Hey, don’t look at me, I voted along with the majority on that poll. But then again, I also voted for Al Gore in 2000. And change you can believe in 2008.
See a pattern there?
This goes to show you, this is a Republic we live in - not a direct Democracy.
As for the TIME, its editors made it no secret that it ultimately came to them, the editors, to choose who the actual Person of the Year would be and they, the editors, reserved the right to disagree with the majority.
This is the American way.
The story goes that, back in the Gilded Age, artist Frederic Remington telegrammed the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst to tell him all was quiet in Cuba and "There will be no war." Hearst responded "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."
And thus, the term “yellow journalism” was coined to describe the kind of coverage that helped promote the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Closer to our times, Blueprint Magazine, the official publication of the DLC (a plagiarized edition of Commentary and the Murdoch’s Weekly Standard) has been credited with lining up many reluctant Democrats behind Bush’s unilateral venture in Iraq.
Even after things started falling apart in Iraq, the DLC remained unrepentant. Here is a sample from a pre-election Blueprint Magazine article:
The term "yellow journalism" originated with the Yellow Kid (from the comic strip, Hogan’s Alley) that was running in the two rival newspapers, Pulitzer's New York World and Hearst's New York Journal, which quickly became known as the yellow kid papers---hence the expressions "yellow kid journalism," and "yellow journalism," later.
Though it is nowadays mostly used to qualify tabloids sensationalism, the expression remains widely in use.
The color is traditionally associated with cowardice. But when it comes to cowardice, nothing, I think, equals Vanilla Journalism.
i.e.,
- what the Times’ editors did,
- when a publication suppresses or minimizes real news so as not to steer any controversies over events that are rightly deserving of more attention.
Yellow Journalism and Vanilla Journalism are but just two sides of the same coin. Both kinds of journalism are equally dishonest in their design and their intent. But while the first kind is typically more virulent, the miasmatic nature of the second makes it more underhanded, and the most offensive of them all.
Ah, the sacred center (referring to your Blueprint referral) which presumes the center is holy not because any argument favors it but because it doesn't presume the "extremism" of left or right.
ReplyDelete"Vanilla journalism" - with a touch of blond - is what we have today, alright.
Though I think the motivation there is fierce personal ambition and a fundamental corporate desire for greater profit than any gross political idea. Those ideals following the desire for accommodation, personal gain, and coming out on top of the ratings. As well as a desire for riches.
I guess that's just the way the cookie crumbles.
ReplyDeleteThe "sacred center" has been invoked with various effects to peddle a variety of corporatist political policies and ideologies in the last few centuries.
Interestingly enough, past invocations of a political "third way" or a "middle way" have included Italian Fascism under Benito Mussolini, Harold Macmillan's 1950s One Nation Conservatism, and Phillip Blond's Red Toryism, amongst others.
The term is typically used nowadays by politicians who advocate Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan's style of economic deregulation, privatization, and globalization into the mainstream so-called "center-left" political parties.
Sounds like Obama-ism to me.
Granted, Barack Obama is no Ronald Reagan, but then again that's precisely the reason why Obama has been able to push an agenda that Reagan would never have been able to push through — not without the left up in arms as a result — not in a million years.
And the man did it under a Democratic Congress, to boot!
Look at the masterful unfolding of the PPACA. Reagan could never have achieved such a feat, not even under a Republican congress. While the idea of mandated for-profit insurance as an alternative to single-payer was originally a Republican idea, the GOP, ideologically, could never have endorsed the notion of "mandate" (any mandate—it just wouldn't sit well with their libertarian base) in Congress, not openly anyway.