a beautimous comment. thanks.

Glenn makes an important comment about the separation of intents and constraints, in terms of media bias.

Today on Diane Rehm Show on NPR, the weekly news round up covered the USAs scandal. One caller complained about the soft-balls the media has given the Bush administration since 2001. One of the "journalists" responded that it's unfair to say that the press has been pulling punches for the last couple of years - I almost had to stop my car in the middle of the road. It was a particularly ironic response given that the USAs scandal was universally ignored in its early development outside of TPM and the blogosphere, and only caught on in the traditional press once it became impossible to ignore without appearing openly biased.

I'm sure that the journalist speaking honestly believes that they're not "pulling punches". It's simply that the filter of becoming a successful reporter makes it almost impossible for a member of the traditional press to actually recognize a story that isn't pre-approved by establishment figures.

An example is Panamanian ex-President Noriega. Back in the early to mid nineties, he was up for a parole hearing. It appears that a rookie reporter, not having been filtered yet, actually went to the hearing and wrote up a story, which then landed on the back page of the local section of the Miami Herald, and died there. Why is this interesting? Well, it appears that the CIA appeared in force at the hearing to argue for Noriega's early release. He was considered by them a rogue operative that had already paid his price - if I remember correctly, some of the testimony included reports that William Casey, who had died at at that point, considered Noriega his protege. One would think that this should have been a major national story about the real nature of our incursion into Panama, instead of a back-page local story stuffed into the space left-over from the obituaries.

No secret conspiracy, just the nature of the press culture that simply is incapable of recognizing a story that has not been pre-approved; anyone who does not quickly lose that capability and regurgitate the consensus reality will quickly find themselves in a new field of work. That's why we always here the meme of "Conspiracy Theory". All that means is not an approved part of your daily required reality intake.

Jim Senter was quite correct to question the whole notion of "objective" reporting, and to cite Mark Hertzgaard's book On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency, which is arguably the best analytic study of presidential press coverage ever written.

However, the best direct critique of "objective" reporting can probably be found in a different book: Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics and the Public Interest, which--though restrained in tone--is a scathing critique of journalism ethics, which finds it fundamentally incapable of dealing with the major ethical challenges of the current era.

Indeed, as an interested, rather than disinterested practice, Iggers argues that it functions more to rationalize and normalize the failings--focusing on conflicts of interests at the level of individual journalists, for example, while ignoring the system conflicts of interest involved at the corporate enterprise level.

This example is only one of the easiest to state and recognize, however. There is much, much more to Iggers' critique than that. Plus it has some excellent historical background as well. It is, in the end, an argument for building on John Dewey's pragrmatist model of a citizen- and question-driven press as opposed to Lippmann's positivist model of an expert- and fact-driven press from the Lippmann-Dewey debates of the 1920s. And all in just 179 pages.

http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/perseus/book_detail.jsp?isbn=0813329523

It might also be beneficial to pull up the studies done that showed the breakdown of beliefs in relation to primary news sources.

If i recall correctly, people getting their news from NPR and PBS were at the high end of the spectrum (only about 20% of so having erroneous belief as compared to the 70% of the general population) for correct beliefs about the relation of Saddam and 9/11 while Fox was at the bottom and the other networks filled in the middle.

And once you see those numbers (I'm admittedly too lazy to look for them at the moment) you can see why PBS and NPR have been a target of the conservative movement ever since Nixon put Bill Moyers on his enemies list (and why Moyers was actually driven off of NOW by the Bush administration.)

The next time we walk out cocker spaniel, doberman, roving flea-bitten mutt, or a collie Lassie etc.,...

...take the dog to the curb, scoop the 'you know what--SHHH!...and put it in a brown paper bag. Borrow a Light, and throw the bog of Chihuahua's 'stuff' on the stolen White House? If we are lucky (not the lost dog, named Lucky Strike, because Zeus struck the dog with a flask of heaven's lightening...You Get The Idea. Lucky the unlucky dog had one neo-nut, one nsa ear attached to the Salon, and one left leg amputated. Poor god eat human dog-World, ain't it? ( etc.) No Response.

Krwdawg and m.b.f. are lovely plum blossoms of nice food for thought. no perturb them. What a very comprehensible people some human dawgs and ostriches are....Keep our human heads out of the M.E. sands. Yes.

For one thing, not everyone who works for a company is a whore for the company willing to sacrifice their integrity to please their bosses. Some people who work at large corporations -- including media corporations -- retain their integrity and fight agianst currents they disagree with. Many don't (which is why the dynamic you describe is relevant), but many do (which is why your theory doesn't explain Everything).

It's not that their whores - it's just that if they lack the right blinders, if they don't have the right biases, they simply don't get promoted. They're outsiders and troublemakers.

It's similar to any large corporation. The guys who like the same sports as the bosses become buddies with the bosses and get promoted. If they didn't like the same sports before, they can either be cynical and get into it, or more usually just start to like it, because everybody likes to be liked - we just naturally gravitate toward the consensus. And the consensus is heavily weighted towards the ideas of those at the top of the hierarchy.

It's what you inevitably get in a hierarchical society. As long as media is dominated by large corporations, you can expect to see a blindness to most reality, to see reality as seen by those at the top of the company ladder. Blogs disrupt that - they're like the old-fashioned small presses, with their flatter hierarchies as an industry.