American Thinker 07.12.2011 - Marvin Folkertsma - America's Bureaucracy of Truth (Artykuł z programu Calibre 0.8.29, który obsługuje ponad 1100 gazet i blogów z calego świata).rar

America's Bureaucracy of Truth

By Marvin Folkertsma

Americans who are exasperated by the low level of professionalism in the mainstream media would do well to take a glance at the mother of all media lunacies, the Soviet Union. For instance, readers of the 1 October 1979 edition of Pravda, a Soviet newspaper meaning "truth," were greeted on page one by a fervently argued two-column (out of eight) editorial calling for "higher standards in political and economic work" while excoriating slackers for their lack of discipline and interest in the great "cause of building communism." The main news item was a headline story entitled "Harvest Completed," which is not exactly hot-off-the-presses news but undoubtedly comforting nonetheless, and a lot less trouble for Pravda's editors to put into print. And if this isn't enough to excite your senses, how about that front-page picture of a ball bearing plant in Moscow? Be still, my heart.

This raises the question about the current relevance of a defunct newspaper from a defunct empire, about which Paul Lendvai's "The Bureaucracy of Truth" provides an excellent account. The answer is that what the Soviets and their Eastern European satellite brethren did during the Cold War days simply was not news reporting, because their media had no concept of the news, no sense of what constituted breaking events worth an impartial and judicious treatment in those collections of pages the rest of us call newspapers. This also meant, paradoxically, that those myriad manipulators of public symbols in the Soviet bloc could not be accused of bias, either. They had internalized regime rules about what to say and what not to say. Thus, if you're not doing the news, no one can accuse you of bias, because that charge presupposes an understanding of impartial criteria for journalism, without which the accusation of news bias simply has no meaning.

It is this concept that many conservatives need to grasp more fully in their frequent charges of bias leveled against elite media outlets such as the network "news" programs, ABC, CBS, and NBC -- as well as national newspaper corporations like The New York Times and the Washington Post. For instance, using content analyses of episodes of criminality or anti-Semitism in the Occupy Wall Street movement cannot be taken seriously as evidence of cover-up or partiality. Rather, like their Soviet counterparts during the Cold War, many American media outlets that cover such matters simply lack a concept of news. No news, no bias.