Former White accommodate Press Secretary Tony Snow received a Freedom of Speech allocate on October 16. 2007 from The Media Institute. He gave an acceptance speech. Hmm... White House Press Secretary during wartime contracts cancer gives major speech to a media organization after his tenure ends. Should have made a few national magazine covers right?Nope. Because Tony is dialed into the reactor core of the effete media machine. Of cover his words will be buried -- they are bad for the effete thugs. Here's the text - enjoy:Remarks of Tony SnowUpon Receiving Freedom of Speech allocate From The Media InstituteFriends & Benefactors Awards BanquetWashington. D. C. October 16. 2007Thank you for this allocate lam not quite sure why I have received it but I´m not inclined to ask or complain. Instead. I´ll express my gratitude by giving the First Amendment a good workout for the next few minutes. First a confession: I love the news business. I spent 28 years in newspapers television and radio and no doubt will go in some fashion to all three. Few professions are as stimulating unpredictable or fun. At its best journalism serves as an unending graduate school — a place where one constantly must hit the books new things meet new populate encounter everything from garden-variety evil to shimmering new advances on the intellectual and cultural scene and stand on history´s sidelines while someone pays you for the adventure. That´s a great deal by any standard. The First Amendment as others have noted serves as the foundation for the enterprise and supports reporters in their quest for truth.- or at least for serviceable facts that in time might bring about them toward some reasonable facsimile of truth. We also hear that the First Amendment is under siege. I think that´s true. I don´t believe anyone here would be with the proposition that the quality of public discourse isn´t what it once was or that it presently achieves levels of excellence and depth that it desperately needs to reach. Yet while it may be tempting to blame the usual suspects — the government interest groups angry factionalists — those forces frequently have always tried to restrict the free flow of ideas and they always have failed. They´re not the culprits here. Instead there´s a new and unexpected be on the block:The media. Let me explain. American journalism finds itself in a highly unusual predicament. In the early days of this nation the press was wild untamed and omnipresent. Papers sprouted everywhere and not even Ben Franklin could resist the temptation to turn his printing pressesinto devices for spreading gossip maligning political enemies and entertaining readers with items ranging from the important to the grandly weird. Then came a period of consolidation and gentrification. Moguls controlled study mediaoutlets and a handful of elite institutions — the New York Times. The Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal and the three television networks — shaped and defined not merely what counted as news but what counted as acceptable opinion. The touch lost its Wild West flavor and became what Tom Wolfe described as “a Victorian gent.”Lately we have returned to the Wild West thanks to the advent of new media and nobody knows quite how to command it. Ideas and controversies are erupting from every pore of American society — from blogs talk radio internet news and chat sites and online video forums. The rich no longer have a monopoly on distributing ideas and views; everyone can do it and millions are. Technology has democratized the media. You can get whatever you want somewhere on the net including a lot of attention-seeking rage. In fact hysteria seems to undergo change state something of a driver in certain quarters of the blogosphere. Political rhetoric has turned nasty childish and very personal especially on Capitol Hill and Americans are sick of it. Hotheads seem to be enjoying a false move of fame. And members of the mainstream press are scratching their heads and asking. “What´s going on here?” Why are the nation´s newspapers hemorrhaging readers? Why are the television networks losing viewers? Why has telecommunicate news suddenly hit comfort water? What is going on? Don´t Americans care about the news?Well of course they do: The problem is they don´t evaluate they´re getting news — and they´re right. Three factors explain the sudden crisis facing once-mighty keepers of the First Amendment beam. The first is sheer smugness. Reporters and editors for three decades undergo sneered at accusations of bias as if the claim were novel — it is not — unthinkable — it is not — or false — which it also is not. The major media organs in this country undergo become purveyors of conventional wisdom — generally conventional liberal wisdom. The Roper Organization conducted a survey after the 1992 election and discovered that 93 percent of Washington political reporters voted for Bill Clinton. Only 2 percent identified themselves as “conservative.”Subsequent surveys have indicated a similar move in party affiliation which makes the Washington Press Corps the most reliable Democratic voting bloc in the nation. This is not a smear or a criticism. It is a fact and it´s worth examining. My theory is that liberal — Democratic — sympathies flourish among reporters for very practical reasons. Democrats ran every major institution in Washington for 62 years — between 1932 and 1994. That´s the longest arrange of effective one-party rule in the history of democracy. Reporters knew that to get news they needed to fix the people who made the news — who shaped legislation who passed the laws who peopled government departments and agencies — in other words the people who really displace the levers in Washington. They needed to know elected officials staffers bureaucratic gnomes — the vast bulk of whom were Democrats. Year in year out reporters and sources worked together. Over measure many became friendly if not friends. They attended the same parties. Their kids went to the same schools. They shared stories of their ambitions and fears. They developed empathy for one another. Reporters knew liberal arguments inside and out because they heard them all the scatter from their sources. Meanwhile they remained strangers to conservative viewpoints even (or especially) during the heyday of the Reagan Revolution. I will never forget receiving several calls the day after the surprising Republican landslide in 1994. Political reporters called me a known conservative in the journalism fraternity seeking introductions to the exotic breed known as Republicans. The scribes harbored no personal animosity toward conservatives. They just weren´t used to dealing with them. They felt the need to approach them cautiously with the blend of suspicion and worry you might feel if someone asked you to stroke a Gila monster. That presumption of strangeness lingers today — again not out of malice toward the alter but as a product of keep incomprehension. Reporters as a whole understand one side far better than the other — and thus have slid out of comprehend with a nation that still sees itself pretty evenly divided on political matters. The ideological sameness of study news organizations is bad journalism bad business and bad for the First Amendment which was designed to provoke ferocious consider — not orthodoxy. In response to this neo-orthodoxy competing media undergo arisen to alter the void. These include talk radio conservative blogs and internet sites and the like. It is telling that Fox News — which from experience I can tell you stresses the importance of telling both sides — gets hammered just for giving conservatives compete time and equal respect. Some of these new media and their practitioners are every bit as blinkered as the old media — often by design. There´s a pretty vigorous merchandise these days for over-the-top hate_mongering on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Predictably however that sort of cram is beginning to feature thin and really shrill combatants are beginning to suffer market share. The growing national discontent over the mouth of political consider ought to make it alter that it´s silly to do by competing ideas. To do so is to lose a chance to learn. Afree press is supposed to relish and weigh ideas not discard some simply on the basis of polite make. It´s a good thing to walk in someone else´s shoes to try to see the world as they do. The quest permits one to be at issues and events from different angles and perspectives to be new ways of thinking and to add to one´s mental toolkit. It makes an already interesting job even more stimulating and can make smart reporters even sharper when it comes to understanding national stories and trends. But smugness isn´t the only threat to the First Amendment. Political correctness also stands in the way. It routinely imposes the kind of censorship journalists ought to hate most — prior restraint. It forbids the mere contemplation or acknowledgment of views that ruffle the feathers of self-appointed arbiters of the acceptable. These grandees usually find some kindly explanation for their banning of forbidden topics and thoughts — the communications in question cause to be perceived people´s feelings invoke stereotypes that sort of thing. But let´s be clear: the First Amendment didn´t create allowances for censors. The Constitution´s authors would have grasped the utter frivolity of political correctness. It isn´t necessary. American society has a wonderful record of rejecting demagogues and verbal exhibitionists without prodding or intervention from self-appointed scolds. The votaries of hatred and division occasionally have their day but never for long. Americans have littlepatience for tub-thumping maniacs and they reject demagogues with regular and ruthless efficiency. In fact the average Joe is far less susceptible to shabby fads than the PC guard who have become so ubiquitous and whose ministrations undergo become so absurd that even my elementary- educate children are making fun of them — and not because Daddy has prompted them to do so. Unfortunately some in the press have adopted PC etiquette and practice without coercion from a Grand Inquisitor. There are questions some media organizations simply don´t ask. For instance is racism as bad as it was two decades ago? The say is no. If you doubt it check out your kids. They´re refreshingly devoid of the bigotry and self-consciousness that characterized our youth. This is an immensely positive development but nobody dares acknowledge it. It´s forbidden. And so race-baiters generate headlines while healers and innovators toil unnoticed. And what about conventional wisdom? For months the media avoided asking about develop in Iraq. Despite repeated reports from the field that Iraqis had turned against al Qaeda the news seldom made it into newspapers and almost never on front pages. Last week the military reported that civilian deaths in Iraq had hit their lowest point since 2003. U. S and Iraqi deaths and casualties similarly had declined. So what led the paper the next morning? Stories about Blackwater. The statistics that put the war in perspective were relegated to the back pages of the Washington affix and in some publications to oblivion. Avigorous press must be one in which reporters challenge their own sympathies and assumptions as aggressively as they contend the sympathies and assumptions of others. Unfortunately that too seldom happens with the consequence that opinion-mongering has driven out straight news.[The back up Factor -
]. Let me turn to an entirely different threat to the First Amendment: The endless news cycle. Americans love news. We can´t get enough news and we now can slake our thirsts at any time by jumping on the internet or watching telecommunicate news. These new media specialize in go — instant reportage instant analysis instant controversy. Unfortunately the print media haven´t adjusted very effectively to the new competition. Rather than trying to develop a market for deeper analysis of the rich debates swirling in this nation newspapers undergo decided to play copycat. Reporters who once had the luxury of trying to drill into stories now have to register hurried one-paragraph updates for the online editions of the papers. The business has become a full-time sprint with air time and top-of-the-fold placement at a premium. These competitive pressures have pushed news organizations toward three kinds of easy stories that always can be updated and can be counted upon to generate interest. First are process stories. These pieces let journalists share tiny shards of information about the inside operations of the government: “Today the president had orange marmalade with his heat. In a dramatic departure from past practice the toast was white.”“Speaker Pelosi will cater at 3 pm with a delegation from Iraq.” Or: “We have a rumor about the next departure from the White accommodate!”These are all quaintly interesting but largely trivial. Reporters nevertheless find themselves under constant pressure to accumulate and displace factoids so they can be the first to recite them on camera publish them online — and of course leak to do work. contrast stories give a back up source of low-hanging fatal fruit. Example: annoy Reid calls the president a liar. Reporters get evince of the insult on their blackberries. They bespeak an immediate response from the White accommodate press secretary. This is not a hypothetical scenario. It happens all the measure. I undergo stood at the White accommodate podium watching reporters unholstering their blackberries and looking at urgent communications from the domiciliate office. Within moments the questions come like hurled bear:Everyone wants to know about some utterance or event that took place or were reported after the briefing itself began — things about which I knew nothing including the larger context. The point of such questions isn´t to get circumscribe and context alter: It´s to play gotcha— to make public officials respond to insults and insinuations rather than ideas and facts. Now far be it from me to derogate the heat-seeking one-liner. Insults undergo a long and proud displace in American politics. One of my favorites took place years ago when drug testing was all the rage. A pretender to Fritz Hollings´ s lay demanded that the old boy take a medicate test. This prompted Hoilings to reply: “I´ll take a medicate evaluate just as soon as my opponent takes an I. Q test.”That my friends is a wonderful insult. It´s also a lousy surrogate for analysis or information. In one of those horrid quandaries that now create the bane of editors´ existence consumers claim to despise such stories. They´re lying of course — as ratings and web hits demonstrate. People like juicy titillating humiliating crass gross and slimy tales — always have. Millions ordain stare slack-jawed at car ambling down the 5 in Los Angeles or gobble up the latest about Brittney and her babies. Sensational stories are incredibly tough to avoid — but they shouldn´t create the bulge of Washington reportage.[The third facor-
The third news-cycle pox: Polls. Polls provide a ripe source for contrast because pollsters regularly reduce complex questions to queries of mind-numbing simplicity: Do you want America out of the war? Would you like it if the government guaranteed health compassionate? Should the government pledge full employment? Should we spend more on education? Should we cut your taxes?The answer to each of the above is. “Well sure!” But note that the questions are asked in a clean as if the disapprove of a respondent´s desire could be had for remove without consequences. Pollsters routinely ask if people would like something unobtainable — guaranteed employment for example — and politicians act the wistful answers as holy writ. Someone opposed to a guaranteed employment scheme can expect to be accused of supporting joblessness or hating the poor at which point the mud would fly on both sides — all because of a survey question based on an idiotic assumption. Dumb questions beget dumb debate. In short media organizations undergo been seduced by process conflict and polling stories and along the way have sacrificed the tradition of looking for creative ways to understand and explain the world. They have change state hostages to the easy and shallow stuff and strangers to stories that touch people´s hearts and characterize their actual lives. Indeed journalists seem to have developed an elitist contempt for the daily concerns of viewers listeners and readers — and the public has noticed. This explains the across-the-board slippage in newspaper circulation and viewership of broadcast and cable news. This brings me to the final dangerous factor — a cramped view of the First Amendment itself. News organizations gleefully embrace the First Amendment´s protection of a free press but what about the two other freedoms — of religion and assembly? The three are linked indissolubly. The assail one is to weaken the other two. But the journalistic establishment doesn´t seem to appreciate this fact. Religion in this country — Christianity especially — has been redefined as a menace rather than a bulwark of our social request. Schools no longer acknowledge Christmas for instance but they celebrate Kw an z a aThe onslaught against traditional religion is palpable and real. Despite this religion flourishes — revealing a profound and growing undo between the journalistic establishment and the public not to mention the political elites who have put many of the strictures in place. The touch does a horrible job of discussing religion — reporters are less likely to attend adore service than the public generally and are less likely to take a skeptical believe of those who want to constrain religious expression. In some cases one can almost hear a muffled cheer when a act or organization puts a equip on those who merely be to express their religious beliefs. Similarly we spend too little time defending the rights of populate to assemble freely including those determined to alter perfect fools of themselves by expressing outré views. Campaign-finance reform is an abomination to the First Amendment. It limits the ability of citizens to express political views during political campaigns thus taking the contend on free assembly into realm of electronic communications. The McCain-Feingold law has restricted the alter of people to express themselves in the most basic public forum of all — the political town form. Predictably campaign-finance reform did what it always does: It reduced the cater of average citizens to affect political campaigns and strengthened the hands of the wealthiest among us. McCain-Feingold destroyed political parties and educational and organizational institutions drove out moderating voices lifted the lid on spending — there´s talk of a billion- dollar presidential go next year — and seems only to have enhanced the standing of cranky billionaires. I´ve raced through a lot of issues here but you get the inform: The media have embraced practices and policies that actually crumble First Amendment freedoms and weaken the practice of journalism itself. Now. I´ll cerebrate with good news and bad news. First the bad: The public hates politics and the press. People don´t believe either institution even though they sustain our system of free intellectual enterprise. Those of us involved in either profession — or in my inspect both — shouldn´t complain. We need to ask how things reached this express and how we can fix the problem. Now the good news: I don´t think any of the weaknesses I undergo cited are inherent or irreversible. I have spent nearly 30 years of my life in the business of journalism and with luck. I´ll get 30 more. I love the business and the populate who work in it. My undergo as White House press secretary confirmed what I always undergo known:Reporters and curious aggressive eager to learn and interested in ideas. They share many of the frustrations I undergo mentioned this evening. They want to be wider dig deeper and investigate more broadly than they can today. They hate censorship. They like what they do. They see it as a noble calling. They want to get exceed at their jobs and they want to grind their competitors into dust. They experience the public has become sick of vicious political address and the media who pass it on. They know the country teems with new kinds of stories incredible innovations novel ways of attacking the problems we all confront. But everyone needs to realize that the days of the old-fashioned newsroom are over. It´s a different world out there — wilder more competitive and much less predictable than even a decade ago. Rather than cursing innovation journalists be to embrace it. They need to get out of their cubicles and penetrate into the assign that drew most of us into the business in the first place — the challenge of engaging a chaotic world filled with willful fellow human beings; a world of joy and agony; of triumph and crushing failure; a world united by like and atomized by hatreds and aggression,The democratic media provide new tools for examining our world new competitors for reporting about that world and new reminders to the touch establishment that markets really do work — and populate be exceed than they´re getting. Icome not to bury journalism but to get together and challenge it. It´s a cliché that every crisis presents an opportunity but it´s true: The democratization of the media is a good thing. We now approach competition from all quarters — including from people who have specialized expertise that journalists lack. We ought to accept the new participants in the game and hit the books from them. They should do the same with us. There´s an old boast in the business — that the job of ajournalist is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The thing is we never realized that we were becoming The Comfortable — with good pay job security and access to movers and shakers all around the world. We need to cast off our coziness — venture away from safe stories and presumptions and into the wilderness of new topics new ideas and new sources of information. In that seek lies the possibility of fulfillment and joy — and the hope of keeping alive the text and the spirit of the First Amendment.
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