From: aaiken@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (andrew carlton aiken)
Subject: Re: Media bias
Keywords: bias
Organization: Indiana University
Distribution: usa
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 92 20:34:10 GMT


>In article <1992Jul22.143241.13229@afit.af.mil> jswitzer@afit.af.mil (Chip Switzer) writes:


>>  Unfortunaltely, journalism is still a magnet for liberals.

>	Yup. It's not the liberals fault that they're just more talented
>then conservatives, though. If conservatives could spell better, then
>maybe there would be more conservative writers.

	Heh Heh.  But what does being a "good speller" have to do with
writing talent?  I believe that spelling is important if only because
poor spelling gives the reader the (sometimes unfair) impression that
the writer is unfamiliar with the words that he is using.  Spelling is
valued because people want their ideas to be taken seriously, not
dismissed as the scrawlings of an illiterate.  
	Liberal educators insist that grammar-school English courses 
over-emphasize structure at the expense of explaining the importance of
"content."  They dismiss the idea that an intelligent child, once
equipped with an understanding of the stucture (lexical, syntactic, and
semantic) of english, will develop his own style.  They are sentimental 
about youth, and so they underestimate the profoundity of youthful
ignorance.  They insist that we must give courses in "critical thinking,"
as if it would encourage a love of clear reason.  This is like trying
to encourage in children a love of aquatic sports by playing upon them
with a fire hose.  
	It is therefore odd that liberals would herald Quayle's spelling
mistake as a dire portent of incompetence.  Hence they reveal that
they are as sophistic as conservatives.  Let us hear no more whining
about the crass triumph of "images" over "issues."


>	Seriously: Why are reporters/editors so "liberal". Were they 
>brainwashed? Are conservatives really just morons? Maybe Elvis comes
>down in a spaceship and touches journalists on the forehead, pushing
>them leftward.

	Maybe the medium of televison (and the TV-ized press) encourages
a sentimentality that is more liberal than not.  Ronald Reagan was  
successful in appealing to popular sentiment, because he understood that
the majority of journalists are roundheels, despite their pretenses of
skepticism.  If a liberal can make vivid arguments, then he will sell more
soap and USA Todays, since the bright and flashy baubles are what attract
the literate vestiges of our culture.  Conservatives seldom are vivid.  They
are more likely dour, and hence unpopular with the Cult of Vividness, which
demands that its government must entertain them.  Journalists in general
are in favor of more government because they imagine the press as a 
"fourth branch" of it.  Like any bureaucrat, they welcome any expansion of 
their own power.  Since when do the media clamor for more regulations by
the FCC?

	The best remedy for what I have described is not carping on the
part of conservatives, but an understanding that the press is no less
resistant to change than the federal bureaucracy itself.  Any criticism
of it is pointless, and given that the media are privately-owned, criticism
of media (while insisting upon "fairness") is not a conservative response.
It is the response of the chronic loser, who blames his failures only upon
his environment.  I am skeptical of what I read and watch, and I encourage
my friends to be similarly skeptical.  No "critical thinking" course could
teach this skepticism.  It is acquired only by experience.  (Something
that I am admittedly still short on.)

>	This is better then the JFK assasination - maybe you can get
>some right wing director to make it into a hit movie?

	Ha ha ha.  There's the rub.  Only left-wingers insist that their
art be suffused with "social relevance."  The conservative is more likely
to make art for its own sake.  (I am ignoring here the pecuniary motivations
in art, which are common to both left- and right-wing artists.)  It is
little remembered that Van Gogh and Monet were denounced as reactionaries,
since they painted not allegories of the Struggle of the Masses, but sun-
flowers and haystacks.  They saw the greatest beauty in nature and the works
of nature's God.  To them, the struggles of man seemed transitory, hardly
the sort of thing which pleases not simply the mind, but the soul as well.
They studied color and texture instead of Hegel.  Who is today remembered more
fondly, Monet or his radical contemporaries?


Andrew Aiken

 
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d,alt.rush-limbaugh,talk.politics.misc