Propaganda

I’m trying to get my mind off baseball. I can’t begin to express how glad I am that I went to bed in the sixth. The late innings rollercoaster would have had me reduced to a quivering ball of jelly. Or shooting folks from the roof. It could have gone either way.

I’ve had thoughts percolating in my head over the last several days. By now everyone’s up on the latest media/political scandals. Dan Rather airing documents even Michael Moore wouldn’t touch and then defending them at the price of what shreds of credibility he has left. The ABC News memo directing the good people of ABC to nail the President to the wall even if it means letting the Senator slide.

What’s next?

I wonder when the holy scripture of “impartial reporting” came into existence. The news couldn’t have been impartial during World War 2 or Ernie Pyle would not have had a job. The news couldn’t have been impartial during the Spanish American War or we wouldn’t have had a war. The news has never been impartial; it’s ridiculous to think it ever could be. We’re all human, we all have biases and we all filter what we see through the screen of our experiences. To think that Dan Rather – feeling as he does about taxes, war, patriotism and politics – could report impartially on the issues of the day is idiotic. That should be plain to see.

What’s wrong with a biased press anyway? In the early days of the Republic press outlets served as the mouthpieces of political factions. Every town big enough to support a newspaper had two: one for Democratic-Republicans/Jacksonians/Democrats and the other for Federalists/Whigs/Republicans. Down the street from where I live a cannon lies buried in the sidewalk. That monument is all that remains of “Penelope;” the gun that was fired by the town’s Democratic paper to celebrate Democratic victories. Then, bias was loudly trumpeted and allowed the citizenry to make a choice: have your pre-determined views reinforced by your chosen party’s organ or compare the two sides and come to your own conclusion. Then as now, I suspect many chose the former.

Just think, if we’d give up this lusting for an unbiased press – a lust than human nature itself mitigates against – we could simultaneously do away with complaints about equal time, about fairness, about government regulation and control. The market would begin to decide which news outlets survived and which didn’t.

Maybe that’s why weblogs are becoming a viable information outlet. Nobody thinks Cold Fury or The Daily Kos are trying to be fair and even-handed. They’re biased, they’re proud of their bias and their ideas compete in an open market. Whoever sells the best ideas will stay around the longest.

Hurrah for a free media! It worked for the Founders.