To Be News or Not To Be News
by Jim Buckley
No reason to get your jockstraps all tangled up in knots upon hearing (or seeing) the news that neither Rachel Maddow at MSNBC nor Jake Tapper on CNN ran former president Donald Trump’s victory speech after winning the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses with over 50% of the vote. Maddow refused to run any of the speech, babbling on with some bullpoop about MSNBC being a “real” news station and couldn’t (Oh my!) possibly transmit false or misinformation on such a credible news source as her station (Russia collusion and Hunter Biden’s laptop being the exception).
Tapper ran with the president’s speech until Trump segued into his litany of complaints and accomplishments. Tapper chose then to cut the sound and to talk over Trump, explaining that he just couldn’t countenance being party to broadcasting falsehoods.
Harumph.
In any case, if you are wearing panties (and there’s nothing wrong with that), don’t get them in a twist. Because, you see, none of these stations (MSNBC, CNN, Fox Cable News, NewsMax, et al) are “news” stations at all. MSNBC and CNN serve as the broadcasting arm of the Democrat Party. Fox and NewsMax serve the same role for either the Republican Party or the conservative cause.
And that’s okay.
That is, in fact, the way it should be.
It’s the way it must be.
There was once a “fairness doctrine” (with “fairness” being defined by governmental entities) that oversaw political conversation on the airways.
Then, along came cable and its stations that were completely unconcerned about fairness. Their messages were sent by privately owned cable systems and received by paying customers.
They didn’t need to be fair.
Let the customer decide.
Mercifully, the FCC put an end to the use of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987.
To the left-wing’s horror, Rush Limbaugh launched his radio show the very next year and turned the dead and dying AM radio frequencies into a money pot.
And that was a good thing.
But, for the record, what exactly is news and who determines it?
Let’s examine, for example, The New York Times, which proudly boasts under its logo that it reports “All the news fit to print.”
The Times took it upon itself more than a century ago (the late 1800s) to develop a niche for the paper proclaiming itself an “objective” observer and reporter of news. At the time, there was stiff competition among the 15 or so other New York City newspapers vying for paying readership for their one- or two-cent broadsheets or tabloids.
Subsequently, if the editors at The New York Times didn’t think it was news – that it was not worthy of putting into print – then it wasn’t news. If New York Times editors (or founder Adolph Ochs or his successors) determined that the latest scandal wasn’t worth his readers’ attention, they would tell their readers to move on. Nothing to see here.
Down a nearby avenue, Joseph Pulitzer at his Evening World and William Randolph Hearst at the New York Evening Journal, were battling head-to-head for the same audience.
Compiling news was always a business first. The New York Times got away with pretending it was an objective arbiter for over a century. It’s editors proudly proclaimed that they wouldn’t dirty their hands in covering some of the garbage their competitors were into. And that ploy worked for them well into the 1990s, until they finally fessed up that they were always pretty much a left-wing paper.
We recall The Times’ positive coverage of the Soviet Union from its onset in 1917 (“I have seen the future, and it works,” Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times Moscow correspondent [and communist sympathizer] Walter Duranty proclaimed). The Nation, a forever left-leaning magazine, gushed that Duranty’s reports for The New York Times were “the most enlightened, dispassionate dispatches from a great nation in the making which appeared in any newspaper in the world.”
Wow.
If one thinks of American cable tv stations as individual newspapers, one should then examine the newspaper world in France.
Le Figaro offers a mostly conservative view of politics and events, though, according to my Google sources, its politics has recently shifted to a more centric stance.
Le Monde, on the other hand, is the premier left-wing newspaper in France.
Readers make their newspaper-reading decisions based upon the editorial stances of both newspapers.
In England, as in most European countries, there are “liberal” and “conservative” newspapers, and their readers know which is which. They can choose from among the Daily Mail, The Sun, Daily Express, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, and The Guardian.
Here in America, no one outside New York City or Washington, D.C. reads any longer. They watch TV. Mainly because there are no more newspapers to read. The Internet has killed them. To make matters worse, the traditional broadcast channels (ABC, NBC, CBS) lean left, so there isn’t anything different to choose from.
However, cable-tv viewers do have choices.
We know which way these stations tilt.
It’s no secret.
MSNBC is filled with left-leaning former intelligence department heads (former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan), along with left-leaning race hustlers such as Al Sharpton and Joy Reid; all its talking heads are decidedly left-wing.
Fox and NewsMax on the other hand, feature more-or-less right-wing, or at least conservative, commentators. Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, and Greg Gutfeld are Fox’s big draws.
As founder and editor-publisher of the Montecito Journal (from 1995 to 2019), I was often taken to task by various readers who scolded me for not covering some event or bit of news that they believed was “fit to print.” My response was nearly always one form or another of explaining that if it had nothing to do with Montecito, we really were not interested. That was true then and perhaps it remains true today under its new leadership.
One thing readers and viewers must be aware of is that every newspaper, magazine, newsletter, and media outlet is its own censor and arbiter of what constitutes “news” for its readership. As editors and publishers, we can exclude, include, omit, or promote what we wish.
That so many in the media today seem to relish – and wish to make permanent – their new-found “partnership” with government and with the intelligence community is indeed worrisome.
This nation’s founders and writers of the U.S. Constitution included freedom of the press as one of the cornerstones of governance, along with the separation of powers among the three branches of government.
Media (the Press) was meant to act as the fourth branch of government.
Collusion between media outlets and governmental entities is the easiest way to slide into tyranny.
So, let’s have no more whining about what MSNBC, CNN, or anyone else omitted or included in its coverage.
We’ve got choices.
Let’s make them.
We have always had liberal or conservative newspapers, and the reading public did indeed have "choice." But back then (and it wasn't so long ago), the opinion articles were clearly placed in the editorial section. News reporting presented objective analysis of the stories of the day. Now, every story is presented with a politically subjective slant. Thus, readers no longer have choice because the facts are masked in propagandized language.
About five years ago, I conducted an experiment, just with myself. I looked up stories from the Washington Post about Nixon's resignation. I figured if any newspaper would be forgiven for biassed reporting the summer of 1974, it would be WAPO, given Watergate. I found two stories: one announcing the resignation, the other detailing his last day in the White House. Both stories were front page.
Both were objective, honest reports. Indeed, the female reporter describing Nixon's farewell to the White House staff and then his departure by helicopter, her writing was sobering and at times, compassionate. It was an honest detailing of a significant moment in our history. The newspaper trusted its readers.
Sadly, those standards are gone today from America's legacy newspapers. The story today? It's all focussed on the reporter or commentator, news secondary to the purveyor. What news?
You confused communist sympathizers. Lincoln Steffens saw communism and thought it would work; Walter Duranty saw communism and lied about it by denying the Ukraine famine.