PrintOctober 22, 2009
Mass media and private liberty
The spectacle of a White House warring against the single television news network which does not fawn over the president, and attacking his most prominent talk radio show critic, brings home just how bureaucratized information, opinion, and thought have become in America. In television news a handful of institutions determine what is newsworthy and what is not for those tens of millions who only get news from the video screen. That decision -- what is "news" -- decides everything. If, for example, the establishment leftist media decides that the tragic story of families with a sick member who lacks health insurance is "news," then the rest of the story follows automatically.It seems hard for us to grasp that once news, entertainment, and education were not utterly bureaucratized. During the American Revolution, a single book by an ordinary American, Common Sense, provided much of the rhetorical firepower needed to defeat the arguments...(Read Full Article)
