what a fair and balanced media consists of:
A free and fair press is the best weapon against tyranny, but only if the press remains as fair as it is free. Partisan politics has no place in a newspaper or broadcast report. Journalists have made themselves ineffective with their agenda-driven opinion and the only solution is for them to return to fair and balanced reporting.
It’s not about which side a reporter agrees with. It’s only about what the facts are and the facts will speak for themselves.
Unfortunately we do not have this free and fair press any longer. Think about it, the press is only "adversarial" when the Republicans are in power. Once the Democrats get into power then everyone is holding hands singing Kum-Ba-Yah.
Everyone can see the bias that seeps through whether it’s when reporters use fake Iraqi police officers to write a story about violence in Iraq or when they ignore every single good thing that happens in Iraq, we all understand what is happening. They have an agenda to get us out of Iraq just like they did in Vietnam. 50,000+ lives were lost in Vietnam for nothing because we never finished the job. You can thank Walter Cronkite, the liberals, and the rest of the MSM for that. But will we let them succeed in Iraq?
See author page
If they were really a check and balance to power and sought to keep govt accountable, then they’d be demanding the Democrats produce their 2006 campaign mantra, their “New Direction In Iraq” plan. You know, the one Gov Dean admitted to Chris Matthews on election night that they didn’t even start working on, but they would as soon as they were elected. Yeah, ok. Sure….. I’ve yet to see a single member of the media ask Gov Dean where their plan is, and why the unelected ISG was able to produce one, but they weren’t even while campaigning on sizzle.
Still no steak.
I find it more than a little strange that you smear the Washington Post as part of a monolithic force that is bent on destroying conservatives and use an article where the author takes the Post to task for an editorial that extolls Pinochet’s record and pays homage to Jeane Kirkpatrick, a paragon of conservative intellectual thought.
I disagree with the point that the media is only adversarial when GOPers are in office. The media will swarm and go adversarial against anyone when they smell blood in the water.
It’s a timing thing really.
GOP scandals are broken before all the facts are in and pushed relentlessly. Democrat scandals will often be broken by others (think Lewinsky scandal broken by Drudge) before finally being picked up by big media outlets, who will be slow to push the story until they think all the facts are in.
However, once the scandals have broken, the media will swarm and push to bring down whoever is in its path; a legacy of Watergate perhaps where journalists are all trying to be the next Woodward/Bernstein to bring down a politician.
Bloggers and independent journalists have evened things up of late – being able to break stories out there about Democrat malfeasance, but the larger point of what journalists are supposed to be doing – reporting news instead of editorializing remains a sound one.
Now that the Democrats are in control of Congress, I wonder if they will extend that adversarial logic to them? Ha! I doubt it.