« shudder | Main | cheesy? yes, but I like cheese. »
November 27, 2003
happy spanksgiving
I admit it, sometimes my hackles raise when people criticize the media. For one thing, I am part of the media. For another, "media" is plural and refers to so many things that to criticize them makes no sense.Fox News, The Simpsons, The Matrix Reloaded, Oprah Winfrey, Lost in Translation, The Washington Post, MacGuyver, Friends, Liz Phair, the RIAA, google.com, NPR, Rush Limbaugh, Law and Order, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Time Magazine, The Economist, The New Republic, The Nation, Seventeen Magazine, Weekly World News, Entertainment Tonight, Space Ghost, toothpaste commercials, Better Homes and Gardens, I Love Lucy -- which parts of the media are corrupt, conservative, liberal?Oh, we're just talking about the news media? Okay, too licentious? Too liberal? Too conservative? Which part? The Boston Globe, The Washington Times, The New York Times, commentators, reporters, sports writers, the folks on the city government beat, celebrity news shows, political discussion panels, The No Spin Zone? What?I personally think that news reporting is a fundamental function of an honest democracy -- or a dishonest, faltering one, for that matter.Still, it helps me cope with being in possibly the least popular profession in America right nowto see that folks have hated the press for hundreds of years, as Daniel Defoe reminds us.He says:'Twould be endless to examine the Liberty taken by the Men of Wit in the World, the loose they give themselves in Print, at Religion, at Government, at Scandal; the prodigious looseness of the Pen, in broaching new Opinions in Religion, as well as in Politicks, are real Scandals to the Nation, and well deserve a Regulation. Yet for his frustration with the evil potentials of the press, he still defends its independence and freedom:'Twould be endless to reckon up the many Volumes on all needful Subjects, which were absolutely rejected in the days of the Press's Restriction, when the most Orthodox Divinity was suppress'd, because the Man was not approv'd that wrote it, and a Book was Damn'd for the Author, not the Author for the Book. And this: Licentiousness of all sorts ought to be Restrain'd, whether of the Tongue, the Pen, the Press, or any thing else, and it were well if all sorts of Licentiousness were as easy to Govern as this; but to Regulate this Evil by an Evil ten times more pernicious, is doing us no service at all. He also seems to support the establishment of some type of copywright system. I know some people who wouldn't approve. But you can read it for yourself
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at November 27, 2003 12:46 AM