Media is doing our thinking for us
By JOHN REINIERS
Published: Jan 22, 2007
Nikita Khrushchev remarked to the New York Times on Sept. 29, 1957 that "The press is our chief ideological weapon." So it came as no surprise when North Vietnam's leader Ho Chi Minh echoed Mao Tse-tung's truism that by using the "media and elitist peace activists, an enemy of America could convince the American people" that they couldn't win a war. The trick was not to defeat the military - they knew they couldn't - but rather to use the media and activists to break the will of the American people.
And the beat goes on.
Pulitzer Prize winning liberal Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted recently, referring to Vietnam, that "We suffered defeat in an unwinnable war... Vietnam was hopeless enough, but to repeat the same folly 30 years later in Iraq is unforgivable."
Here we go again - breaking the will of the American people and our troops. Most military experts will point out that the Viet Cong were all but destroyed four years into the war when it went from insurgency to a more conventional war between the south and north. But the media convinced Americans that we had already lost. The most accurate similarity between the two wars is the manipulation of the public by the traditional media - from Walter Cronkite to Jon Stewart. (Yes, most 18- to 35-year-olds get their hard news from the Daily Show on Comedy Central.)
The high priest of the print media, Joseph Pulitzer, commenting on the power of the press in 1947, said "The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalism of future generations." How prescient. Coincidentally, another part of this quotation was used on the U.S. 3-cent stamp: "Our republic and its press will rise or fall together."
Given the media's bias, I have a sinking feeling. As Adlai Stevenson quipped in 1952, "We are developing a one-party press in a two-party country." And neither of these iconic men was aware of the oncoming juggernaut of the TV networks that would be in lockstep with the traditional print media.
And that towering figure in American journalism, E.W. Scripps, flatly said in 1951, "Few people...have any idea of the tremendous, the almost invincible power...of the daily press....the press rules the country, it rules its politics, it rules its religion, its social practice." (And this, too, was in the pre-network era). Nobody in the liberal mainstream media would have the courage to say this today because it's the truth. The president of the American Newspaper Publishers Association flatly stated in 1936, "The daily press has more power in the shaping of public opinion than any other force in America." (Jerome D. Barnum).
And the greatest ally of the media is not the truth - or the facts - but rather the perceptions they create. (Even John Stuart Mill noted way back in 1859 that "The mass do not now take their opinions from dignitaries...Their thinking is done for them... through the newspapers.") These perceptions are often created by nuance - such as George Bush "misled" us about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) morphing into "he lied." Or Bush has no "gravitas" to morphing into just plain dumb (No matter that his grades and SAT score were slightly higher than John Kerry's at Yale, and he is our first MBA president).
Most people don't realize that, just as a good motivational speaker or preacher will gradually have an audience/congregation "eating out of their hand," the media, too, will create demons or heroes or ideas of myth-like proportions which become very real with the passage of time.
The rest at.....http://www.hernandotoday.com/columni...BOCT0E9XE.html
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself."
Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
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