Tony Snow Sees First Amendment Threat from Media Practices

[babylonsister]

Snow Sees First Amendment Threat from Media Practices


By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 10/17/2007 8:32:00 AM

Former White House press secretary Tony Snow said there is a threat to the First Amendment, and it comes from within.

"There is an ideological sameness to major news organizations, and that makes for bad journalism and bad business, and it's bad for the First Amendment," he said, "which was designed for ferocious competion of ideas and not orthodoxy."

Accepting the Freedom of Speech Award from The Media Institute Tuesday night in Washington, D.C., Snow was initially too overcome with emotion to speak after thanking his wife for her support through his bout with cancer. "Unlike Ed Muskie," he said, "I never would have made it in politics." But when he got his bearings, Snow lit forcefully into the media over what he saw as their bias, smugness and technology-driven shallowness and more.

He said he loved journalism, otherwise he wouldn't have been a journalist for 28 years. But he added that the threat he was talking about "doesn't come from the government, doesn't come from wackos, doesn't come from organized groups on the outside, but instead it comes from the media itself."

Snow said the press has gone from wild and untamed in its beginnings to a "period of consolidation and gentrification," with control in a handful of elite institutions like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, as well as the major TV networks that "shaped and defined not merely what counted as news but what counted as acceptable opinion."

Now, he said, news has returned to the Wild West. "Ideas and controversies are erupting from every pore of the body politic," he added, a particularly graphic image. Technology may have democratized the media he said, but politcal rhetoric has turned nasty, childish and personal, and people are "sick of it."

He said the reason why newspapers are losing readers and TV viewers is not because there is less appetite for news, but because the media aren't delivering it.

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http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6491983.html

[CottonBear]

1. Tony is so full of shit. n/t

[flyingfysh]

2. He objects to political rhetoric being "nasty, childish and personal"

Just look up what Lincoln was subjected to. He was often called a "baboon", and that was one of the kindlier comments. A free press can be unpleasant, but it is essential.

[unpossibles]

3. I want to send him a card with the definition of "irony" in it

is that mean?

[Supersedeas]

4. who could that Pot label FOX be talking about as the kettle steams lightly

[T Wolf]

5. And what specific part of the media started and accelerated the

"nasty, childish and personal" behavior, cancer boy? Could it have been your faux network?

And notice he did not mention Uncle Rupert in his rant against media consolidation.

He is a piece of shit who bears no resemblance to a real journalist.

[malaise]

6. Madness

"...but politcal rhetoric has turned nasty, childish and personal, and people are "sick of it."

Thank your buddies at Fux, in the WH, the Rethugs led by Rove and in Conrgess and your corporate backers at the rest of MSM.

We are facing a complete inversion of reality.

[Justitia]

7. Snow getting the "Freedom of Speech Award" is like Kissinger getting the Nobel Peace Prize -eom

[misanthrope]

8. He's one to talk...

...considering the role he played in furthering the things he decries.

[mitchum]

9. I didn't know that they gave the Freedom of Speech Award as a SYMPATHY prize...

c'mon, you just know that's the only reason that the Incredibly Shrinking Shill received it