Now, given the fact the provocateurs and poseurs among this wastreling, self-enamored class aren’t going to willingly comply, the question becomes how to prod them into some type of adherence.

He says that in the old days, enterprises like manufacturers or mines dumped their waste on the public at large. The cost of dealing with the waste was shoved off to society in general. Later, it became legally required for such enterprises to clean up their own messes.

Currently, the media don’t follow this model. The costs of their excesses are dumped on the public, and they face no costs at all.

Wretchard askes what might happen if the press is treated as an industrial polluter, required to pay, so the rest of us don’t have to, for their excesses.

One would think so, but you only need to look at thier reactions after the fact. They explicitly stated *they did nothing wrong*.

A normal thinking person would step back and and think about it for a moment, at least give them pause. While they may not think what they did was wrong, I don’t thik one would say they did *nothing* wrong.

One of the things I believe about arguing politics, or telling reporters something like this post does (and discussions with quite a few other groups) is that they don’t care. Riots, death, etc isn’t a factor. It’s like telling someone that drinking a lot of water will make you urinate – yea, so? Riots and death? We report what we feel is newsworthy. Notice that “newsworthy” does not include things like truth, unbiased, people aren’t going to be killed, etc. It only has to do with ratings and getting it first. Though to be fair that wasn’t a newsweek quote, but it is pretty accurate of what the general media cares about.

Just try.

The fact that there are millions of people that are so frustrated, repressed, and religiously inflamed that they riot at the sort of provocation that normal adults are expected to take in stride is the real problem, and it won’t go away no matter how careful Newsweek is.

My answer: yes, indeed I can. My impression of many journalists is that they are simply not deep or critical thinkers. They are facile writers–which sometimes goes with those characteristics, but often does not–and they are business people running a business. Like many successful people, they also often have pretty large egos, and are interested in their own power and sense of self-righteousness.

Yes indeed, they know the role played by the media in Vietnam. But they think that role was a noble one. A goodly portion of my last two essays in the “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series went towards attempting to explain just how and why they came to feel that way, and to cling to that thought even now in the face of a great deal of evidence to the contrary.

Simply put, many of them (perhaps particularly the older ones, who lived through the Vietnam era as journalists) think of themselves as beleaguered heroes.