This item from Tom Paine.com is quite cogent in its own right. It will also take you to a blog that I am going to bookmark.
He opens with
There are seven interlocking parts in a kind of contraption political journalists operate for us every four years—campaign coverage, as we have come to dread it. Recognize any of the following?
The seven parts, which elsewhere he refers to as "artifacts", pertain to ways in which the media confabulate the stories that they report to the public. A variation on propaganda techniques.
Continuing
Spin Alley is absurd, and called so by journalists. . . . But Spin Alley is there after every big debate, and it still draws the journalists. Why is this?. . .
The secret is this: pssst... the press is a player in the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the press could or should be playing for. So while the press likes being a player, it does not like being asked: what are you for? . . .
In fact, the instructions are not to think about it too much, because to know what you are playing for would be to have a kind of agenda. And by all mainstream definition the political reporter must have no kind of agenda
. . .
Yet these rituals persist because they do one thing well. They preserve the fiction of a view from nowhere, which is needed for ideological reasons (professional neutrality in journalism) and commercial ones (agenda-less news is for everyone, advertisers included). [Emphasis added]
Posted by Donald Douglas at January 24, 2004 03:12 PM | TrackBack