Msm And Blood In The Water

IN BRITAIN they’ve been enjoying a week of political blood sports. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s #1 media attack dog got badly mauled in a dog-fight. And had to resign.

Ah, you’ll say. Fourth Estate at work: investigative reporting at its best.

Er, no. It was a blogger, Guido Fawkes, that outed Damian McBride, known to everyone as McPoison.

And why did he out him? Not because of any noble motive but because McBride accused him of being a racist. Here’s Fawkes’ explanation from his article in today’s London Times.

[McBride] took the trouble to read and round up some off-colour and politically incorrect comments left on my blog one Friday afternoon and forward them to my rival Derek Draper for republishing. There on his LabourList blog the cut-and-pasted headline screamed “Racist”. I was tarred as a racist over things not written by me, and that I had not even read.

Sound familiar? Isn’t that what the lefty Canadian human rights commission chappies have been doing, as told by Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn?

Fawkes accused Draper on TV of publishing a smear sent to him by McBride and Draper denied it thrice. That prompted a whistleblower to send emails to Fawkes showing that McBride was planning to set up a website to publish smears about Conservative party leaders.

Funny how politics works, isn’t it? It’s not glorious principle that guides the principals. It’s power and greed and personal pique.

Fawkes goes on to point the finger at Britain’s parliamentary journalists as cowards. They knew about McPoison and his shenanigans, but they did nothing.

For the past five years my blog has squarely blamed lobby journalists for failing democracy. Though the fourth estate may not have a formal constitutional role, its task is real. Journalists are to there to “speak truth unto power”, not trade favours for tittle tattle, not report spin as truth.

Actually, I think that Fawkes (real name Paul Staines) has it wrong. You can’t expect journalists to buck the system. Never could, never will. The only time that journalists will "speak truth to power" is when there is blood in the water. Politicians are into power. When they have power, they use it, and they use it to destroy anyone that stands in their way. What can a journeyman journalist do against that? That’s why journalists always toady to the powerful—until the moment arrives when there is blood in the water. Then they all pile on and we learn that they never liked the guy.

But you have to ask: Why would you call people like that "The Fourth Estate?" The whole notiion of the Fourth Estate is based upon the idea that the media is a power center capable of challenging the other powers, the great estates of the realm. If journalists can’t or won’t do that, why call them the Fourth Estate?

Maybe we’ve got things all wrong. Maybe it is bloggers who should be called "The Fourth Estate."

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems� No more rules, no more models� Genius conjures up rather than learns� ” —Victor Hugo
C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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