{"id":59,"date":"2006-03-30T12:29:54","date_gmt":"2006-03-30T17:29:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=59"},"modified":"2017-03-17T09:07:58","modified_gmt":"2017-03-17T14:07:58","slug":"blogs-and-the-msm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=59","title":{"rendered":"Blogs and the MSM"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Unlike a lot of bloggers I like newspapers. Without\u00a0the MSM (mainstream media)\u00a0a great many of the bloggers who fancy themselves pundits would have little to say. My friend <a href=\"http:\/\/www.duluth.com\/placed\/index.php?sect_rank=6&#038;story_id=216972\">Tom West had it about right<\/a> in a column he wrote for his little publication the Budgeteer last week.\u00a0He pointed out that most of what the blogging community writes\u00a0about originally came from\u00a0newspapers. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Having an opinion is easy. Having someone else&#8217;s opinion is even easier. Since the Republican paranoia about the press bubbled over in the 1980&#8217;s Republican&#8217;s believe that all reporters are liberal and report accordingly \u00a0That&#8217;s what group think will do\u00a0once it has you in its\u00a0grip.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Yes, reporters tend to be liberal. Surveys of reporters have borne this out. I think it comes from their college liberal arts degrees. The &#8220;liberal&#8221; in liberal arts means <em>well-rounded<\/em> more than it means <em>politically liberal<\/em>. In fact, that&#8217;s long been one of the aims of liberal arts colleges compared to community colleges or trade schools. Liberal arts graduates are expected to read widely, if shallowly, about a great many things. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>I&#8217;ve always been struck by how many reporters, no matter how politically liberal,\u00a0take their educations and turn it into healthy skepticism. Most have been\u00a0quite open to conservative criticism\u00a0of\u00a0big government and\u00a0our permissive society. I\u00a0think its much more accurate to describe journalists as pragmatists rather than as polemicists let alone liberal polemicists. The blogging community on the other hand has a lot\u00a0more polemicists. What is a polemicist? Think of them\u00a0as being persuaders or, if you prefer, propogandists.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Because\u00a0young people are abandoning newspapers in favor of second hand <em>but free<\/em> blogs I&#8217;m a little worried about our future. So, long as they don&#8217;t retreat into something like Fox News simply to have their prejudices reinforced\u00a0America\u00a0will likely survive this phenomenon and retain\u00a0its open minded and\u00a0vibrant culture. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Now that that&#8217;s off my chest, I can go back to my polemics.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Unlike a lot of bloggers I like newspapers. Without\u00a0the MSM (mainstream media)\u00a0a great many of the bloggers who fancy themselves pundits would have little&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21187,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions\/21187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}