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"The media love to wrap themselves in the mantle of  'the public's right to know' but there is no such dedication to that right when it goes against the journalists' own prejudices." -- Thomas Sowell

"I would not be fooled by the old myth that reporting is about objectivity. Deciding what is news is the most subjective of acts and it is probably the most important thing that we do." -- Carl Bernstein 

"In the past, in the days of ink-stained wretches and typesetting, it was the editors and publishers who set the news agenda. A small coterie of journalists decided what was most important, what went on page one, what was to be emphasized day after day." -- David S. Hirschman, Editor & Publisher

"Many Western journalists, in contrast to revolutionaries, do not treat ideas seriously, and therefore fail to recognize the power of ideas in action. They don't realize that chaos and brutality must accompany a determined effort to implement ... thorough-going socialism." --Prof. Morgan O. Reynolds 

   "Anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total state.  That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals." -- Lew Rockwell 

"It is not just bias -- the vast majority of media people are truly ignorant about economics (as well as history, the military, etc. etc.)  They are mostly privileged white libs who went to liberal arts colleges, where they majored in English and were indoctrinated by left-wing professors.  They then went off to J-school for further polishing into the little gems we see today.  They have rarely had to engage in critical thinking or the use of logic to support their positions.  The MSM is a hive, with a hive mentality. The swarm is dangerous, but the individual worker bee ain’t that bright." -- Phineas Gage

Check out THIS example of "economics reporting" which goes beyond embarrassing to the incredibly bizarre. 

Find "The word journalist has a distinct smell to it." -- Alicia Colon, HERE  

"It's hard for the media to ignore a good 'racism' story, even when the definitionsdon't fit." -- Neal Boortz

"Journalists, being simplistic by nature and trained to seek melodrama, almost always screw up science stories. They simply hate to add all the qualifiers, conditions and uncertainties because it detracts from the drama."-- Charley Reese 6-19-2001

"When covering what scientists say, reporters are particularly prone to getting the story wrong.  Most of us have little training in science, little understanding of how it works, and too much faith in any one given scientist. ... Businesses often twist science to make money.  Lawyers do it to win cases. Political activists distort science to fit their agenda, bureaucrats to protect their turf.  Reporters keep falling for it." -- John Stossel, Give Me a Break.

"The Global Warming alarmists are the anti-science religion that is trying to forcibly indoctrinate and convert everyone while suppressing dissent. And the news media are their patsies, their stooges, their puppets. Right now, let's start demanding that whenever the local newspaper or TV stations say anything about Global Warming, they back it up with actual data that takes into account the solar oscillations, the real climate history of the earth, and the facts about what CO2 actually does in the atmosphere. ... It's time to stop letting them pass along other people's lies. It's time for the news media to stop doing cocktail party 'research' and dig down into the science and get it right." -- Orson Scott Card

"Journalists are no better than other liberal-arts majors at doing regression analysis with infinite variables." -- P.J. O'Rourke, Wall Street Journal, 4-16-02

"As the twentieth century drew to a close, the connection between hard scientific fact and public policy became increasingly elastic ... in great part because of the decline of the media as an independent assessor of fact." -- Dr. Michael Crichton

"...America's news media and largest periodicals don't have it [that tiny grain of knowledge]. They work by the T&P (trust and parrot) method. They may differ in whom to trust and parrot; but they share a common inability to evaluate. They will find two opposing viewpoints and manufacture a 'controversy;'  for they think objectivity lies halfway between the truth and a lie (or worse, between two lies)."-- introduction to the Access to Energy Newsletter

"The case we made is: with most reporters, the understanding they have of most issues has the depth of floor wax."  -- Cal Thomas, 9-18-04

“Framing is a process whereby communicators, consciously or unconsciously, act to construct a point of view that encourages the facts of a given situation to be interpreted by others in a particular manner.” -- Jim Kuypers, Assistant Professor of Communications, Virginia Tech

"This is what passes for journalism today. Participate in contriving a story and then report it contrary to the facts." -- Jed Babbin

"Some folks in the media are quite willing to lie to you." -- D. J. Drummond

It turns out that the entire Valerie Plame scandal was a hoax from the beginning, blown up and perpetuated by the agenda-driven mainstream media.  Check it out HERE

"Deborah Solomon's weekly short interviews in the New York Times Magazine are the most irritating possible example of the snotty, smarmy, smug and holier-than-thou attitude that pervades the entire enterprise that is theTimes." -- Don Luskin

"What a difference three days make. 72 little hours.  In that time, a New York Times reporter went from tolling the death knell of real wage growth to reporting a 7-percent wage jump over last year after inflation." -- Ken Shepherd

“The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.  The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling.” -- Michael S. Malone

"... press conferences ... [have] become a customary courtesy over the years, but courtesy is a two-way street, except for those in the media who act like spoiled brats, as if they have some inherent right to whatever serves their institutional, career, or ideological purposes. ... The media love to wrap themselves in the mantle of  'the public's right to know' but there is no such dedication to that right when it goes against the journalists' own prejudices." -- Thomas Sowell

See::How to "report" a phony civilian body count:HERE

"There once was a time when reporters took pride in their courage. Now, however, they take pride in their 'political correctness.'  That's one reason why people don't trust the press any more." -- Tony Snow, 3-30-2000  
See how students at a "prestigious" J-School cheated on an ETHICS test HERE. 

Public Evaluations of the News Media: 1985-2009

"I’m no longer surprised that journalists lack an internal regulatory mechanism (sometimes called 'ethics' or another quaint old-fashioned term that no longer applies, 'patriotism') to prevent the release of information that could damage their own country. On the contrary, they actively search for that information and release it with great relish." -- Charles Johnson, in "The Media are the Enemy," HERE

"The New York Times is now reeling from so many huge mistakes by reporters and management that people are saying it's one of the worst newspapers in America." -- Donald Trump, 10-28-2005  
  

"All is woe and darkness in the house of media. If you were measuring journalists' public standing on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best, right now we're in less-than-zero territory ... The great flaw of media-scandal coverage is that it's so intramural: journalists covering other journalists in trouble ... this is a bit like assigning a second cousin of the Gambinos to cover The Family's latest criminal trial. ... The real lesson of the Times scandal is ... that the Age of Media Arrogance is over." -- William Powers

"But I stopped watching [CBS] some time ago. The unremitting liberal orientation finally became too much for me. ... A large swath of the society doesn't trust the news media. And for many, it's even stronger than that: They abhor the media and perceive it as an escalating threat to the society."-- Van Gordon Sauter, formerPresident of CBS News, in the Los Angeles Times, 1-13-2005 
  

National Journal's Hotline Blogometer interviews Polipundit 6/16/2005: Q. How often, or do you ever, read a newspaper in its dead-tree (i.e. print) form?  A. What’s a “newspaper"? Q. How do you see the new media and old media affecting and influencing each other in the next five years?  A. Dinosaurs and asteroids. Nuff said. "The MSM [mainstream media] is very defensive of its credibility, and is loathe to point out serious errors no matter who points them out. It’s all the worse when upstart media competitors like bloggers point out the errors." -- Don Luskin "Newspapers do have a few things going for them....you can't line the bird cage with the Internet or wrap fish in a cable news channel." -- Neal Boortz "It is kind of ironic when you think about it. I mean the internet was begat by the old Arpanet which was created to keep the flow of important data moving through alternative nodes when one or more of them became disabled or nonfunctional. ... Not just ironic. Delicious." -- Jessica's Well "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- John Gilmore "Decades of state censorship have yielded a mastery of euphemism and allegory so subtle the Chinese government ends up promoting films meant to mock its rule.  If any culture will find a way to discuss freedom while routing around [the censorship of] the word freedom, it's China's." --Kerry Howley "What's even more laughable is those in the press (like the amazingly pompous and inane New York Times) who are now tut-tutting about how awful it is that these independently funded groups are allowed to be heard. Oh, what is it you're afraid of, Mr. News Editor Man? That you don't get to be the gatekeeper of what people are allowed to hear about any more? ... The Internet has detected the mainstream media as a form of censorship and simply routed around them." -- Dean Esmay "A sudden loss of status and influence is a profound shock to most people who have spent their lives aimed at the acquisition and enjoyment of socio- political standing. Relieved of the ability to shape the consciousness and behavior of others, a certain number unburden themselves of the inner restraints which kept them from openly voicing the condescension and scorn they have for those whom they regard as their social, intellectual, and moral inferiors." -- Thomas Lifson "The real luxury [of the internet in general and the blogosphere in particular] is not having someone like you [MSM people] misrepresent what people are, do and mean by your selective 'fact-sifting', out of context quoting, and sloppy reporting....  I am targeting the entire profession here. I am an equal opportunity ranter." -- Adriana Lukas "A bunch of amateurs, no matter how smart and enthusiastic, could never outperform professional neurosurgeons, because they lack the specialized training and experience necessary for that field. But what qualifications, exactly, does it take to be a journalist?  What can they do that we can't?  Nothing.  Generally speaking, they don't know any more about primary data and raw sources of information than we do -- often less.  Their general knowledge is often inadequate.  Their superior resources should allow them to carry out investigations far beyond what we amateurs can do.  But the reality is that the mainstream media rarely use those resources.  Too many journalists are bored, biased and lazy." -- John Hinderaker "Journalists are no better than other liberal-arts majors at doing regression analysis with infinite variables." -- P.J. O'Rourke,WSJ, 4-16-02  Guerilla Media on the rise "Question: What does the stock market know that the mainstream media  [MSM] do not? Answer: almost everything." -- Larry Kudlow "The power of the blogosphere (more properly, the internet) does not lie in a handful of bloggers with well-read sites. It resides in the hundreds of thousands, or millions, of smart, well-informed, engaged readers who, collectively, have amazing knowledge and expertise in just about any area you can think of. What is new is the ability to bring together these disparate sources of knowledge, analyze them, and disseminate them in real time. We help to do this, but on a big, fast-breaking story like this one, the real impetus comes from our readers--a point we make in every interview we give." -- John Hinderaker "The people in the MSM don't think of themselves as liberal.  They're justin favor of collectivism and against individualism in general -- withoutusing many labels (or mucch thought) of any kind.  They go out of their way only to mention a minority group if they can.  Groupism is what they believe in." -- Rick Gaber "World Ends; Women,  Minorities Hardest Hit"  -- headline parody by James Taranto,HERE., 6-6-03 "Report: Tsunami Hit Women Hardest" - headline, CNN.com, 3-26-05 "The MSM's avoidance of theindividualist perspective is now routed-around." -- Rick Gaber

SHAME on the media for burying this story about Louisiana authorities preventing the Red Cross and Salvation Army from delivering food, water, medicine, and care to the people trapped in the Superdome, Convention Center and all of New Orleans. 
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"Remember how CBS News spiked a poll showing 67 percent of Americans supported George W. Bush's tax cut plan?  It didn't stop there.  Now ABC News has poll results it doesn't want to handle.  An ABC News/ Washington Post poll found that 58 percent think Bush's tax cut is 'about right' or 'too small.'  Only 36 percent said it was 'too big.'  Did these results make it to air?  Of course not!" -- Neal Boortz, 3-29-01

"The media seem to have come up with a formula that would make any war in history unwinnable and unbearable: They simply emphasize the enemy's victories and our losses." -- Thomas Sowell 
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"Headlines from Afghanistan always read 'Five Soldiers Killed and Wounded,' not '150 Taliban Killed.' If today's journalists reported the Battle of Midway, we'd read 'U.S. Aircraft Shot From Skies,' with a brief mention of the destruction of the Japanese carrier fleet buried at the bottom." -- Ralph Peters

Domestic spying?  The Clinton administration spied domestically on the Conference of Catholic Bishops, Jerry Falwell, the NRA, Cardinal O’Connor and others, none exactly international terrorists.  You remember the unrelenting uproar about it in the nation's press and airwaves, don't you?  You don't?  Oh, yeah, right.     Never mind.

"I’m no longer surprised that journalists lack an internal regulatory mechanism (sometimes called 'ethics' or another quaint old-fashioned term that no longer applies, 'patriotism') to prevent the release of information that could damage their own country. On the contrary, they actively search for that information and release it with great relish." -- Charles Johnson, in "The Media are the Enemy," HERE

"Sometimes the fourth estate seems more like a fifth column."-- Dr. Thomas Sowell, HERE and HERE

"It's the enemedia." -- Fred Nerks

"Suppose that American media were really funded and supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, and openly opposed to the United States. How would the coverage differ?  Answer: not at all." -- Charles Johnson

"Why do 'they' [the editors of The New York Times] hate us?" -- Michael Barone

"Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush -- sophistry washed down with Chardonnay." -- Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

"Caught up in the hidden marxist agenda of their postmodern rhetoric, ... the graduates of these journalism schools march in lockstep with ... the poor victimized terrorists and all the helpless and persecuted dictators and tyrants ..." -- Pat Santy

“Islamists who murder non-Muslims in pursuit of explicitly Islamic goals are airbrushed into vague, generic 'rebel forces.'  You can't tell the players without a scorecard, and that's just the way the Western media intend to keep it.” -- Mark Steyn 
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The AP calls terrorist mastermind bin Laden a "dissident" here.  Outrageous.

"Sheridan’s omissions are part of a larger problem of journalists who have wittingly or unwittingly become defacto public relations representatives for extremist Islamist groups. Taking their press releases at face value, journalists have helped effectively to cover up the larger, serious issue of the growing secret network of the Muslim Brotherhood in the US." --Andrew Cochran

See how "the last five years of relentless dishonesty and fecklessness in the American media" have made nuclear war a near-certainty here.

"The courts have given the news media carte blanche, in the name of the First Amendment -- butthe media are no better than government at exercising unchecked power. When it's known that no one can punish you, a certain kind of person stops caring whether he hurts anybody. And such people tend to rise within any organization that doesn't work hard to have a conscience." -- Orson Scott Card

"... all of the major news outlets in this country, at this very moment in fact, have been ... scurrilous and malevolent." -- Kowalski

"There is corruption in our business [of journalism]," he said. "We need to get back to basics. This war should be studied and talked about. In the run up to this war, to my mind, there was a gross abdication of responsibility." -- John Burns HERE 
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"After rioters have been christened 'demonstrators' by the media, it was perhaps inevitable that terrorists would be christened 'militants'." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell

“Kidnap and behead Westerners, or bomb schools, and the Associated Press will call you an 'insurgent.' At worst, a militant. ... But attack a dictatorial Ba’athist regime and suddenly you’re a terrorist, sans scare quotes...” -- Charles Johnson

"... how the Reuters 'news' service described its effort to treat terrorists and their victims 'on a level playing field'."-- James Taranto

."Is there any more cowardly class of Americans than journalists? ... the nation’s media professionals have lately demonstrated a kind of courage rarely seen outside a hamster cage." -- Tim Cavanaugh

"When our media has the testicular fortitude to report on terrorists honestly, then they will have gained the moral authority to lecture any White House on censorship and the responsibility of fully informing the public. Until then, such demonstrations as we saw this week by the White House press corps only stands as a perverse monument to the media's hypocrisy and venality." -- Ed Morrissey, 2-19-2006

"Refusing to even acknowledge the Santorum-Hoekstra announcement is another black eye for American journalism, and further evidence that the MSM is (thankfully) on its last legs." -- Spook86

The New York Times disorts Rep. Hoekstra's letter 
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"This cult of murderers [Iraq's terrorists] will kill some of their own women and children and then try to make it look like they were killed by American forces. The media, of course, will fall right in line with this anti-American game." -- Neal Boortz

"I'm not so old as the Gray Lady, but it seems to me the working motto of the New York Timeshas always been 'All the news that fits our agenda,' not just since its various story-fabrication scandals came to light." -- Rick Gaber 
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“Anything negative, no matter how commonplace, can make the front page of the New York Times, while even remarkable acts of bravery or compassion are passed over in silence." -- Thomas Sowell

"The Times' new motto: 'all the news that others find unfit to print'."-- Don Luskin

The New York Times is being sued over its motto.   Check out The Fat Lady's Comical Self-Importance as well.

"Like the activist who loves The People but despises every actual person he meets, the Times’editorial page takes liberal stands when the issue is safely abstract -- but when it comes to the paper’s profits and political battles, the Little Guy can get bent." -- Matt Welch

"The New York Times: It Just Can’t Stop Hating Success and the American Way of Life" -- Dr. George Reisman 
. 

"When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, 'there ought to be a law,' you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell

"It seems as though you can't go a week without some idiotic myrmidon yelling, 'there oughta be a federal law!' " -- Neal Boortz

"It's gotten to the point where relying on journalists to be government watchdogs (to protect liberty against demagogues), is like relying on pedophiles to be inspectors of daycare centers (to protect toddlers against abuse)." -- Rick Gaber

"The purpose of the government is to provide the service, and the purpose of the media is to provide the vaseline." -- old libertarian joke 

"The time is long overdue for schools of journalism to start teaching economics.  It would eliminate much of the nonsense and hysteria in the media, and with it perhaps some of the demagoguery in politics." -- Thomas Sowell

"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.'  But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance." –Murray N. Rothbard

"Never -- and I mean never -- blindly trust the statistics you read [or hear] about the economy." -- Don Luskin, HERE

“Americans are fed a steady diet of idiotic commentary and specious 'analyses' most of which flow smoothly down the gullets of unsuspecting nightly-news, viewers, newspaper readers, and National Public Radio devotees. But for those of us vexed with some comprehension of supply and demand, comparative advantage, the role of prices, the nature of money, and other economic insights, most of what is uttered or written by the news media on economic topics is so ignorant that it hurts to hear it.” --  by Donald J. Boudreaux

"Well, of course capitalism is the cause of prosperity. Given the overwhelming evidence of the 20th century, only a New York Times reporter would regard this as a surprising or controversial conclusion." -- Robert Tracinski

"As a leap of faith, let us assume that the New York Times is telling the truth about the facts. What does this one woman's story prove in a country of more than a quarter of a billion people? ... The Timesstory gets around that problem by simply declaring her to be like 'millions at the bottom of the labor force' who are part of  'the hidden America.' This unsubstantiated assertion is crucial to the point that they are trying to make.  But what if your faith can't leap that far?" --Thomas Sowell

See "how the process of straining political events through the standard journalistic narrative templates - especially the right-vs.-left narrative -- can simplify a story so greatly that it emerges as a different story, perhaps even the wrong story" HERE.

"What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion."-- H.L. Mencken

"The mainstream media is to information what American Idol is to real talent and ability." -- Mike Hu

"It used to make me incredibly angry anytime I saw a story like this reported in such a sloppy and dishonest fashion. It still makes me angry, but it comes as absolutely no surprise anymore. I have come to expect this kind of crap from the mainstream media. The only nice thing I can say is that at least they are consistent ... just imagine that your local newspaper, read by everyone you know, wrote a story saying that you were accused of some horrible act -- let’s say rape for the men, child beating for the women. Imagine that the headline and opening dozen paragraphs of the story herald the accusations made against you. Then in the thirteenth paragraph of the story they say that DNA tests have cleared you of the rape (for the men) or that an investigation had found no evidence of child abuse (for the women). Let’s say that your local television news picks up the story, and reports the accusations, but doesn’t bother to report the DNA or investigation results."  -- Lorie Byrd

"If you haven't been under a rock the last few weeks, or relying on the mainstream media as your sole source of news [which is even worse], you are likely aware of some of the questionable circumstances surrounding the organization Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)." -- Jeff Poor

Journalists conceal Julian Bond's crazy talk here. 
  
"Large sections of the international media are not only misreporting the current conflict in Lebanon. They are actively fanning the flames." -- Tom Gross, National Post

"Following a precision strike by bloggers from around the world, the mainstream media's reputation can be seen going up in photoshopped smoke in Lebanon." -- Perry de Havilland

"Now that the wire services and their photographers have been called out on it, they're all dancing on the head of a pin trying to explain away the discrepancy.  They've been nailed as willing participants in the Islamic terror propaganda efforts." -- Neal Boortz, HERE

ABC News  deliberately mischaracterizes Justice Antonin Scalia's attendance at a Federalist Society meeting HERE

"An analysis by David Boaz of the Cato Institute found that major newspapers used the phrase 'shift the court' 36 times in covering the Alito nomination. They referred to changes in the 'balance of the court'  32 times and'the court's balance' another 15 and used the phrase 'shift to the right' 18 times. ... By way of contrast, not a single major newspaper used anything like those phrases when the Senate considered the Ginsburg nomination, though her appointment would clearly change the ideological makeup of the Court." -- Wall Street Journal Political Diary 1-24-06 

"I was a liberal from a family of liberals, until I compared the media reports on the Clarence Thomas hearings with the actual hearings." -- hippoetry

"Accurate reporting loses out to sensationalistic reporting every time. Thus we like to say that, at least when it comes to long term accuracy, no pundit survives contact with a historian. ... Editors also rely on the fact that most consumers of mass media news do not revisit old stories to see how accurate they were. Historians, however, do that all the time." -- Jim Dunnigan 

"British PM Stanley Baldwin once dismissed a similar abuse of media power as 'power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages'. In fact, the performance by much of the media is probably a slur on most sex workers, who, one presumes, don't generally dismiss the wishes of 40 to 50 per cent of their customers. Many journalists are certainly living down to their standing as one of the least-respected occupations." -- Michael Warby

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