I’ve been working in the news media since I was 14. My career officially began at CNN. Before and after picking electronic cotton for Massa Turner, I worked for newspapers, radio stations, magazines, TV and the Internet. So I know more than a little about journalistic bias. There are two main strains: sensationalism and liberalism . . .

Sensationalism is the simple result of capitalism. The great Don Henley put it best: “it’s interesting when people die.” “Gun violence” is interesting; it attracts audiences. Ratings/page views/ears mean money. Ergo anything involving guns is a potential mainstream media money spinner, especially if it involves ballistic perforation.

Guns are particularly fascinating in that they usually involve intent. Someone shot someone. Who, what, where, when, why? Unlike many, I don’t think less of people for wanting to read, watch or listen to sometimes gory information about a shooting. The basic human instinct for survival informs this desire. If I know more about a shooting, I can protect myself from being shot. Makes sense to me.

The mainstream media’s anti-gun/liberal bias is another matter . . .

The people who own and/or control the mainstream media are college graduates. They hire college graduates. They’re all products of a system that’s a hothouse of elitist ideology. With exceptions (notably university departments teaching hard sciences), college students are trained to consider themselves better than non-college graduates. After assuming a mountain of government-sponsored debt, they’re perfectly qualified to make choices for other, less educated, perhaps uneducable citizens.

The gun control message fits this belief system like a glove. Society needs to limit access to guns because most people aren’t like us. They’re not smart enough to handle the responsibility of owning a deadly weapon. And it’s OK for the police and the military to have guns because they’re under the control of smart (i.e. college educated) people. 

This elitist anti-gun message finds special resonance in journalism school. Students are taught by professors inspired by The Washington Post’s dethronement of President Nixon. The profs — and thus their students — see their work in Blues Brothers’ terms: they’re on a mission from God. A mission to expose and defeat Republicans/conservatives. Because Democrats/progressives share “our” values.

Don’t get me wrong: journalism is a noble undertaking. In its ideal form, journalism holds the rich and powerful accountable to the laws/principles upon which this country was founded. It protects the weak. It safeguards our Constitutional republic. Thomas Jefferson put it best:

The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.

Papers. Yes, there is that . . .

A 2014 U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy study found that 14 percent of Americans can’t read, 21 percent of adults read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read. To say nothing of their understanding of the United States Constitution and the Second Amendment therein.

Assume that reading endows a person with critical thinking skills. Clock the fact that the mainstream media makes the lion’s share of its money in urban areas where illiteracy is at its highest. Connect the dots. The MSM “dumbs down” firearms-related stories to consumers ill equipped with the critical thinking skills needed to appreciate — or care about — the producers’ underlying anti-gun rights bias. It’s win-win as far as the MSM is concerned.

The Internet changed — is changing — everything. America’s traditional college system is collapsing under its own weight, as union-driven costs spiral and the Internet-driven free market rewards efficiency and productivity, rather than politically correct college cred.

Is the Internet enabling, indeed forcing a return to the educated electorate that was America at its birth, when 90 percent of citizens were highly literate? (This before compulsory education.) The jury’s out on that. Meanwhile, let’s face it: the sensationalist anti-gun rights mainstream media haven’t lost much of their power to mold minds. They show little sign of acknowledging or changing their bias.

On the positive side, Fox News. And Internet-based “citizen journalists”: writers, podcasters and videographers who promote the Second Amendment as the defense against government tyranny and personal predation. That said, “new media” hasn’t even dented the mainstream media’s anti-gun bias. But we do undermine it with rational discourse, for those capable of understanding. The more of those, the better.

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67 COMMENTS

  1. “The late great Don Henley?”

    Not dead.

    Glenn Frey maybe? Or different Don Henley?

  2. “Regardless of the school, college students are trained to consider themselves better than non-college graduates.”

    This is an overly broad statement. It depends on the school and the Department. Many people trained in the hard sciences certainly are not taught to consider themselves “better” than people who don’t have their level of education. When you spend your life working with dangerous substances, where a single mistake means dead people and evacuated buildings, you’re humble and careful or you’re dead (and the @$$hole who took people with you due to your own hubris).

    I don’t know how “schools of journalism” work because I didn’t go to one but what I took away from my college experience was that you never stop learning and improving in anything you do. No, I’m not “better” than someone with a lesser education just because I’ve got some fancy piece of paper hanging on my wall. I might be farther along certain roads than they are, but we all started in the same place: cold, wet, hungry and screaming. Where we are now isn’t where we want to be tomorrow. That’s why you pick up a text by Virgil that you haven’t read or teach yourself a higher level of math.

    Personally I think the attitude described above has little to do with education, it has to do with the type of personality who seeks out that particular brand of education which they gravitate towards simply because it offers little in the way of resistance. While I may not have seen this in schools of journalism I certainly saw it in other departments in my university. People got a BA in “Afro-Caribbean Literature” because it meant they didn’t have to take a scary math class.

    These people believe themselves to be “better” because they have never been humbled by failure or felt the sting of working your ass off only to have someone with a natural talent whip the crap out of you. They’ve never had to work hard and they’ve never had to fight. They chose an easy path in life because they are, in their heart of hearts, cowards who cannot accept the idea that they might not be right or might not be the best. Everything they’ve done in life is designed to avoid failure and defeat, that being the case, they have no real education. They have only instruction.

    • Point taken. Text amended thus:

      With exceptions (notably university departments teaching hard sciences), college students are trained to consider themselves better than non-college graduates. After assuming a mountain of government-sponsored debt, they’re perfectly qualified to make choices for other, less educated, perhaps uneducable citizens.

      • i don’t think, and i don’t even know if this is how you meant it or not, that colleges indoctrinate students to think they are better than non-college people.

        the whole “go to college to better yourself, manual labor or a trade is for lower forms of life” mantra is pounded into kids heads way before college.

        • Some Sociology courses are highly critical of college education. Had one that talked about how college’s main purpose is to track and train people into obedient workers to serve the elite. That colleges are moving away from teaching well rounded people to teaching people skills the elite value for their labor force. Like instead of teaching critical thinking skills, the colleges may teach computer skills instead to prepare students to be office drones who don’t question orders. Then there is the meat market where many colleges chew up and spit out athletes on their sports teams.

        • Slicer, your Sociology prof is a walking irony. Comp skills are taught because they pay the bills & enable independence, sociology profs exist to make more sociology profs, the field being largely useless outside academia. Oh, and only one of those two fields is being bankrolled by the mysterious ‘elite’

        • Actually Business Marketing makes extensive use of sociology to determine what they should make, how much, for what price, who to market to, etc. Government and both political parties use sociology to help determine the best ways to get the most votes. Also the course talked about how because so many people are getting college education, it is worth less than it used to be and is no longer a guarantee to good paying jobs like it used to be. Basically to create a surplus of college graduates to keep the cost of educated skilled labor low. There is an education gap where the majority of people are over educated for the available jobs. That and the American dream of working hard enough to become rich is mostly a fantasy. The vast majority of American wealth is inherited, not earned. Getting ahead depends on who you know, not what you know, being born into a rich family, and being involved in rich social circles and making friends with other rich people it the true way people get ahead.

          Then we have the post-industrial age where middle class jobs are either being eliminated through automation or shipped overseas where people work for peanuts. A post industrial economy is mainly low tier service jobs or high tier technical jobs, and little mid tier jobs because most are outdated.

          Think about, who is pushing for gun control, billionaires (ike Bloomberg) and other high on the hog people like senators and executives who can hire bodyguards, the elite. Afterall if these elites really want an obedient workforce, then they surely want that workforce to be unarmed to make them more obedient. Yes there is indeed irony, on every side.

  3. MSM is biased towards the left. Everyone knows this. It’s obvious. Except to some Liberals. This winter during the height of the Republican presidential candidate race I got into a long and heated argument on FB (of course) about this subject with a VERY Liberal college friend of mine. This gentleman I’ve known for 10+ years, he’s in his late 40s and I consider him pretty intelligent.
    He was adement that the MSM was not in the least liberal biased. He thought that only conservatives or Republicans say that because it’s a tool to try to control the masses.
    Now I always had considered this man rock steady and wise…. I still cannot believe that he argued this position to the point that I had to de-friend him on FB because he started calling me a Conservative loon for believing in the liberal media hoax. Some Liberals just cannot see past their own hypocrisy. It’s like talking to a blind man about a painting.

    • The point is obvious to those on the right. It’s just an echo chamber for those on the left. Of course they don’t think it’s biased! After all, everyone knows they themselves are always right!

    • It’s hard to see the bias when literally everything is slanted in the same direction. Not having an objective standard to compare it to, you think it’s straight.

      When you gain inside knowledge on something — guns, for instance — you begin to see how much the media gets things wrong, and the bias begins to become evident. A lot of people will never get to that point because they already agree with much of the leftward bias to begin with; or because they’re just not that interested in thinking for themselves.

    • Many people have that ‘Team’ mentality (some more than others). They support their ‘team’ (or country, family, political party, Union, etc.), no matter how obviously wrong they are. Most of my family just LOVES Bill Clinton, no matter how many times I point out his lying, philandering, etc…and I won ‘t even get into those NE Patriot fans that refuse to believe that they are the biggest cheaters in pro sports, no matter how many times they are caught.
      This phenomenon seems to be much more prevalent on the left. Anecdotally, I hear much more criticism by ‘R’s of their party, than by ‘D’s (which I hear virtually none).

  4. journalism is a noble undertaking.

    There’s nothing noble about journalism and there hasn’t been since Emile Zola went all “j’accuse” on the French government’s ass.

    Journalism is a scam designed to keep people ignorant and under control.

    • The power of the press belongs to he who owns one.

      Not sure anyone can point to an era of news coverage where “the press” was romantically objective, unfettered by prejudice or bias. Political press is political. There is no pure “truth” against which to judge the mythical “objective” clarion. If you want truly objective news reporting, you will not find it among mankind.

      I am always mystified by the conundrum that the “lamestream” media is fast losing its hold on “truth”, yet retains extraordinary power (against the entire internet) to warp the minds of the citizenry. If the lamestream is losing, who come we are constantly railing against the unfairness of it all?

      • Just because the MSM is losing doesn’t mean the war is over. The Wehrmacht was losing for over two years before it was ultimately defeated, and millions died until it was finally snuffed out.

        • “The Wehrmacht was losing for over two years before it was ultimately defeated…”

          The Germans were capable of fighting (as were the Japanese) ferociously, but they lost every battle after Kasserine Pass. The MSM, to read many conservative (anti-leftist) writers, is winning daily battles (Fabian tactics don’t work in wars of culture). So, the question remains, “with all the anti-leftist news and opinion outlets, how are we losing every battle (or so close to “all” as to be statistically insignificant”)? How is the MSM remaining so powerful? Perhaps we are fighting the wrong war, with the wrong opponent.

          MSM does not create mush-brained drones, it reflects. The source seems to be the complete domination of the education system, at all levels. The creation of mush-brains is done in school, the MSM is only a reminder service. I doubt anyone can seriously propose that the leftists are losing the battle in the education system.

  5. “Eye on the TV
    ’cause tragedy thrills me
    Whatever flavour
    It happens to be like;
    Killed by the husband
    Drowned by the ocean
    Shot by his own son
    She used the poison in his tea
    And kissed him goodbye
    That’s my kind of story
    It’s no fun ’til someone dies”

    Tool: Vicarious

  6. Progressives hate religion of any kind. Having done away with believing in something greater than themselves, they have made progressivism into their religion and they practice it as wild eyed zealots to the religion. Media is their church and they all want to be the priest head anchor so that they can preach to the unwashed and faithful alike how their ideas are far more superior than yours.

    And it is not just journalism that has suffered from the far left echo chamber. The majority of lawyers label themselves as progressives. Psychology departments are completely in the echo chamber to the point that the leading journal finally figured out that they have a lack of new ideas because of confirmation bias. If you are in any of the arts, you pretty much either need to lie if you are not progressive or join the religion because otherwise you cannot find a job. This is especially true in the music industry.

    A singular way of thinking is not good. Progressives especially NYC progressives I know remain squarely inside the echo chamber and shutter when someone introduces a new idea unlike what they have been told how to think. progressivism is the real world Borg.

    • +1

      “Privilege” is their original sin;
      Cognitive dissonance is one of the main tenets of their faith.

      The only thing would change is that they truly believe “Government” is all knowing and a greater entity than themselves. Further, “we the people” just need to submit to the correct “Top Men” of government and all wrongs will be righted and all injustice will be eradicated.

    • [Full disclosure, I’m an atheist/agnostic.]

      I find it somewhat amusing that progressive hatred of religion, especially Christianity, is based on their own ignorance. Much of the morality, for lack of a better term, that they wish to erase from society because “it’s Christian and we have separation of Church and State” (we don’t but that’s another topic) comes not from Christianity itself but from older and often non-religious philosophical inquires by the Greeks, Romans and others. These philosophies profoundly influenced the Judeo-Christian culture that came after them.

      IHMO, this is why many of the classics have been erased from the canon of public education. If people were educated as to where these ideas come from they would know that they were put in text hundreds of years before the birth of Christ and therefore cannot be uniquely Christian. For example, Plato’s description of the death of Socrates is a pretty profound look at the concept of a world beyond this one, where Socrates thought everything would be revealed in it’s perfect form. However, this can’t be Christian because Plato wrote it 385-380BC. Such knowledge being common would destroy the liberal arguments on the topic which is why such texts are no longer taught.

      Liberal ideology is based on ignorance, which is why they took over education. A population that’s actually educated would discard liberal dogma immediately because the philosophy is mostly premised on a history that never happened.

      • Excellent points. One thing I’d like to point out though is that Christianity didn’t technically begin when Christ was born. Christians believe in the Old Testament as well, which theologically predates every civilization.

        • No offense, but your argument is on shaky ground at best. Judaism starts with the covenant between God and Abraham ~1812BC and is predated by a number of religions including the Ancient Egyptian religion, Assyro-Babylonian and Akkadian religions and a great number of Cannanite religions that are remarkably similar to Judaism but pre-Abrahamic. Then there are a ton of poly-theistic religions that predate Judaism and of course Zoroastrianism the world’s oldest known monotheistic religion which invented the ideas of heaven, hell and free will likely before 2000BC. Other religions elsewhere in the world also predate Judaism.

          It’s clear if you research the topic, or take a serious college class on it, that many stories in the Old Testament are taken and reworked from much older religions. Really, unless you’re a true believer in Judaism or Christianity the evidence that this is true is unassailable.

          A singular example: The flood narrative in Genesis was composed somewhere around 1445BC, supposedly by Moses himself, yet it’s clearly taken in large part from the epic of Gilgamesh written in Mesopotamia around 2700BC and which copies from 2000BC still exist. Even if you don’t buy the original dating of ~2700BC, you can’t deny that the existing copies, credibly dated to 2000BC are at least 500 years older than the story preserved in Genesis and nearly 200 years older than the oldest claim to existence that Judaism can make.

          At the risk of seeming hopelessly ironic I will quote the Old Testament in this regard: “…There is nothing new under the sun” -Ecclesiastes 1:9

  7. I love watching Liveleak

    The stark fugliness of humanity reminds me of what the world is really like, not some politically correct society where people turn their backs on things they dont wanna see

  8. …and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read.

    It really says something about the state run education system if people are graduating but can’t actually read.

  9. The people in today’s MSM who call themselves journalists should be ashamed of themselves. They are, for the most part, pathetic. Our universities should close their J schools. Just shut them down tomorrow. Journalists should either be people with life experience, or should work their way up within media companies from entry level jobs.

  10. The problem is journalism today isn’t journalism. It’s propaganda for sale and for consumption.

  11. We need some new laws to cover the need for controls on the First Amendment with respect to large professional media organizations. Organization purporting to present “News” should have to meet standards of truth, non-bias, fairness, and accuracy or face the loss of their Broadcast Permit or Publishing Permit. Any group receiving government subsidies, grants, etc. would be subject to the same standards.

    • I prefer avoiding slippery slopes, even if the current system isn’t perfect.
      Unless you’re being sarcastic in which case I say bravo!

  12. Educated people are, um, more educated than non-educated people. They absolutely know MORE than people who know LESS. Hard sciences students learn this very basic math/logic very early. If you value knowledge and education as a standard of assessment of a person, then (all else being equal) the more educated, more knowledgeable person IS certainly better equipped than a person without that skill-set. To call them a better person would be accurate, regardless of how using that term makes you FEEL. All else being equal, there is more to that person and they are a more valuable member of society. Attacking this position is illogical and senseless, and seems to me an attempt to justify an uneducated person’s opinion as valuable (in any sense of the word whatsoever) as an educated person’s opinion, when it is very plainly NOT. This is why we go to trained doctors when we are sick instead of crowd-resourcing unqualified opinions. This is why we trust the research of climatologists over the opinions of corporate front-men who see EPA regulations as nothing more than cutting into their profits.

    • “That is why we trust the opinions of climatologists [who get their money from agenda-driven donors] rather than corporate front-men [who get their money from people buying their products and services]” ? What do you mean “we”–you may, but I certainly don’t, at least not just because the opiner has a degree from an institution that calls itself a university, in a discipline that for all its advances still boils down to educated guesswork.

      • Mark Twain once said “It ain’t what we don’t know that kills us, it’s everything we know that ain’t so.” I know this because of my, er, education.
        Climatologists don’t get their money from “agenda-driven donors”, and it wouldn’t matter if they did – does it matter if a meteorologist on the weather channel gets paid by an umbrella manufacturer to tell you it’s raining when it’s friggin’ RAINING?
        Also, even if you were right about science (you’re not), “educated guesswork” is far more of a qualification than “doesn’t know sh!t when he steps in it”.

    • Education does not equate to intelligence and intelligence does not equate to wisdom. To conflate these terms and deem one person “better” than another based on levels of education is unwise. Education may make a student more informed in a particular field of study… unless the educator is an imbecile (example for journalism: Melissa Click).

      • “Education does not equate to intelligence and intelligence does not equate to wisdom.” I never said they did, nor did I “conflate” anything.
        Also, I see you missed my qualifier “all else being equal.”

        • “I never said they did, nor did I “conflate” anything.”

          Yes, actually you did. You can’t shift the goalposts because you got called out for making a poorly constructed argument.

          “Also, I see you missed my qualifier “all else being equal.””

          Didn’t miss it… If all else was equal, you wouldn’t have had to add the qualifier. Reality dictates equality in outcome is bullshit; with education especially.

        • Climatology is the DeVry University of hard sciences.

          Not to mention the sheer unfettered arrogance of a singular field of study to account for the all variables in a stunningly complex and open system as our planetary environment (hell, even when limited to only the troposphere). I am still waiting for anyone who studies this joke of a field or defers to its ‘findings’ to demonstrate the difference between IR adsorption and absorption. Or as to when methane magically acquired a dipole moment. These are not even terribly complex chemistry concepts, yet they escape our climatologist ‘betters’.

          A college-educated fool is still a fool at the end of the day. And it would be pure hubris to think that your (or mine) college education makes us inherently more knowledgeable than someone who did not go to a university. All my knowledge and experience in aerospace engineering doesn’t mean diddle if I was tasked with competing against a master of a skill who has been honing his craft for 30 years. Education just puts us further down certain roads is all. We are no better or worse than anyone else

          EXCEPT LEFT-HANDED PEOPLE. Friggin’ devil’s minions…

    • In regards to benefitting society, wisdom is much more valuable than knowledge. The two are definitely not the same. Higher education isn’t usually responsible for instilling students with wisdom.

        • I would bet on the intelligent person with experience any day over an idiot with a degree. I routinely best engineers with logic.
          The most intelligent person alive today,Freeman Dyson, said ” If someone says they understand climate change they are lying or stupid”

  13. Today’s journalists make look up to Woodward and Bernstein, but the SJW mindset of journalism dates back at least to the “muckrakers” of the early 1900s, when Progressivism took shape. Everybody wants to remake the world in his image, and reporters, educators (Dewey) and straight-on activists were on a tear at that time. Admittedly, a lot of bad things needed changing, but rather than celebrate labor reforms and women’s suffrage and trustbusting, later generations of journalists felt they had to do as much as their forebears, even if that meant inventing causes.

    • I don’t get all the Eagles hate.

      For one thing, the 80’s was a musical desert in many ways. All that disco. Ug. Yes, Little Feat and southern rock and Stevie Wonder (before he called to say he loves you). The Eagles were dare I say it genuine.

      For another, country music needed to join the 20th century. Along with Pure Prarie League, Jackson Brown and Linda Rondatadt they made it relevant to a non-Nashville audience. And yes, Johnny Cash was knocking it out out of the park.

      Lastly, the Eagles production values were astounding.

      So there.

      • “the 80’s was a musical desert in many ways”
        i realize that you might respond “i rest my case” but for posterities sake i offer the following from the wasteland:
        bauhaus butthole surfers cramps fleshtones nina hagen joy division L7 residents talking heads mazzy star supernaut big black buzzcocks chrome cure dead kennedy’s flipper gang of four higsons husker du killing joke ministry psychedelic furs sonic youth undertones pixies wedding present. of the top of my head. saw them all.

      • kennedys should not have been possessive. and off the top of my head was my intent. seriously tired, last night of first shift.

      • I don’t hate the Eagles. I’m indifferent towards them; but whenever I hear one of their songs, or someone mentions them I think of this scene. The only band I HATE is Creed!

  15. So, journalistic bias is all about sensationalism and liberalism. Of course there is no conservative bias. Journalistic thugs such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and a host of others are always nonjudgmental, fair, truthful and spout nothing but facts. Right. You ought to check yourself out Farago. When it comes to bias you’re not much better than liberals. You just cover yourself by coming at issues from the right which is perfectly acceptable in this forum.

    • Neither of your examples claim to be unbiased, in fact they often point out they are commentators not journalists. As opposed a huge number of mainstream media members of the liberal persuasion who hide their intentions under the cloak of “impartial journalism”.

      “Journalistic thugs…” (LOL) So precisely when did Beck or Limbaugh show up and force or threaten you to listen/watch them?

      • True story: the conservatives mentioned make no bones about their bias. And they are no more thugs than their liberal counterparts.

        Now you could certainly make the point that Fox News is just as bad as MSNBC and I’d find it hard to argue the point. For the record I find their sycophancy to Donald Trump deeply nauseating.

        • Fox showed their hand during the debates and suffered accordingly. Conservatives drank sweet tea until revealed their news was delivered slathered with HFCSyrup. One positive, unlike democrats Conservatives hit the dump switch and move on, demo’es deep throat the news nozzle and beg for more.

    • Since when were Limbaugh or Beck considered mainstream?

      And the problem is that the left likes to play pretend about being objective. I can’t even open an article on CNN that isn’t riddled with bias or outright lies (especially during the M855 ammo ban frenzy). Fox at least puts their opinion pieces in the OPINION section, not passed off as legitimate journalism.

  16. RF,

    I’d make one quibble: on the soaring costs of universities. As someone who grew up on a university campus (my Dad was one of the founders of first the criminal justice/criminology program and then department at the University of South Florida), spent a lot of time on them as a student between undergraduate and graduate schools, and several years as a professional – post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor – before moving on to the work I do now, the increases in spending at universities have not been among those who are most likely to belong to the faculty and staff unions.

    Rather, the cost increases have been among the administration. The number of administrators at universities and colleges have exploded over twenty to thirty years. As has construction of facilities.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html?_r=0
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomlindsay/2015/01/24/university-of-texas-looks-to-limit-metastasizing-administrative-bloat/#6d743d97458a
    http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323316804578161490716042814

    If anything there are fewer tenure track lines and tenure track faculty, and therefore fewer potential faculty union members, because the trend has been to let tenure lines lie empty as they open up in favor of cheaper, contract faculty: lecturers and adjuncts. The latter often making $2,000 to $5,000 per course depending on the course and where the university is located. And these contract and/or part time faculty are often not allowed to join the faculty union, if there is even a faculty union at the schools that they are teaching at. Wherever the money is going, its really not going to the most likely members of unions – either faculty or staff. The trend at universities and colleges has been to rework them along the corporate model, which accounts for the ballooning numbers of administrators and massive expansion in construction.

    The real issue with university and college costs, really with all educational costs at all levels, is the issue of how to best provide the public good that is education. And this brings up the question as to whether public goods can, let alone should, be provided for a profit. This isn’t an argument for running them or providing them in a way that is fiscally irresponsible, rather it is part of the larger conversation that we no longer have as a self governing people: what are the public goods in the US. In other words what are the things that we all have to do together, as a self governing people for everyone in society? And at what level of government is it most appropriate to do them? And what interactions between levels of government should there be in regard to them? And what is the best, as in the most efficient way to allocate the public resources to do them? We don’t have these discussions anymore in regards to policy and it unfortunately shows.

    • Solid observation…to add the reason admin is climbing is government backed school loans provides guarantee cash flow.

      Here’s a thought. Education castle supports illegal immigration not for the tired and poor, but to sell native high school students an “education” backed by government loans for worthless degrees.

      Wall Street guts middle class 401k’s without any accountability, while the Education industry sells worthless paper while screwing teachers. All backed by our government.

  17. You’ve missed one of the most important points — the 24 hour news cycle and the sheer multitude of “news” outlets. When there were three national news shows (ABC, NBC, CBS) doing 30 minutes of news a day, the stories were chosen with more care, and more attention was paid to substantive news. Now the “media” is forced to fill up almost 50x as much time with “news” and running sensational stories and pitting tribes against each other is the easiest way to do this. Bad facts? Shoddy reasoning? Bias? Doesn’t matter since they will all be drowned out and washed away by the continuous “news” flood.

  18. In three hundred years nothing changed. Same yellow journalism in Jefferson’s day applies today, only at a faster rate without the monetary brick supporting the newsroom. Adapt or die as Gore’s creation crumbles news castles.

    My observation is there’s very little news, and what’s available is widely distributed. Truth has a way of bubbling to the surface. A bad gun design, private server documenting pay to play, illegals murdering, H1B’s hip checking citizens into the unemployment line, or government gun running designed to infringe on a sacred right to lawfully defend.

    If government spent the same energy telling the truth instead of a prolonging lying into a soft landing, people would respect that. Big question is why lie in the first place and can only conclude government wants to take what you have. Your money, your labor, your possession and your mind.

  21. You can be come educated without attending a government school. That is the true enemy of the progressive.
    Even the public library will teach you things the government school will not. Like the history of the second amendment.

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