{"id":23,"date":"2007-07-31T10:05:01","date_gmt":"2007-07-31T17:05:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stiftungleostrauss.com\/bunker\/?p=23"},"modified":"2012-07-08T08:56:16","modified_gmt":"2012-07-08T15:56:16","slug":"idiopathic-journalism-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.stiftungleostrauss.com\/bunker\/idiopathic-journalism-2007\/","title":{"rendered":"Idiopathic Journalism, 2007 (updated)"},"content":{"rendered":"

W<\/b>ith Rupert’s imminent entry past the shattered Great Gate and on into Minas Tirith<\/a>, American journalism prepares to endure yet another phase of debasement and looming irrelevancy. The woes of the dead tree business model generally are well known. This blow, however, has the ring of Doom about it as Russell Baker explains<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Rupert Murdoch of course has long spread melancholy in newsrooms around the world, but it was the disclosure in May that the Bancroft family, which controls The Wall Street Journal, might be ready to sell him their paper for five billion dollars that really struck at journalism’s soul. The sale of another newspaper is common enough these days, but The Wall Street Journal is not another newspaper. It is one of the proudest pillars of American journalism. Like The New York Times and The Washington Post, it has for generations been controlled by descendants of a founding patriarch.<\/p>\n

Family control has sheltered all three newspapers from Wall Street’s most insistent demands, allowing them to do high-quality\u2014and high cost\u2014journalism. It was said, and widely believed, that the controlling families were animated by a high-minded sense that their papers were quasi-public institutions. Of course profit was essential to their survival, but it was not the primary purpose of their existence. That one of these families might finally take the money and clear out heightens fears that no newspaper is so valuable to the republic that it cannot be knocked down at market for a nice price. Murdoch at the Journal is a dark omen for journalists everywhere. When the sign in the shop window says “Everything For Sale,” it is often followed by “Going Out Of Business.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

B<\/b>aker also writes this, which sums up much of the Stiftung’s pov — and the cynicism is not unjustified with all the journo-lobbying and pay-for-AgitProp deals animating supposed ‘reporters’ and ‘columnists’. Baker says:<\/p>\n

In American Carnival, Neil Henry sketches the modern “journalist” in all his “mishmash of guises,” and suggests why the public has withdrawn its affection. It has been a long time since Americans thought of a journalist as a working-class guy teaching a spoiled rich dame how to dunk a doughnut. To the average person today, Henry writes, “a Journalist is the television talker who is paid a considerable retainer to regularly make noise on cable news programs.” The person hosting the program is a Journalist, too, drawing down big money “not to seek out and report the news but to entertain an audience with a certain glibness and an argumentative personality.”<\/p>\n

Today’s Journalist in Henry’s sketch is the TV commentator at a murder trial pronouncing guilt and talking of the maximum penalty before the evidence is in. Or she is a network TV star with a multimillion-dollar salary briefly pretending to understand the problems of working-class people. And there is “the inveterate Washington Beltway insider with shifting loyalties and ethics who works as a Pentagon spokesperson, political campaign adviser, or presidential speechwriter one year” and hires out next year as a network reporter or magazine correspondent worthy of trust. If in television, the Journalist is someone who may need “the eye tuck, the hair transplant, or the Botox injection” to create a false appearance of youth essential to reporting the truth persuasively.<\/p>\n

Henry is clearly unhappy about all this. His assemblage of self-servers, frauds, political double-dippers, gasbags, mountebanks, spoiled reporters, and unprincipled swine make up that vague organism called “media.” How the press and journalism became entwined in this squalor is a long and complicated tale, but there seems to be no escape. Indeed, the press seems to have become only a minor player in Henry’s carnival, and there is even some question whether many people care. Nobody phones the paper expecting to find a hero anymore.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Times simply notes that “in end the end, Murdoch wanted it [the Dow Jones] more” than GE, media tut tutters or even the Bancroft family<\/a>. We’ve long argued as you know, Dear Reader, that in a Commodity Society, should government and all information be subsumed within a branding exercise, liberal democracy is ultimately impossible.<\/a> We don’t embrace Adorno and Horkheimer’s overall critique via<\/i> the Frankfurt School<\/a> on two major counts — the Marxist dialectic, and their fundamental anti-Enlightenment agenda — but there is no question that commodification of thought poses a most insidious challenge to civic virtue as understood by the Framers. This is the real problem with “shareholder value” determining alone societal information assets.<\/p>\n

Parasites abound in our current transitional phase from traditional media ownership\/consumption models. Technology itself is neither the end state nor answer deus ex machina<\/i>. Those embracing technology as a res<\/i> or thing in and of itself, such as parading talking snowmen on Youtube before presidential candidates, are but leaves in the wind. Blips soon forgotten. For even in a commodification soup, someone must make the recipe. Murdoch may have wanted the Dow more, but he also understands all of this — as made clear re his positioning in satellite television, MySpace and of course, Fox. Murdoch understands commodification and branding still require an apriori determination of values and end states desired – as well as ROI.<\/p>\n

Another sign of so-called American “liberalism’s” (small ‘L’) decadence. Liberalism today is a complete ideological failure. Self-professed liberals no longer understand Who They Are and Why They Are. What all of this means for them and their alleged values. But then, American liberalism long ago degenerated into mechanistic triage of coalitions whose members long ago forgot why they are even there. So it is encouraging that the netroots today are celebrating their “progressive” nomenclature as a brush clearing exercise.<\/a> <\/p>\n

The question before them post-Warlord is whether and how they can transition from an insurgent force\/last stand against Christian Socialist Authoritarianism to a viable governing philosophy. They’ve already passed one important test — basic operational political competence (organization, recruitment, candidates, GOTV, etc.) in 2004 and 2006. Their next test will be to assemble a majority coalition and govern successfully. So far, there is every reason to be encouraged on that score but it remains an open question. As important, the netroots will face the temptation of embracing commodification and branding for short term expediency. This is particulalry true as they seek to establish and build out new media entities. <\/p>\n

Sometimes we wonder if the netroots themselves understand the magnitude of the task they have undertaken. Or how much this country, whether it knows it or not, depends on their success. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With Rupert’s imminent entry past the shattered Great Gate and on into Minas Tirith, American journalism prepares to endure yet another phase of debasement and looming irrelevancy. The woes of the dead tree business model generally are well known. This blow, however, has the ring of Doom about it as Russell Baker explains: Rupert Murdoch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","two_page_speed":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[256,143,163],"class_list":{"0":"post-23","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-acolytes-in-media","7":"tag-intelligence","8":"tag-journalism","9":"tag-media","10":"entry"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stiftungleostrauss.com\/bunker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stiftungleostrauss.com\/bunker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stiftungleostrauss.com\/bunker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stiftungleostrauss.com\/bunker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stiftungleostrauss.com\/bunker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.stiftungleostrauss.com\/bunker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stiftungleostrauss.com\/bunker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stiftungleostrauss.com\/bunker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stiftungleostrauss.com\/bunker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}