I said below that in today’s media, news and editorial opinion is ground out by an assembly line.

It is publish or perish. So you have to manufacture information that gets published.

It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference whether you are producing articles for Penthouse or the New York Times or the BBC or Hunter’s Magazine.

The Professional Journalist thinks he is a special case because he produces his product for a specific group of people who are called Professional Journalists or Flagship Media. The assumption is that his particular product is judged by people who are Practically Perfect in Every Way like Mary Poppins.

As I pointed out in my last book, our theory of government is based on the idea that anybody who has money and power needs to watched and regulated.

With one exception.

That exception is the Third Estate.

We all accept the idea that the media has a DUTY to ask questions of anyone who has power and money that affect the rest of us that they would ask of the average person.

But no one has any right to pry into whatever Dan Rather chooses to call his “private opinions.”

Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite had a hell of a lot of money and a hell of a lot more power. The media in general have huge power and money, both of which dwarf other big businesses.

But that influence has NEVER been a SERIOUSLY scandal.

True, there have been one or two reporters who got into embarrassing position, like the Professional Journalist who got the Pulitzer Prize for a story she completely made up. But it was an embarrassment, not a scandal.

Every single respectable cosnervative agreed that it was entirely HER fault. She fooled her honest and dedicated superiors.

It was a mistake, not a SCANDAL.

A black man got caught after years of making up stories for the New York Times. But what made it OK was that many Professional Jounralists INSIDE the New York Times had been sending memos for YEARS about how this guy was lying.

I have frankly forgotten the embarrassment that Dan Rather got caught in. He misinterpreted some information about the Bush Administration that caused some rioting.

The press went after the few rotten eggs who caused this. They embarrassed Professional Journalists.

My own guess is that every one of those who caused this is still a Professional Journalist drawing a big time salary.

Congressmen go to prison for little slips like that. Presidents get impeached for embarrassments like that.

The prisons contain thousands of small businessmen who got embarrassed like that.

You see, when a president or a congressman or a businessman does something that is blamed on “a few rotten apples” among Professional Journalitsts, the first thing Professional Journalists ask is, “Is this the tip of the iceberg?”

In other words, is this just one incident that leaked?

When a congressman does something wrong the mdeia ask, “is this just one thing that came to light? After all, a congressman or the president have a lot of power. They are able to hide most of their misdeeds.”

All of which is perfectly true.

But anything that happens in the press is an “embarrassment.” There is no iceberg.

And nobody has more power to hide most of their misdeeds than the press does.

Has anybody heard any talk of an iceberg in the media?

I turned on my TV the first time in days and within two minutes I heard two items that were straight off the journalistic assembly line.

One was a study that showed that women who had strained marriages tended to be sicker. As an extension of that the report revealed that patients who have sexual relationships in hospital tend to be sicker for a longer period.

Nothing was mentioned about the fact that people who are sickly might tend to have worse marriages. Nothing was mentioned about the fact that you do not normallly develop a relationship in a hospital overnight.

You don’t feel good when you are sick. You may be crabbier and harder to live with if you are sick. So there could be a relationship between illness and had marital relations. So if you report that people who have bad relationships are ill and you do not mention that people who are ill may have bad marital relations you are distorting things completely.

The other right-off-the-assembly-line discussion was with the usual full-time paid activist who demands government action and raises money or gets grants for doing it. He wants the FDA to regulate anybody who adds calcium or iron or vitamins to food.

One person I know was living in Eastern Europe “on the economy.” This means he was not shopping in American stores or living in an Amerian hostel or hotel. He informred me that his gums had started bleeding.

I have spent a lot of time living on a lot of economies.

I told him he probably had something like scurvy. I told him to get some AMERICAN multivitamins/minerals.

He did.

That cleared whatever it was up.

The idea of getting anything like scurvy is alien to an American. Our foods are so enriched that even the most wretched of our inhabitants cannot avoid a range of vitamins and minerals that routinely avoid conditions that our ancestors considered common, like goiter and scurvy.

Back in the 1950s the entire medical profession declared that vitamin pills were useless. They declared that one could only get needed chemicals from a “balanced diet.” So it made me a bit nostalgic to hear this guy demanding that everything be regulated by the government if anyone decided to enrich foods.

He said all this evil, uncontrolled enriching keeps our minds off of … guess what? … a balanced diet.

People like this guy and the media should be our guardians, but they are as commercial as anybody they seek to regulate. This guy, like Science in the Public Interest and other groups, are a bunch of pencil-necks who make a living pushing old nostrums and new public regulations.

The “professional journalist” who reported on bad marriages causing ill health just had to throw in the point about the fact that patients who are in hospital who develope relationships with the staff stay sick longer. The idea was that THOSE relationships CAUSED their injuries to to take longer to heal.

But a person whose injury takes longer to heal is more likely to develop a relationship in the hospital.

OK. Pencil necks and Professional journalists have incentives to ignore reality.

But who has the incentive to make the comments I just made?

Let Joe tell me who does.

What I wrote above takes one minute of watching TV and my writing it down for half an hour.

But who is going to PUBLISH it?

How can it compete with THIS:

“A one-year study by the Harvard Institute on Health Through Counseling shows that people who have bad marriages tend to be more ill. Professor Bugenboogle said that this would seem to indicate that bad marriages CAUSE ill health.”

Here you have a one-year study at enormous public expense and PhDs at public expense.

This is news.

If it is a long, long study by a name outfit it is news. And if it’s sexy stuff it hits the media.

And, as outlined above and I could give examples all the day long, ONLY the sexy angle gets the media attention.

Bad marriages CAUSE ill health is a news hook. In fact, everybody can testify that they felt bad throughout a bad divorce.

This is a sexy story.

“Greedy corporations are destroying a balanced diet!” is NEWS. You can do a fund-raiser on that one.

You can’t do a fund-raiser on common sense. You cannot get attention to common sense.

Common sense is not sexy.

One of the sexiest stories the Professional Journalists love to tell is how those who are NOT Professional Journalists are just selling papers with sensationalism. Professional Journalists, on the other hand, weigh the studies carefully and avoid such distortion.

Actually Professional Journalists distort every story they tell, and not just for commercial purposes. The news is a stream of completely illogical statements designed to get the point across that will get published. If you don’t learn to do that, you will not last as a Professional Journalist.

Since the end of local independent newspapers Professional Journalism is as mass-produced as anything else.

The Professional Journalist at Voice of America that I worked with was as much a part of an assembly-line machine as a worker on an auto assembly line. He was measured by his ability to come up with the same story as other jounralists, but preferably quicker.

And now to a really heretical thought:

Why should mass media and huge newspaper chains be allowed to run editorials? General Motors can’t run a political editorial without being subject to government restrictions. Even if they could do it, the big other big corporations couldn’t write off their their editorialists’ pay as business expenses as a normal part of business expenses.

Only one mass-production big business is allowed to write off its political expenses.

Common sense used to come from the press. That is why the Founding Fathers protected them. But there is no relationship between the press they lived with and the giant businesses that are the media today.

Why is the Big Business of Media allowd to have open political opinions, and write them off as business expences, but other giant corporations can’t?

Try getting THAT idea published.

Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species and then held it back from publication. He only published it in 1859 because he had to.

He had to because someone else was aboout to publish a book with same ideas.

It is often said that Origin of Species changed the world.

That is not true. If Origin of Species had not been published in 1859 another book saying the same thing would have been published in 1860.

We very often hear of inventors and writers fighting over which one had prior claim to their great contribution. And all of history keeps talking about whoever won the copyright or patent fight as being the one who changed history.

None of which is true.

So who REALLY had the power? Who REALLY changed the world?

There were some really embarrasing factual errors my A Plague on Both Your Houses, 1976. But not one reviewer, however hostile even mentioned a single one of them.

As Jeffrey Hart said in his review of Plague for National Review, subtlety entitled, “Read This One!”:

“The sheer intellectual pleasure of this book is Whitaker’s corruscating insights.”

It was one idea after another, a tying together of what everybody knew but nobody had THOUGHT about.

It was a point of view.

One thing everybody agreed on: If I had not written Plague absolutely nobody else would ever have written it.

In fact, there have been books written about almost every page in Plague.

None of them mention Plague and I doubt the writers knew where their ideas came from.

The month Plague came out Chris Matthews, chief aide to Speaker Tip O’Neale (?), made a bet with a chief Republicans aide which got into the Washington Post. Said Republican knew about my book. He told Matthews that the budget for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare was bigger thant he budget for the Department of Defense.

This bet occurred a month after my book was published. This bet was between two people who had been WRITING the Federal budget for years.

It turned out that Chris was wrong but he welched on the bet. That was the big news.

The big news was NOT that the world had been informed for the first time by my book that what I called “the education-welfare establishment” had, at long last, been discovered to be a bigger industry than defense.

In the comments on the 1976 convention, when the book had come out, cosnervatives for the first time started counting the education-welfare interest groups who were there. They talked about the MONEY the National Education Associated had tied up in liberalism.

No one had ever mentioned this before.

And remember, Hart talked about “corruscating” insights. This was just one of them.

There is a nice, convenient dead-end here into which some of Bob’s Blog readers have settled into:

Is Bob bragging?

I don’t mind bragging, but it is important that in this case I am not. If I tended to brag I would spent a lot of time reminding writers of where their ideas came from.

Get off my personality and concentrate on something IMPORTANT:

I am telling you about POWER.

I simply cannot tell you about what I do unless I explain to you that what I do WORKS.

“Bob is bragging” in this context is every bit as important as, “Bob doesn’t like liver.”

Get with the program, gang!

The only question is whether what I do WORKS and how you can USE it.

We are trying to change the WORLD, not evaluate Bob.