Moron Alert!!

 Ted Koppel, Elitist Hack: ‘Corrosive Partisanship’ That Fox News Started Is Ruining the Country | NewsBusters.org

Wow!  Did you know we’re too stupid to understand the news unless the Elite Media fixes it so we understand the REAL meaning of what’s going on?  With too much information, we just don’t understand what’s happening.

By Tim Graham | November 26, 2011 | 08:04

In the same issue of Broadcasting & Cable magazine in which Al Gore described the public’s deep yearning for Current TV, former ABC anchor (and current NBC Rock Center special correspondent ) Ted Koppel issued one of his lectures on how the elite media has lost its way amidst all the rabble and their incessant partisan blogging and partisan cable news.

To Koppel, the nation was much better off when it was guided by a small and wise (and supposedly nonpartisan) national media elite that had the brains to separate the wheat from the chaff of information and tell the public how it should think. That’s all been ruined now by the “democratization of journalism,” and the public will ruin the country with their incessantly partisan ravings. Here’s some of that critique:

Many years ago, I offended some of the photojournalists among my colleagues in making a critical observation about CNN. Simply pointing a live camera at an unfolding event, and then transmitting that signal around the world, was not, I suggested, journalism. It was a breathtaking feat of technology, but journalism requires a great deal more. It requires editing, separating the significant from the trivial. It requires context; an explanation of how what we’re seeing fits into a larger pattern of events. It requires reporting; the process by which we establish, as best we can within the limits of deadlines, the veracity of what is being said, sometimes even what is being seen. 

 Thirty or forty years ago, I used to tell audiences, with a mixture of pride and chagrin, that while doctors and lawyers needed a license to practice, that while everyone needed a license to drive, or hunt, or fish, nobody needed a license to be a journalist. Of course, back then, the only way to communicate to a national audience was to get a job with a national news magazine, like Time or Newsweek, or with a national broadcasting network, of which there were only three. So, the opportunity was more theoretical than real. Still, with the advent of the Internet, I used to tell college students that the capacity to communicate globally was now, literally in their hands. I never actually expected them to do it. Well, here it is: the democratization of journalism. And somewhat belatedly, some of us are recalling that the Founding Fathers weren’t all that enamored of pure democracy, when they were crafting what would become our system of government. Representational government – not democracy, for heaven’s sake! The American public, it was feared, was too likely to be swayed by the passions of the moment.

Just imagine if the public was kept informed, round the clock, of the votes – sometimes even the intentions – of their congressperson. Imagine if they were exposed, round the clock, to a partisan harangue designed to inflame their pre-existing biases. And imagine if voters could then instantly communicate their displeasure directly to the office of their elected representative. Well, the consequences to our political system are too horrible to contemplate. But what was unimaginable in the 18th century has become commonplace in the 21st. More than ever beofre, we live today in a world of instant reaction, constant judgment, and corrosive partisanship.

Read the rest here…