Posted 10:24 PM by Gene

David Shaw of the L. A. Times does a juggling act with news bias. He apparently does not believe news hacks can be superficial and biased at the same time, that too many press releases on the countless marvels of show-biz actually mesh nicely with too many weasel words on the endless perfidy of Republicans. But truth to tell, the problem with the press isn't so much bias as that news hacks have always marched headlong with the forces of reaction.

Think of the two worst things news hacks have ever done to America. The first was Hearst's War (aka the Spanish-American War), where an unprincipled publisher turned what may have been a catastrophic accident in the U. S. S. Maine's gunpowder hold into royal Spanish treachery. "YOU FURNISH THE PICTURES," William Randolph yelled by cable at his illustrator Frederick Remington, "AND I'LL FURNISH THE WAR!!!!!!!!!!!" And boy did he furnish the war. What did the war get William Randolph? Increased sales and a chance to run for office. What did the war get the U. S.? 3,000 dead, most from jungle diseases. The Philippines -- a ward of the American state until 1946, an archipelago basket-case and a kleptocracy for some time thereafter. Cuba -- relinquished to become another kleptocracy for decades, now the Left's favorite dictatorship. Puerto Rico -- the meaning of welfare. Thanks, William Randolph!

Now fast forward seventy-five years, to Cronkite's Peace. "We must get out of Vietnam -- at ANY COST," said Uncle Walter, and like so many bobbleheads the press (initially indifferent to the politics of our involvement, perhaps because it thought Vietnam was near Walla Walla) agreed. What did the peace bring the news hacks? Awards and ample opportunities for self-congratulation. What did it bring the rest of the world? Communist dictatorships in southeast Asia. The Boat People -- hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese uprooted from their homeland, never to return. The Killing Fields -- a million dead in the genocide of Democratic Kampuchea. Utter paralysis in our foreign policy that didn't lift until Reagan, and not in military action until the Gulf War, and which may yet have inhibited us in wiping out the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Thanks, Uncle Walter!

Now how could news hacks have gone from right-wing reaction to left-wing reaction? Simple. In Hearst's day the press was dominated by print robber barons, and your typical news hack was a low, mean, unscrupulous, cowardly work slave. Recognizing that Hearst was one of the most loathed men on the planet and his subordinates came close self-made heroes like Joseph Pulitzer established J-schools to raise the standards of the profession in pay and platitude. In time the robber barons sold their companies to the public and died off, to be replaced by apolitical suits who beckoned solely to their shareholders' whim, and the news hacks got better educated, better paid, more pretentious -- and more liberal. The balance of news power shifted from the right-wing-reactionary publisher's suite to the left-wing-reactionary newsroom. The press went from one kind of reaction to another. It scarcely matters, then, whether the press is right-wing reactionary or left-wing reactionary: it will always be reactionary.