The establishment mainstream media is often attacked for its clone-like, group-think mentality, particularly among the so-called “punditry” of independent-minded opinion journalists. That this is a blatant lie is demonstrated here. There was no attack memo issued from the bowels of the Democratic National Committee’s ministry of propaganda directing journalists to viciously smear presumptive GOP VP candidate Paul Ryan by writing scurrilous lies linking him to novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand (who has been deceased for thirty years). That is just another baseless allegation without evidence of conspiracy mongering on the part of the lower sorts. The press are not like you or me. They are a special class of beings. They are the Fourth Estate, an imaginary extension of the rigid class structure of pre-Revolutionary France from the Estates General. In the Ancien Regime there was the clergy, the nobility, and lastly, the bourgeoisie and commoners. The Fourth Estate sees themselves on an equal par with the first two elevated classes, and above the third. It is the aristocratic notion that gentlemen and ladies of the press serve a vaunted “public interest,” and do not soil themselves with activities of a rank and sordid commercialism. Such endeavors would be a violation of their hoary journalistic ethics. They have a public trust to enlighten the ignorant unwashed masses in their duties to their betters, those who compose the state and their adjunct servitors in the kept press. So move along Citizen. Nothing to see here.
5:49 pm on August 13, 2012