The printing press has long been a symbol of political liberty. It was recognized that the right to print and distribute ideas was key to holding together the democratic process. However the emergence of a media industry whose income source is derived from selling stories about the political process has created an immense conflict of interest regarding political freedom. Instead of safegarding the people from tyranny, the media enterprise has an interest in increasing the overall quantity of political debate taking place. Whatever the issues of the day may be, war, terrorism, health care, global warming, etc, if political power is involved in making decisions over it, the public must buy the media's products to be informed of it. The greater the reach of political power, the more work there is for political journalists.
This makes a man like Ron Paul a direct threat to the very existence of an establishment media. By swearing to wipe out political activity, Ron Paul is directly threatening the wealth of the media. If he succeeds, there will be little need for a "national press". All it will have to report about will be hurricanes and football.
Some have wondered why Paul has been excluded from the media and the debates. He is not part of the debate because he proposes to destroy the debate permanently. This is unacceptable for the media. They will attempt everything they can to stop him. Maintaining silence over his existence was the strategy that has been successful in the past, but now it has become too obvious and they must switch to a new strategy. They will attack him and his supporters as extremists.
The fallacies of intellectual communism, a compilation - On the nature of power
Stranger:By swearing to wipe out political activity, Ron Paul is directly threatening the wealth of the media.
Excellent point, Stranger...and more than a little bit infuriating.
The fact that Ron Paul now has $5.3M in the bank is catching the media's attention. The more money you have the more the media gets interested because at the end of the day advertising dollars pay their bills.
The only news to read is the news on the Internet. You can choose what you want to read, and you are not locked in to a one year subscription. Here is a good video about the "media" vs the "Internet": http://youtube.com/watch?v=hgaCtdVDswI
I disagree. Paul will not destroy the debate, he will widen it. The problems people propose to solve by waving the magic wand of government will not disappear with the end of government intervention. The desperately poor will not magically become rich, the diseased will not be cured. Paul proposes a framework in which people find their own solutions, both for themselves and the people they choose to help. The media do not like this because a lot of them come from the social activism school of journalism. In other words they think it is their duty to shine a light on the problems and inequities in the world, judged according to their ideology of course, so the government can come in and sprinkle legislative fairy dust and make an imperfect world perfect.
Right now that relationship is firmly entrenched. The various media outlets pick the problems of the day, left wingers and right wingers alike, and the people in power respond. The debate over the problem, its causes and possible solutions, is framed from start to finish, guaranteeing a certain outcome. Everybody in the loop is happy. Those of us outside of the loop rage and grind our teeth, but nothing really happens.
A whining reporter with a camera and microphone is nothing. If he can mobilize the government to solve whatever problems he deems fit to cover he is an unelected ruler of the country, a mover and a shaker, with a nice warm and gooey conscience and even a constituancy of sorts. That's the problem the media have with Paul. He threatens their power in terms of social activism by proposing to undermine and eliminate the very power structure they depend on to advance their agendas. In a free society people may just discover that they can solve their own problems, and more importantly the unseen costs of the status quo get exposed big time as they have more freedom, income, and responsibility. If there's anything a parasite can't allow to happen it's for its host to realize that it can live without the parasite.
It's quite noticeable, how the media has expanded their coverage of Dr. Paul after he cleared that 5 mils. The dollars voted for him instead of the dismal sounding poll numbers, which seem hardly credible, though I doubt it would matter where they were with 13 months to go. Better to start from a very low base, but always be increasing, to "topping out" and going down. As in markets, momentum is an unsubstantial than means a lot.
The big equalizer in this whole issue is the Internet.The whining reporter has been replaced by the army of whining bloggers and commentators, like ourselves,using the net as their bully pulpit, and whether they be eloquent, or just "GoRonGo", the volume of comments and discussions can't be ignored. The "You know"-ing Borgers of the media are finally up against some critical competition.
Stranger:By swearing to wipe out political activity...
By swearing to do what?
Stranger:He is not part of the debate because he proposes to destroy the debate permanently.
He has proposed no such thing. What are you on about?
DBratton: Stranger:By swearing to wipe out political activity... By swearing to do what? Stranger:He is not part of the debate because he proposes to destroy the debate permanently.He has proposed no such thing. What are you on about?
Subtlety is apparently a scarce talent.
Stranger: "Whatever the issues of the day may be, war, terrorism, health care, global warming, etc, if political power is involved in making decisions over it, the public must buy the media's products to be informed of it."
This is certainly the way the media have become to operate these days, where journalism is synonymous with tarting up government press releases. But that's just the rule of laziness. If there weren't government press releases to be had they would have to revert to actually sniffing out the stories themselves. In fact in this case there would be more justification for a press corp than there is now. After all, we can get the government's press releases ourselves from the .gov sites.
Do you think maybe they are also just totally intimidated by him because he takes the discourse so far out of their comfort zone that they don't know how to confront it? He's so foreign to them that they instinctively marginalize him - I don't really think most of the commentators are subtle enough thinkers to see how he threatens their current approach. I think the Old Media are mostly just followers - they want to be in the club. Ron Paul is outside the club, and they don't want to look stupid by supporting the guy who isn't guaranteed to either win or lose respectably, in their book.
Anyway, they would all still have jobs regardless of who is in office. I don't think they care whether they are reporting on something meaningful intellectually, or utterly vacuous.
BTW - Clearly I am making vast generalizations here. There are smarter and more honest reporters, and dumber and more sheeplike reporters. I think I refer more generally to the tone that the corporate executives wish to set, which is to be comfortably in the middle of the pack where they can attract the most advertising dollars.
"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. ... Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
thompsonisland:Anyway, they would all still have jobs regardless of who is in office. I don't think they care whether they are reporting on something meaningful intellectually, or utterly vacuous.
They'd still have jobs. But going by what was going on when I left school and from what I've heard and seen since, journalists these days are almost taught from the beginning that their job is to hilite problems and improve the world by doing so. They're taught more feature writing techniques than the old hard news, lead line fact focussed and tight style that was the regular in Woodward and Bernstein days. And when you combine that with their majority liberal ideology, and their near universal big government bias, you get a media that considers itself an unofficial wing of the government. It all comes down to power, Paul threatens their power by making their hard fought for audiences and political access worth a lot less than they are now.
Something else occurs to me: those audiences and the media's hold on them are threatened by Paul to some extent. If it gets exposed that there is a significant libertarian population in the US some media mogul may come along and capitalize on that, similar to the way Fox News capitalized on what was, at its birth, a marginalized audience for conservative bias. Think about it. A libertarian new channel would be a network that after a school shooting would't be afraid to point out that the shooters already broke a myriad of existing gun laws which didn't do diddly to stop the shooting. They wouldn't shy away from mentioning it if an armed citizen stopped the shooting. They wouldn't merely repeat government press releases on the war on drugs. You might actually get a reasonably accurate accounting of government spending and the people who benefit from it. Civil liberties violations would be much more prominently reported as well as the government's active role as being the main violator of such liberties. They might actually have the guts to challenge the weeping and sick props politicians pull out to try and sell their legislation.
A libertarian oriented news channel could be a real threat to the established networks and cable channels, reporting on the same issues but with a minimal government bias, which could draw a lot of their audience and break the stranglehold they have on national debate.
xahrx:A libertarian oriented news channel could be a real threat to the established networks and cable channels, reporting on the same issues but with a minimal government bias, which could draw a lot of their audience and break the stranglehold they have on national debate.
I often think of this question, and I have difficulty answering when my friends ask me "why don't I see Ron Paul on TV anywhere?"
I'm not completely comfortable with the "war on Ron Paul" approach, that the media and government are in cahoots and they want to keep him out. It's a very hard position to take without sounding like a conspiracy theorist.
I do believe the party would like to keep him out, and that the major media are essentially statists.
But mostly, I think they want to talk about what sells, and RP's low numbers in the "traditional polls" don't equal sales dollars to network news. I do believe the grassroots campaign will roll on, and I think we'll actually see more media coverage as it gains steam.
The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations. -Eric Hoffer
EotS: I often think of this question, and I have difficulty answering when my friends ask me "why don't I see Ron Paul on TV anywhere?"I'm not completely comfortable with the "war on Ron Paul" approach, that the media and government are in cahoots and they want to keep him out. It's a very hard position to take without sounding like a conspiracy theorist.
It's not nutty to believe people protect their own interests.
Interesting take.
It seems to me that most of the big media in the US wants to just ignore Ron Paul and hope he goes away. Fox News, on the other hand, seems to want to actually attack and discredit him.
I believe Gandhi said something like: First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they attack you. Then, you win.
Steve Bachman:Fox News, on the other hand, seems to want to actually attack and discredit him.
I'm having a hard time trying to think of a group outside the current administration that Fox News doesn't attack and try to discredit.
Dalai Lama maybe since he's Bush's golden boy as of late...
Stranger: By swearing to wipe out political activity, Ron Paul is directly threatening the wealth of the media. If he succeeds, there will be little need for a "national press".
LIbertarianism is not anrchism, therefore, it is not the wiping out of political activity. Ron Paul wants to give to the states the powers to decide things like education, gay marriage, etc. (as the constitution does not explicitly give these powers to the federal government), so this would actually increase the amount of political activity and discourse. Instead of one federal ruling on education, media could cover what's going on in each of the 50 states, in turn creating more of a multi-linear discourse within the United States rather than the assumption that all Americans have the same interests in mind.
I think that the real threat of Ron Paul to the media is that he challenges their corporate interests. Many media outlets are owned by the same companies which profit from the military industrial complex, hence the pro-war bias that has been so common in certain media outlets for the last few years. They don't want him to be president because he would end the war and abolish the reserve, whose shareholders also have a great investment in the media.
If you look at independent media, there are multiple discourses taking place and more than enough news to cover, whereas in coporate media, we often get stories that are all along the same lines of discussion. It is the corporate media who keeps this discussion narrow and it is people like Ron Paul who want to widen it. They attack his supports as extremists because they bring up issues not currently included in the mainstram dialogue, and issues which quite frankly corporations often do not want addressed. An example: Mike Gravel has asked his and Ron Paul's supporters to try to get them an hour of airtime to debate issues that the debates run by major media outlets don't bring up in their debates. Their ideas will not be heard in corporate media debates because the questions they're answering won't be asked.
Most libertarians don't like being told what to think (or think about), and perhaps this turns them away from mainstream media.
The media presents no real solutions because it fails to address the real problems in our society, i.e. distribution of wealth, the inadequacy of education, the immorality of the war, etc.
Wow good one, I never thought about that. The world would possibly be A LOT calmer under a RP administration.
Here is a nice little gem from the media war...
The main media dislikes Ron Paul because he screws up their Presidential Candidate Story Line/Octagon UFC match:
Demubiican (Ms Pants Suit, Barack Not Hillary, Mr. $400 Hair) - Against War (Somewhat) for Welfare Programs (Big Time) vs Republocrat (Rudy, the old guy (Not Ron Paul), North East Mormon, a POW, bunch of other folks) For War (Big Time) against Welfare Programs (Somewhat)
Enter Ron Paul who is consistent in his views against War (Really) and against Welfare (Really). So the Media does what it does best: Ignore, then mock, now listen to and soon to challenge.
The other issues is that the main media can not really challenge Ron Paul on his biggest things without sounding like idiots because they are asking questions whose answers are simple to understand and COMPLTELY CORRECT. For this they will not forgive him.