Thursday, February 11, 2010

Why Bloggers Are So Successful

From Richard Baehr on the American Thinker:

Mainstream Media and the Hypocrite's Oath

The ultimate hypocrisy is the claim that journalism today is concerned with reporting and bringing the news to readers or viewers. Mainstream journalism is in fact more often concerned with influencing. Journalists believe they have special insight into what needs to happen (in an election for instance), and they want to be players in bringing it about, rather than passively serving as scorekeepers. Every day is a daily game of going through the motions to satisfy the minimal requirements for journalism —— paragraphs, sentence structure, headlines, and reporting some basic news. But the real effort is driven by a different motivation —— to deliver a message, without being too blatant about appearing to. This involves deliberate errors of omission (stories not written), and commission, including lies and distortions, and misleading headlines. Mistakes on the front page are sometimes corrected, and when they are, the correction appears many days later. Many fewer people will read the correction than the original misinformation.

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