"The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers...
[A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers.
This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper."
Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp,
Oct. 13, 1785.
4 comments:
I like to think that TJ would remove a well tailored glove and firmly whack George on the nose. Then he would point at him and say, in a very stern voice, "No, George. No."
Oh I wish ...
I was reading a Der Spiegel piece on Bob Woodward and was disturbed by this: 'And the president? A pale figure in the White House, less and less interested in reality even as Iraq sinks deeper and deeper into the quagmire of violence. Bush is presented as primarily concerned with proving to his father that he possesses greatness, too, and with finishing a project which his father, President George Herbert Walker Bush, left unfinished: regime change in Baghdad and a new democratic order in the Middle East.'
I might post the interview link.
Bush is a figurehead. The real thrust of Bush's campaign is not coming from one man, but from the party he is supported by. No one would ever accept that state run media could ever be a true bastion of even handed reporting - so it shouldn't be a huge leap in faith to expect some privately owned media to be any different. Fox news, for example, is unashamedly right wing, and makes no bones about it. The danger is that we choose the news we want to hear, instead of looking at a balanced report and god forbid, make our own minds up.
Mr. Jefferson would be appalled.
Post a Comment