No Stupid Questions

Was searching something and stumbled upon this old piece from 2004 about journalism in context of America:

The press, to a large extent, owes its origins to the party pamphlets of the 17th and 18th centuries, and it is good to see that they are sticking to the traditions that made the term “honest journalist” a contradiction in terms. The only question is, “Who pays?” In the heroic days of journalism, dishonest editors like Bennet, Pulitzer, and Hearst paid their writers to go out and get stories that would sell papers, and the journalist guns they hired would have cheerfully sold out either employer or party in order to gain fame and fortune—though not in that order.

“Honest journalist” and “a free press” are not only contradictions in terms; they are mutually exclusive, because the nearest thing to an honest journalist is a man who will sell himself to the highest bidder. Once a man has made enough money—that is, supposing he is a man—he can devote himself to telling the lies he really believes in.

So the question is not, as our colleague Humpty Dumpty never ceases to remind us, whether one has the right to “make words mean so many different things”—that is, to mislead and deceive the public. “The question is which is to be master—that is all.” In other words, since we must assume that journalists will twist and contort both fact and language in order to maintain the cause taken up by their master, the only question in American journalism worth debating (though even talking about the subject can sour the digestion of a philanthropic optimist) is who shall be the masters of the servile press—that is all.

The left generally answers, “the people,” by which they mean the government, by which they mean themselves and their leftist colleagues who end up as the cultural commissars who run the NEA, the DOE, the NEH, and every other set of unpalatable acronyms that, when reassembled, spell out the ignorance and stupidity which are the fate of the American people. The so-called right (though there is not now and never has been a genuine American right that amounted to anything) answers, “the individual,” by which they mean media corporations, by which they mean monopolies like Disney/ABC-Time Warner, by which they mean themselves and their friends who run the monopolies that spell the doom of the American mind and American freedom.