Ron Paul's Popularity Explodes: But Why Does Wall Street's Media Hide It?

 This video appears on the Daily Paul site. Hat tip Mike Marnell.

America Knows No Journalism

I just received this forwarded e-mail from Phil Orenstein. A perfect example. America's pissant propaganda sources are so disturbed, so biased. I avoid them all:

Headlines On This Date 4 Years Ago:

"Republicans spending $42 million on inauguration while troops Die in unarmored Humvees"
"Bush extravagance exceeds any reason during tough economic times"
"Fat cats get their $42 million inauguration party, Ordinary Americans get the shaft"

Headlines Today:

"Historic Obama Inauguration will cost only $120 million"
"Obama Spends $120 million on inauguration;AmericaNeeds A Big Party"
"Everyman Obama showsAmericahow to celebrate"
"Citibank executives contribute $8 million to Obama Inauguration" (Stay tune.....more bailouts to come!!)

Just Say "No!" to Television and Mass Media News

We often begin the new year with a resolution. Here is one to try: stop watching television news and stop reading mass market print media. The news is available all around us, through snippets on Yahoo!, bloggers, occasional headlines and conversation. Even if you reduce your news consumption from one hour per day to 10 minutes, you will have saved yourself confusion and error.

It is difficult to know how much of the news is factually accurate. Even if the vast majority is, the slant that it provides is misleading, and partial knowledge is often worse than none. For example, in the field of education, the business press often represents graduates of MBA programs in business schools as receiving specific, high salaries. Upon closer inspection, the individual who relies on the reports may learn (1) the surveys of graduates on which the salary numbers are based are skewed and biased so that only graduates voluntarily reporting their starting pay are included in the averages. This has the effect of bloating the numbers because students who have not found a job are least likely to report; and (2) there is considerable variability or variance about the mean, so that the mean number is meaningless. A few students might go to work for family firms at very high salaries; and a few might find jobs that pay several times the average. This has the effect of bloating the average. If one student starts at $500,000 and two start at $50,000, the mean is $200,000. If schools report the median, then there is better accuracy, but even there bias would result. For instance, if 20% cannot find a job at all, the median could be $100,000, which sounds great, but if you're one of the 20% it does you no good.

So an applicant who reads the news carefully could easily find themselves seriously misled in a major life choice. Now, multiply that over all the stories that the mass media provides. Consider the pattern of errors in the leading newspapers like the New York Times over many decades. Also consider the media's corruption in supporting incumbents in exchange for favors. You may conclude that it is better to avoid a con than to be exposed to it. Better to avoid the news since it is packed with errors and lies.

One other concern was raised by someone who posted here recently. The values that the electronic and print media communicate are corrupt. Excessive attention paid to material success, hysterical fear of stock market declines, obsession with get-rich-quick schemes, the inane opinions of movie stars and newspaper reporters, such as the eminently stupid Rosie O'Donnell (why would anyone care what she has to say on any topic whatsoever?) and the dull witted fashions and patterns of America's entertainment culture are likely to leave frequent viewers dumbed down.

So let us all resolve to avoid paying attention to the mass media. I am hoping that some of the major print media firms will fold this year. That would indeed give us something to celebrate.

Russian Elections Commission Sees US Media Bias

Gateway Pundit (h/t Larwyn) notes that Russia's Central Elections Committee's Centre for the Study of Election Technology has issued a report analyzing the US media. The report finds that the US media is biased toward Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Gateway Pundit notes that:

"The observations appear to ape western criticisms of Russia's elections in which international observers have complained Russia's television networks are overwhelmingly pro-Kremlin and offer unbalanced and unfair coverage of opposition candidates."

In other words, the US media is behaving very much like the Russian media under communism.

Martin v. Obama

I just received the following e-mail from Andy Martin:

Barack Obama and Andy Martin confront each other in Honolulu Andy Martin's investigative team provokes a "suspension" of Obama's campaign and a desperate trip to Hawai'i by the presidential candidate. The drama builds to a Hollywood "High Noon" confrontation between good and evil

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Barack Obama and his nemesis, Obama author Andy Martin, face off in Honolulu

Martin's Hawai'i investigation causes Obama to panic and suspend his presidential campaign to head off Andy's stories.

NOTE: Today's scheduled column has been preempted because of the suspension of the Obama campaign. "Obama and Islam, Again" will appear next Monday. (Part Two of the Hawai'i series will appear as scheduled on Tuesday the 21st. Our calendar was thrown off schedule by the birth certificate litigation.)

Chicago crusader Andy Martin is on the verge of taking down the Obama campaign

(HONOLULU, HI)(October 20, 2008) You have to turn to Hollywood and "High Noon" to find more drama than the confrontation building in Hawai'i. The good sheriff stands alone against the Obama Gang. Eliot Ness and the Untouchables? The Long Ranger? Pick your own hero. Martin vs. Obama explodes into a Hollywood classic.

I will do my best to defeat Obama even though I essentially stand alone. I stand tall. All of the protagonists are from Chicago. Despite ridicule and envy from Chicago's corrupt mainstream media, I have spent over forty years successfully fighting crooked politicians like Barack Obama and his Daley Machine cronies.

But take a look at one of the most dramatic time lines in recent political history.

Two weeks ago on October 5th Sean Hannity aired a program that terrified the Obama campaign. You can probably see my role at FoxNews.com or on YouTube. The New York Times itself reported that the morning after Hannity's program, I became the target of a massive liberal assault at the Times. On October 6th I wrote a column predicting that Hannity's show would become the most important political program of 2008. On direct orders from the Emperor Obama, the New York Times then unleashed its smear machine on me.

One week ago, on October 13th, the Times tried to destroy me with a front-page package of lies, distortions and outright fraud. The Times failed. My investigative team arrived in Hawai'i and began to dig, dig, dig.

I also predicted in a column that attacking me was the first big mistake Obama and the Times had committed. You be the judge of whether I am being proven correct.

I am still standing and the Times' credibility is going into the toilet.

Before my team left for Hawai'i I predicted we would bring down Obama. By sheer coincidence, one TV network was interested in my mission and has been tagging along with a camera crew.

Monday (today) we petitioned the Hawai'i Supreme Court to order Obama's secret birth records released.

How did Obama respond? He suddenly discovered that his grandmother, who had supposedly been released from her hospital a week ago, when he showed no interest in her, needed his immediate attention. Cool, calm, collected Obama suddenly suspended his campaign and headed for Hawai'i.

High Noon.

I have been issuing reports from Hawaii and we are on the streets digging for the truth. This weekend we issued our story list for Monday-Wednesday (Monday has been rescheduled—see above).

What has Obama done? Cancelled his campaign and announced he is jumping on a plane to join Andy Martin in Hawai'i. Welcome home, Barry (Obama's grandmother calls him "Barry.")

High Noon in Hawaii.

Barack Obama vs. Andy Martin. The drama builds as we move closer and closer to disclosing the dramatic truth about Barack Obama.

Was I right when I predicted Obama made a classic mistake when he attacked me? Will Jim Rutenberg and all of the other Times slimeballs regret their malicious attacks? You betcha.

Obama did not pay any attention to his grandmother until I showed up in Honolulu. Suddenly she is the center of his attention. She is so central to his campaign that he has suspended it! But when Obama was here last summer he only visited his grandmother for an hour. One hour! Now he suspends his campaign for her?

Could anyone have predicted a more dramatic series of developing events? Hannity puts me on the air as the Chicago expert who confirms the links between Obama and his longstanding anti-American, terror network. Obama's goon squads immediately try to smear me in retaliation. The New York Times creates a front-page story out of 25 and 35 year-old nonsense in a desperate attempt to discredit and derail my upcoming Hawai'i investigation.

And Andy Martin's investigative team lands in Honolulu and goes where no mainstream media have gone before, on the streets of Honolulu to dig out the secret truths about Barack Obama.

Hawai'i Five-O looks tame by comparison.

I am still standing, fighting, and investigating, right here in Obamaland. And Hannity's dramatic show on October 5th will prove to be the turning point in the fight to retake America from the Obamabots and their crooked clandestine campaign cash (Without Andy, Hannity's second show on October 19th was dull by comparison and provoked no response from the Times or Obama).

The day we landed in Honolulu was Obama's D-Day. He can't scare us. He can't stop us. He can't intimidate us and the New York Times can't smear us with lies, half-truths and distortions.

The irony in all of this television drama is that Fox News is not the network following me around Hawaii. I will leave it to the network to disclose which one it is.

Barack Obama is looking increasingly like a desperate, doomed candidate whose Big Lie is about to be exposed.

The New York Times tried to suggest I exaggerate. Do I exaggerate? Apparently Barack Obama doesn't think so. He knows what I know. And soon you will know what Obama and I know.

What Obama fears most is that I search for the truth not because I am associated with McCain (I am not) or because I am a partisan Republican (I am not a right-winger). Rather I search for the truth for the sake of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I took an oath as an 18 year old to defend the Constitution of the United States from its enemies.

Barack Obama is an enemy of the Constitution. He is using tens of millions of dollars in clandestine campaign cash from unknown sources to stage an electoral coup d'etat in our nation. That is why I keep fighting for the truth.

Barack Obama has been lying to the American people. And his Big Lie is about to be exposed.

Now that his secrets are on the verge of being revealed he has panicked and suspended his campaign to visit Hawai'i. Do you believe Obama's explanation for the sudden trip?

Or do you believe me?

Do you believe the smear merchants at the New York Times? Or my truthful words on Sean Hannity's America?

If Barack Obama is defeated, he will have two people to blame: me and Sean Hannity.

It doesn't get any better than this.

Stay tuned for High Noon in Honolulu.


[Note: we will be posting our Hawai'i Supreme Court petition on our blogs later tonight.]

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We are in the final stages of preparing a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, and we expect to file by October 27th. Imagine if you will what the Times put on page one: A "report" in which only people who were willing to smear me were contacted, and no one favorable was allowed to appear, in which my successful litigation history was erased from the public consciousness (see www.AndyMartin.com). Rather than a balanced and factual portrayal of a controversial person—I am indeed and indubitably controversial—there was a one-dimensional smear of the crudest kind. And they wonder why the MSM's are dying.

Luckily, we at ContrarianCommentary.com "own" the Internet." "We take the road less traveled...' And that has all the difference.'" (Robert Frost) Watch for the libel lawsuit.

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Readers of Obama: The Man Behind The Mask, say the book is still the only gold standard and practical handbook on Barack Obama's unfitness for the presidency. Buy it.
Book orders: http://OrangeStatePress.com. Immediate shipment from Amazon.com or the publisher now available.
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FULL DISCLOSURE: I recently decided to oppose Barack Obama's election and became Executive Director of The Stop Obama Coalition, http://StopObamaCoalition.com. By default, I became the national leader of the anti-Obama movement. I am not acting as either a Democrat or Republican. I have had no contact whatsoever with the McCain Campaign. I am not a member of any political organization. The views expressed are entirely independent. I am acting as an American citizen who sincerely believes Obama is not the man we need in the Oval Office. We are going to run a very dynamic and aggressive campaign against Obama. I will continue to write my news and opinion columns for ContrarianCommentary.com. /s/ Andy Martin
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URGENT APPEAL: The Committee of One Million to Defeat Barack Obama is raising money to fight Barack Obama. http://CommitteeofOneMilliontoDefeatBarackObama.com. Please give generously up to the maximum of $100. Our ability to fight and defeat Barack Obama is directly dependent on the generosity of every American."
The Committee of One Million to Defeat Barack Obama limits itself to $100 maximum contributions; there are no bundlers, fat cats or illegal contributions. Obama is opposed to everything America stands for," says Executive Director Andy Martin. "But while Obama has raised more than a third of a BILLION dollars, his opponents have raised virtually nothing. We can't just sit back and expect John McCain to do the job all alone. Americans can either contribute now, or pay later. If we do not succeed, Obama will."
E-mail: contact@CommitteeofOneMilliontoDefeatBarackObama.com
---------------------------------------------
Andy Martin is a legendary Chicago muckraker, author, Internet columnist, radio talk show host, broadcaster and media critic. He is currently based in New York selling his new book, Obama: The Man Behind The Mask. Andy is the Executive Editor and publisher of www.ContrarianCommentary.com. © Copyright by Andy Martin 2008. Martin comments on regional, national and world events with over forty years of experience. He holds a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Illinois College of Law.

His columns are also posted at ContrarianCommentary.blogspot.com; contrariancommentary.wordpress.com. Andy is the author of Obama: The Man Behind The Mask, published in July 2008, see http://www.OrangeStatePress.com.

MEDIA CONTACT: (866) 706-2639 or cell (917) 664-9329
E-MAIL: AndyMart20@aol.com [NOTE: We frequently correct typographical errors and additions/subtractions on our blogs, where you can find the latest edition of this release.]

Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion

Walter Lippmann. Public Opinion: An Important Work on the Theory of Public Opinion in Relation to Traditional Democratic Theory. Reprint by Filiquarian Publishing, 2007. Available used from Amazon.com for $1.98.

"The orthodox theory holds that a public opinion constitutes a moral judgment on a group of facts. The theory I am suggesting is that, in the present state of education, a public opinion is primarily a moralized and codified version of the facts. I am arguing that the pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes largely determines what groups of facts we shall see and in what light we shall see them. That is why, with the best will in the world, the news policy of a journal tends to support its editorial policy..."

"The hypothesis which seems to me the most fertile is that news and truth are not the same thing and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and to make a picture of reality on which men can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide. That is a comparatively small part of the whole field of human interest."

----Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, pp. 116, 332

This is a classic by Walter Lippmann, who co-founded the New Republic with Herbert Croly and Walter Weyl. Lippmann was a Progressive, but he was much more circumspect than Croly and John Dewey, and his ideas are more contemporary than either's. The book is disorganized and badly written, but Lippmann's insights are seminal.

The book was published in 1921. In 1920, Warren G. Harding had been the first presidential candidate to use radio in his presidential campaign. Forty years later, the Kennedy/Nixon debate was televised, and 87 years later Barack Obama's speeches are spliced on Youtube. Lippmann's book is seminal not only because he was among the first to ponder the effects of mass media on public policy but also because he anticipated the criticisms of the mass media prevalent among today's conservatives. Although the book references newspapers, not radio, the problems that Lippmann outlines have become increasingly important.

But the book has implications well beyond mass media. The question with which Lippmann grapples is the same question that has confronted many of the social sciences: to what degree are decision makers rational?

In 1958 Herbert Simon and James March published Organizations, a book whose main theme is "cognitive limits on rationality" in devising business strategy. The problem of limited rationality is important not only in management theory but also in economics, where information economics and agency theory have generated important and controversial policy prescriptions. In law and economics there has been much discussion of how informational asymmetries influence public choice and lobbying. In the field of organizational behavior, several of Max Bazerman's ideas on perceptual biases are directly linked to passages in this book. All of these developments owe Walter Lippmann a debt.

Lippmann was writing about a broader topic than management: the ability of the general public to deliberate about policy issues. Progressives claim that democracy is not only viable, but the ultimate good. (This, of course, begs the question as to what construct of good the progressives apply; there is no ultimate ground for favoring democracy over wealth or human well being as the ultimate good, and logically democracy would seem to be inferior to human happiness or Aristotle's eudaimonia -well being-. In attacking natural rights theory as arbitrary or mythical, the Progressives supplanted natural rights with an even more arbitrary and much less fruitful construct.)

Lippmann argues that we are unable to understand the real world in which news and policy problems occur (p. 76):

"...the environment with which our public opinions deal is refracted in many ways, by censorship and privacy at the source, by physical and social barriers at the other end, by scanty attention, by the poverty of language, by distraction, by unconscious constellations of feeling, by wear and tear, violence, monotony. These limitations upon our access to that environment combine with the obscurity and complexity of the facts themselves to thwart clearness and justice of perception, to substitute misleading fictions for workable ideas, and to deprive us of adequate checks upon those who consciously strive to mislead."

Lippmann develops a psychologically-based argument. Because people think in stereotypes and cliches they cannot think clearly about underlying facts (p. 87):

"There is an economy in this. For the attempt to see all things freshly and in detail, rather than as types and generalities, is exhausting, and among busy affairs practically out of the question. In a circle of friends, and in relation to close associates or competitors, there is no shortcut through and no substitute for individualized understanding...But modern life is hurried and multifarious, above all physical distance separates men who are often in vital contact with each other...There is neither time nor opportunity for intimate acquaintance...The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences are those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes...(p. 102) Thus Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital, but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe."

Lippmann notes (p. 105) that the word "progress" connoted to most Americans "mechanical inventions". The emphasis on "the biggest, the fastest, the highest, or if you are a maker of wristwatches or microscopes the smallest; the love in short of the superlative and the 'peerless'" is (p 106):

"a partial and inadequate way of representing the world. With the stereotype of 'progress' before their eyes, Americans have in the mass seen little that did not accord with that progress. They saw the expansion of cities, but not the accretion of slums..."

Perceptual distortion occurs at various points. One of the most important is what Lippmann refers to as moral codes (p. 105), a term Chester Barnard borrowed in his seminal management book Functions of the Executive in the 1930s. I don't know how much has been done about the Progressive influence on management thought, but it was extensive. Croly talked about scientific management and Taylor was viewed as a member of the progressive movement. In Public Opinion Lippmann provides the foundation for Barnard's use of the concept of moral code in depicting the function of the executive as creating what we would call today organizational culture. Sanford Jacoby in his book Employing Bureaucracy outlines how many of the ideas of human resource management emanated from Jane Addams's social work movement. Arguably, the classic contingency theory of mainstream management, the idea that management style ought to be adjusted to fit the environment is also linked to progressivism in that it implies a key role for university experts to advise managers as to how to anticipate environmental change, a role played in large part by the Federal Reserve Bank (probably to the chagrin of management professors who were hoping for more extensive interest in their consulting services).

With respect to codes, Lippmann argues (pp. 111-114) "the way we see things is a combination of what is there and of what we expected to find". In order to make intelligent decisions about public affairs and politics, knowledge of the subject matter is necessary, but "few can be expert" and "those who are expert are so on only a few topics" so that "whatever we recognize as familiar we tend, if we are not very careful, to visualize with the aid of images already in our mind" and "when a system of stereotypes is well fixed, our attention is called to those facts which support it and diverted from those which contradict."

(p. 116) "Far more serious in the modern world than any difference of moral code is the difference in the assumptions about facts to which the code is applied. Religious, moral and political formulae are nothing like so far apart as the facts assumed by their votaries...At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history."

(p. 120) "And since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies either my moral judgments or my version of the facts is to me perverse, alien, dangerous...The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts."

In addition to bias due to moral codes, Lippmann argues that public opinion is distorted by perception of time 9P. 136) and the inability to comprehend statistical inference:

(p. 141) "To pick fairly a good sample of a large class is not easy. The problem belongs to the science of statistics, and it is a most difficult affair for anyone whose mathematics is primitive, and mine remain azoic..."

Thus (p.145):

"There are few big issues in public life where cause and effect are obvious at once. They are not obvious to scholars who have devoted years, let us say, to studying business cycles, or price and wage movements, or the migration and the assimilation of peoples, or the diplomatic purposes of foreign powers. Yet somehow we are all supposed to have opinions on these matters, and it is not surprising that the commonest form of reasoning is intuitive, post hoc ergo propter hoc."

Moreover, as March and Simon (1958) put it, there are cognitive limits on rationality (p. 153-156):

"Of public affairs each of us sees little, and therefore they remain dull and unappetizing until somebody with the makings of an artist, has translated them into a moving picture...Not being omnipresent and omniscient we cannot see much of what we have to think and talk about...In order then that the distant situation shall not be a gray flicker on the edge of attention, it should be capable of translation into pictures in which the opportunity for identification is recognizable..."

Because of the vagaries of public opinion, it is difficult if not impossible to discern what motivates a given public reaction. If public opinion is to be unified or harmonized (p. 200) a symbolic phrase must unify a wide range of meanings so that the phrase itself is vacuous but able to be interpreted in many ways. Thus, an intelligent public policy is possible only through confusion of the public, or at least offering a symbol in which a wide range of people can believe. People come to accept symbols because they are (pp. 207-8):

"planted there by another human being whom we recognize as authoritative...symbols are made congenial and authoritative because they are introduced to us by congenial and important people...And though we may gradually master for ourselves many phases of that larger environment, there always remains a vaster one that is unknown. To that we still related ourselves through authorities...Except on a few subjects where our own knowledge is great, we cannot choose between true and false accounts. So we choose between trustworthy and untrustworthy reporters."

But the choice of an appropriate expert "is still too difficult and often impracticable. On all but a very few matters for short stretches in our lives, the utmost independence that we can exercise is to multiply the authorities to whom we give a friendly hearing...the democratic theory proceeds on the opposite assumption and assumes for the purposes of government an unlimited supply of self-sufficient individuals."

All political theories naively assume that some individual or group has the innate ability to govern. But all people are constrained by the cognitive limits that Lippmann outlines. In particular, Lippmann questions the state of information in the time of the founding fathers (pp. 240-1):

"But the democrats who wanted to raise the dignity of all men were immediately involved by the immense size and confusion of their ruling class...Their science tole them that politics was an instinct and that the instinct worked in a limited environment. Their hopes bade them insist that all men in a very large environment could govern. In this deadly conflict between their ideals and their science, the only way out was to assume without much discussion that the voice of the people was the voice of God...They could not show how a citizen of Boston was to stay in Boston and conceive the views of a Virginian, how a Virginian in Virginia could have real opinions about the government at Washington, how Congressmen in Washington could have opinions about China or Mexico."

He argues that by 1921 "there is no longer any doubt that the continuous reporting of an unseen environment is feasible. It is often done badly, b ut the fact that it is done at all shows that it can be done, and the fact that we begin to know how badly it is often done shows that it can be done better."

Nevertheless (p. 251):

"The democrat has understood what an analysis of public opinion seems to demonstrate: that in dealing with an unseen environment decisions 'are manifestly settled at haphazard, which clearly they ought not to be.'"

According to Lippmann, the American Constitution was based on the view that special interests needed to be kept in equilibrium by a balance of power. "They intended to deadlock local and class interest to prevent these from obstructing government" (p. 259).

Local interests can in Lippmann's view (p. 271) lead to decentralization or a "Roman peace". "Almost always they chose the path that they had least recently travelled." America was founded as a decentralized state, but reaction to the trusts led to centralization. Centralization led to pluralism (p. 273): "This time society was to swing back not to the atomic individualism of Adam Smith's economic man and Thomas Jefferson's farmer, but to a sort of molecular individualism of voluntary groups."

Lippmann goes on to argue (p. 289):

"The democratic fallacy has been its preoccupation with the origin of government rather than with the processes and results. The democrat has always assumed that if political power could be derived in the right way, it would be beneficent. His whole attention has been on the source of power, since he is hypnotized by the belief that the great thing is to express the will of the people, first because expression is the highest interest of man, and second because the will is instinctively good. But no amount of regulation at the source of a river will completely control its behavior, and while democrats have been absorbed in trying to find a good mechanism for originating social power, that is to say a good mechanism of voting and representation, they neglected almost every other interest of men. For no matter how power originates, the crucial interest is in how power is exercised. What determines the quality of civilization is the use made of power. And that use cannot be controlled at the source."

In order to obtain information, the public relies on newspapers. But newspapers are riddled with error. (p. 297) "The truth about distant or complex matters is not self-evident, and the machinery for assembling information is technical and expensive". Newspapers are businesses, and they have to make decisions based on business considerations as well as on public service ones (p. 298). Readers have limited attention spans. News must be tailored to the selfish and personal considerations of the audience. The very definition of news as well as the threat of defamation suits limit editors' abilities to discern important underlying causes (p. 325):

"A great deal, I think myself the crucial part, of what looks..as deliberate misrepresentation on the part of newspapers is the direct outcome of a practical difficulty in uncovering the news, and the emotional difficulty of making distant facts interesting unless, as Emerson says, we can perceive them to be only a new vewrsion of our familiar experience."

(p. 331) "...news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished."

The press is "too frail to carry the whole burden of popular sovereignty, to supply spontaneously the truth which democrats hoped was inborn...they fail, they are bound to fail, in any future one can conceive they will continue to fail...Unconsciously (democracy) sets up the single reader as theoretically omnicompetent, and puts upon the press the burden of accomplishing whatever representative government, industrial organization and diplomacy have failed to accomplish."

Lippmann argues that institutions that are well run will generate accurate information, so that the quality of the press reflects the quality of institutions (p. 335-6):

"At its best the press is a servant and guardian of institutions; at its worst it is a means by which a few exploit social disorganization to their own ends...The press is no substitute for institutions...The trouble lies deeper than the press..."

The book falls down when (p. 342-3) Lippmann argues that experts can solve the information problem. This solution sounds naive indeed, although Lippmann can be forgiven for he was writing in 1921. Lippmann qualifies this claim by discussing the limitations of social science as he conceived it then. Nevertheless his conclusion that there is a "need for interposing some form of expertness beween the private citizen and the vast environment in which he is entangled" sounds stale from this vantage point. He couldn't have known about Ben Bernanke back then, of course.

Party Affiliation and the Media's Lying Quality

In the nineteenth century news sources openly identified their party affiliations. That practice gradually eroded in the twentieth. The New York Times claimed that objective journalism was their goal. They made a good stab at it, but by now they are a Democratic (and social democratic) newspaper. Most other newspapers followed their lead because journalists believed that the Times was the best paper, the newspaper of record. As a result, the newspapers have tended to follow a Democratic Party line.

The television networks were established during a period when the Democratic Party was dominant. Although they do not express a party affiliation, they are mostly supportive of the Democratic Party. This is inequitable because the air waves are public property and should not all be allocated to one party. There needs to be open discussion of partisan dominance of the television networks.

It is time for consumers of news to demand that news sources openly affiliate with one party or another. It is pointless to claim, as do many conservatives, that a Democratic Party newspaper like the Times is biased toward the Democrats. Of course it is. Rather, readers should demand integrity from media. Integrity means that media ought to state the party or ideology with which it is affiliated. It is the false claim to objectivity that irritates conservatives, not the fact that media is biased. Objecting to bias is like objecting to the grim reaper. You can complain all you want, but you're going to be reaped anyway. The fact that social democrats do not make bias complaints about the media is significant evidence that the conservatives' complaint is true.

Many in the media vapidly claim that they are not biased. But it does not occur to them that conservatives frequently complain that they are biased and social democrats defend them. This alone closes the case. There is no reasonable doubt if all on one side complain and all on the other defend them. That is what bias means.

I agree with conservative attacks on the Times just as I agree with reasoned attacks on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But isn't it time to call a social democrat a social democrat and start confronting real issues? These would include abolition of the Department of Education; abolition of the Federal Reserve Bank; privatization of the Post Office; privatization of social security, educational vouchers........