Marvin Olasky describes how last night’s presidential election (and many others) began to be lost about 50 years ago. Here’s one strong point:

Twenty years ago, as the advent of talk radio left many conservatives thinking they had a weapon adequate to overcome the influences of liberal newspapers and news magazines. That proved untrue, because those print publications still do the original reporting and storytelling that frames national debates.

That’s what we see in the current reporting on what happened in Benghazi and everything related to Muslims in the news. That’s what we see in the established process for candidate debates (“Mr. Ryan, should women be afraid of your election?”). That’s what we see in the reporting on government spending, budget modifications, fiscal cliff, etc.

I stopped listening to NPR over the summer when they used the news on Pixar’s Brave to deride the idea of princesses and ask a homosexual entertainer, who I think goes by the name Princess, to expand on being a princess means. I turned it on the other day to hear them pass lightly over a colonel’s criticism of the grossly irresponsible handling of our Libyan embassy’s defenses to focus on what he believed was miscommunication from the Marines on the ground.

We live in an infoworld today. Our kings or kingmakers are the information keepers.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

In fact, one could reasonably make the case that those whose thinking is shaped by unexamined, unacknowledged assumptions are more biased than those who have consciously examined and knowingly embraced their assumptions, because the refusal or inability to recognize one’s own assumptions creates the self-delusion of unbiased objectivity, placing those assumptions beyond the realm of what can be challenged and thus leading one to lay claim to an unearned authority steeped in nonexistent neutrality.

Greenwald discusses objectivity in light of the vice-presidential debate.

What is truth outside of the facts? If someone writes a memoir describing his remarkable experiences, drawing from these profound truths about the world, do people not treat this differently than a novel? If it is learned that his experiences were completely fabricated, do we not see the book in a completely different light? And if an author writes fiction but claims it is fact, is he not appealing to the evidence of reality which he can’t do in a novel? He is, and yet some will still argue that his intentions outweigh his lies.

Mike Daisey has a one-man show called, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Mike D’Virgilio writes, “Daisey conveys his experiences on a visit to China of seeing the allegedly deplorable working conditions in Apple’s production facilities. It turns out much of what he speaks about in his theatrical monologue and on the ‘This American Life’ episode about it, never happened.” That liberals will defend this non-factual account which purports to get at the truth is typical of them, D’Virgilio argues.

Kudos to Ira Glass for rejecting lies presented as truth.

This is funny, but I have to wonder if it shows more the problems of our cultural multiversity, each of us flailing around for a bit of real ground to stand on, than it does the whole news story as the advertisement suggests.

James Fallows calls this weekly world edition of the UK Telegraph the greatest front page ever. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. It’s the absence of cognitive dissonance, a blindness to irony. It’s doing what you’re told without thinking about it or maybe not proofing. Or maybe they thought it was funny.

Three year old non-profit news organization ProPublica has won it’s second Pulitzer. That may be a sign of sunny days ahead for liberal journalism.