And as I begin this lecture, I really would like to thank Lew Rockwell first and the Mises Institute for inviting me to speak.
After I realized that Lew had taken leave of the census in giving me this invitation, I decided to accept it anyway.
And I also would like to thank all of you for attending this session.
And we will determine in about 40 minutes or so if, in fact, you had taken leave of your census to be here.
But I would like to thank all of you for being here. This is an exciting conference.
In fact, you know, I look at this thing, it's not really so much sessions as it is intellectual feasts.
I mean, I started looking at sessions, which one do I want to go to? I actually want to go to them.
It's not like going to the American Economic Association, wherever you get a book this thick,
and you go through it and say, I don't want to go to any of these sessions.
So this is what I, you know, I really appreciate.
I will not be giving anything on PowerPoint. I've actually never done a PowerPoint presentation in my life.
I don't want to start now.
I will not be doing anything here on West Virginia PowerPoint, as Richard Vedder calls it.
So we'll just have to deal with the spoken word and hope that everything turns out well.
I am honored to give this lecture today, and especially honored because it's named after Henry Haslett.
and I think Jeff Tucker aptly named him the People's Austrian.
All of us are indebted to Henry Hazlitt.
As a journalist, he towered above his peers and as an economist, and I do call him an economist.
He could intellectually overpower the imposters who have dominated mainstream economics for more than a century.
To make my point, all we have to do is remember that Henry Hazlitt once wrote on the same editorial page
that today embraces the rants of Paul Krugman.
Who is a better economist? One was a high school graduate, did not go to college. The other has his doctorate from MIT.
And all I have to say is, you know, in areas of clarity, sense, and in economics, I don't even think there's a contest.
Mr. Krugman still has yet to learn what opportunity cost is. So he has a long way to go.
Well, but as for journalism, remember that Hazlitt wrote for the New York Times.
Now, the New York Times, as we know, also gave us the faux journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize fraudulently, a man named Walter Durante.
But at least back then, the Times could counter with Henry Hazlitt.
Today, the Times gives us Jason Blair and then counters with Judith Miller.
So you can tell that the state of intellectual prowess at the New York Times has gone down in the last few decades.
We also owe a huge debt of gratitude to Henry Hazlitt, who along with Leonard Reed helped Ludwig von Mises
gain a tiny intellectual toehold upon the U.S. academic world.
You know, academe scorned Mises, but Mr. Hazlitt saw through the chap thrown about by other academic economists and realized that the rejected Mises still held the keys to the kingdom and helped to make Mises' work secure even as that handiwork has outlived both men.
And Henry Hazlitt was an outstanding economist in his own right.
We're talking about a man who gave us the book, The Failure of the New Economics.
and Mr. Hazlitt was somebody who actually read Keynes' general theory and understood it.
I'm not sure Keynes understood it, but he understood and he wrote a line-by-line reputation.
And one time I was teaching a course at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
It was an upper division macro course and we were using Wallace Peterson's text.
And this was the most popular intermediate macro text.
and to give you a sense of what this book is like, it quoted Keynes like scripture.
In other words, I'm serious.
I mean, he would present an idea and he would have something from the general theory
and that was, in his thinking, that was all you needed to do.
That was the only argument needed to be made.
Obviously, it was right because Keynes said it.
Well, what did Hazlitt do?
Hazlitt took a line-by-line refutation of that book and I would use that in that class,
basically use Keynes as a foil and use Hazlitt as the main body of work.
I wasn't supposed to be doing that, but I did it anyway.
And so I would say that Henry Hazlitt was a real giant in journalism.
If you really want to get a sense of his career, I would urge you to read Jeffrey Tucker's piece in the book,
Fifteen Great Austrian Economists, and this is the one entitled Henry Hazlitt, The People's Austrian.
So, in that, because of that, because it is available, I'm not going to be going through his long career here.
I just want to say that Hazlitt really was a giant in a lot of fields.
And this was a man who, if he applied for a newspaper job today with his educational background,
he wouldn't even be allowed to sweep the floor.
And yet we look at what he produced versus what all of these people with graduate degrees
Working in the media, see what they produce, I leave the results up to you to determine.
And so, again, I'm very much honored.
Also, partly, I'm interested in Hazlitt as a journalist because I was a journalism major in college 30-some years ago.
That doesn't mean I learned anything, I will confess to you.
I took econ, I was on the track team, and we had difficult workouts, and econ class was a very, very good time to sleep, and so I did not do very well in my economic studies.
And I remind some of my old professors of that every once in a while, saying that you had a chance to kill me off right there, but oh no, now I'm in the profession.
And so, I've always had obviously an interest in the press having worked for a newspaper and the like and in fact I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the media and took some different views of the media and have off and on dabbled and done some papers, actually done some articles for the Mises Institute on the Mises page and also done some more formal academic papers
in the subject, so I do have a lot of interest in it, and I do hope that I can convey some of that interest to you and some of the insights I feel I've picked up.
One of the things I want to do today, though, is sort of take an Austrian view of the media.
Now, when you say an Austrian view, I know it's a really wide-ranging thing.
I'm going to be coming at it more from the point of view of the Austrian economist, as you shall see,
dealing with Menger, with Mises, some of the theoretical points and see how this applies to journalism.
One of the things that you find though with journalism is that the mainstream economists simply haven't written very much about it.
And I would say one of the reasons is because it doesn't lend itself easily to mathematical modeling.
And without mathematical modeling, I mean where is economics, poor thing?
And so, we tend to shy away from it, or the approach to economics sometimes becomes like, if you look at, for example, Professor Eakland and others wrote a book called Sacred Trust about the medieval church.
and the assumption is that people were only interested in otherworldly things.
It's sort of the good government viewpoint that all politicians are interested in good government.
That's making wise decisions that benefit all of society and of course never themselves.
And so often we see this in journalism.
I'm going to, if I may, use a really crude example, but in that great classic movie Animal House, there is a scene towards the end where somebody steals the baton from the bandleader and marches the band into a brick wall.
And the band keeps trying to march through this brick wall, and they never succeed.
And we often come up with that in the area of government. We continue to come back to the well of good government, good government. We have to have good government.
Or, same thing with journalism. We know that these guys, quote, are biased.
We know that they are going to have certain proclivities.
And yet, somehow, in the end, we still expect them to produce this non-biased material.
And we're asking somebody to do something I think that they're really not capable of doing.
But at the same time, no matter what, and being a refugee of journalism school, I can assure you that the good journalism, good government theme was pounded into us.
And nobody quite knew what good government was, but I think it was regulating those monopolies called businesses, protecting consumers, and all the other things that government is supposed to be doing.
So, first I want to begin in talking about the modern institution of the press, and keep in mind that when I'm speaking of journalists today, I'm speaking as part of the institutionalized press, not the idea of simple freedom of speech.
There are times when people confuse the two of them.
To give you an analogy, if people criticize public education, what's thrown back at them?
Oh, well, you're against education. You're against people learning how to read and write.
And you think, no, I'm against public education. I don't know how to learn to read and write in public schools.
Well, when you look at, you know, at the modern institution of the press, and you say something critical about it, what comes back?
Oh, you are against freedom of the press. Well, obviously, you know, you want to censor people.
Now, that's not the point we're making, but I want to concentrate on this institution that we call the press and apply some Austrian insights there.
Now, the first thing I think we have to keep in mind is that the modern press, as we know it, really is a progressive era institution.
You really cannot understand the New York Times and these other entities, CBS News or whatever,
without understanding the Progressive Era and the mentality that was produced there.
Now, if you really want to learn about the Progressive Era, I would urge that you read one of Professor Higgs' books,
The Progressive Era Ended Around the Time of World War I
and, again, that proverbial band running into the wall, at the same time we continue to go back to them, demand that these institutions produce something that they really can't produce.
And so I would like to look at a little bit about that.
In 1922, a number of journalistic representatives came up with the so-called canons of journalism.
And in the canons of journalism, the idea was that newspaper reporters, and this was at the time, it was really pretty much journalism was dominated by the print media.
And the idea was that they should be objective. So the front page, you should not be able to tell what a person's ideology is, where they're coming from, but on the editorial page you could say what you wanted.
And this was, in essence, be the institution of journalism, and not only that, but they wanted to take a, quote, scientific approach to it.
And the same way that during this particular time they're taking more scientific approaches to government, to management, and I put scientific in quotes,
So I will let you determine whether or not these things really were scientific, but at
any rate this was the way of thinking.
And this is opposed to the older press, what we would call the party press, something that
in many ways is like a lot of today's blogs, you know, you're not going to read the daily
The Party Press, once upon a time, you knew where the writer stood, you knew where the
points of view were, and out of that, Americans still managed to get information, managed
What we also began to see, very much though, with the so-called progressive-era press or the modern candidates of journalism press, was a dominant viewpoint that somehow capitalism in and of itself was bad or it needed to be curbed.
that you had a lot of writers, for example, Upton Sinclair that they're talking about this week because of the 100th year anniversary of his book called The Jungle which not only got it, it also got the conditions and the meat packing plants wrong as well.
I mean, people think that somehow Sinclair was describing things that actually were happening when in fact it really wasn't.
And I had a tarbell with her history of the Standard Oil Company and the like that the view was, in fact, that there was something wrong with capitalism.
And so you needed scientific institutions to sort of take the edge off what was seen as a system that was very predatory.
Also, the press at that time was seeing something in akin, in its relationship to government, something in akin to a regulatory agency.
Now, we have a little bit of an irony here. A privately owned entity, the press, in essence regulating the workings of government.
It was to be a watchdog of government, that the press, their job was to keep government in check.
Well, what do we know about regulatory agencies? Well, economists over the years have talked about capture theory.
What happens with capture theory?
Well, what we find is that the entities being regulated often would capture the regulatory agencies
and in fact that you would see some sort of cooperative action between them
and there would often be a revolving door between the agencies and the industries.
And obviously there's a whole lot of room for corruption and all that.
And I think that everybody in this room understands the real limitations of the, everybody understands the real limitations of regulation, government regulation of business.
And I don't even want to go into that in this talk. And I don't want to go down, you know, down that particular rabbit trail.
But I think people, I think, instinctively understand.
Well, what happened with the press? Well, guess what? Journalism regulating the press, the watchdog of the press, what has happened over the years?
Well, the outstanding journalist and also advocate of free markets, Warren Brooks, or should I say the late Warren Brooks,
He wrote an article in the Quill back in 1991, shortly before he died, and he said that journalists are not so much interested in the status quo as they are interested in the statist quo.
and that he said his point was that our main beat is government and that therefore if you think about that you all you know that this these are where the relationships are formed now I can give you a little bit of a personal side to that and very much an understanding for a few years I was a newspaper reporter
And the prize beats were the government beats. Beats like the political, you know, our top person was the political writer and he covered the state legislature.
Also the other top beats would be the county courthouse because that's also where the trials were held. So you cover county government plus all of the trials going on.
The police reporter, and he would play cowboy with the police, to put it mildly.
He ultimately got a job with the sheriff's department.
He wrote a lot of articles, let's just say, that were favorable to the candidate running for sheriff in 1978,
and soon afterwards was rewarded for his coverage with a new job with the Hamilton County Sheriff's Department, but also City Hall.
Now, less so at that time especially was the Federal Courthouse.
The Federal Courthouse was a real backwater and for years, by the way, all over the country,
Federal Courthouses really were a backwater for journalism until the drug war and until the 1980s
when the Reagan administration pushed through a number of acts that allowed the,
either criminalized things that weren't criminalized before or allowed certain activities
at a current and a local level to somehow magically be transferred into federal court.
And so now with so many cases going to federal court, it no longer is the backwater that
it used to be, unfortunately, I say.
And those of you who have read my articles on the federal criminal justice system, I
think you probably understand that I would not really want to see this particular development.
But at any rate, what beat did you not want?
You didn't want the business beat.
Why didn't you want the business people? Well, businessmen wanted you to write PR stuff for them.
You weren't going to go to their board meetings and see the give and take of activities.
They didn't want you to see any of that. What they wanted you to see was a favorable view of their operations.
and uh... there was no sunshine law for business meetings and for these private
organizations and so
you didn't want to uh... you didn't want to see any of that
and so therefore you know you you you had the sense of my I guess my job is
just the right PR
for the business people that's what they want and so you didn't want that beat
now we did have a business reporter who kind of uh... he loved getting these uh...
press releases but they also gave him the Tennessee Valley Authority as a SOP
so he would have some real stories to cover as well but our view of and it's very very interesting because in that newsroom your view of the businessman really was colored by you know you know you had the sense of government being open and wow this is where all the action is and the business world well it's just where all the press you know all the PR is created and I should say a very skewed view of the world but there was and so start multiplying this across
Newsrooms across the country, and you get a sense of, you know, where the relationships are.
And, you know, you didn't really cultivate sources in the business community.
They did you no good. Nobody in the business community was really interested in being a source for somebody who was a journalist.
It just really wasn't, it just wasn't seemly.
and so you cultivated your sources in government and in fact that you know if
you got that phone call that that little anonymous tip I remember once that give
you an idea of a story that that I covered in my first year at the Chattanooga
Free Press there was a plant it's fertilizer plant and the equipment blew
And so, it was equipment that was the water pollution control equipment.
Well, now these guys had a real problem because their stuff coming out wasn't being treated.
Well, what do you do about this?
And so, you know, we first had a story about, you know, why?
Because somebody from the Water Quality Agency, one of our sources, called us up and said there's been an explosion at this particular plant.
Plant. Well, of course, nobody from the plant called us up. I mean, Jim Dickerson, I remember, was the plant manager at the time, and I don't think he would have called us up. But anyway, I remember going to a water quality meeting on Saturday, and another reporter and I, nobody quite knew who we were. We just sat there and said nothing. Then they had a private meeting with representatives from the Tennessee Water Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency, and we managed to go in there and sit.
and finally somebody asks, well who are these guys with?
And I thought it was with you, no, it was with you.
Well by then we'd found out some really interesting stuff.
And got some very, very nice scoops against our arrival at the Chattanooga Times.
And so, but you can see that the world according to the journalist is going to be one in which
In the real world, it's very different. If you go into a business, into any kind of enterprise, this is where you see the real world happening.
This is where you see people making things, producing things, selling things. In a very real sense, making life better for people.
You know, you go even away for a long time. I go into the courthouses and into the government offices, and there I see the real backwater.
But as a journalist, that view of the world was turned completely upside down.
And I'm just giving you my own perspective.
And one that I think that, you know, you start multiplying it, and you get to understand some of the biases across the line.
Also, the people who often go into journalism generally are going to have certain proclivities.
There seems to me almost to be a self-selection bias going on.
But there's something else too that I, in my observations, that what I have found over
over the years has been that journalists generally do not, they work for organizations, there's not a lot of selling something, even though they create a product that ultimately the public consumes, in their minds that's not the real customer, the customer is the entity for which they work, and or some other publication, not the general public.
And what I find myself observing is that in these newsrooms across the country, that the makeup of people, in some ways, represents a college faculty, now, and especially the arts and sciences faculty, and being at a university, how do you make money?
Research across the country. That the makeup of people in some ways represents a college faculty. Now, and especially the arts and sciences faculty. And being at a university, and not in the arts and sciences faculty, I'm in the business faculty, and I find that there's a little more common sense that goes on among in discussions there.
In the sciences faculty, we have people there, they really believe that if government provides a service, government has conquered the law of scarcity.
In fact, to them, the law of scarcity really is contrived. It was something dreamed up by capitalists, and if only the government could have its way with everything,
we could abolish all work, all scarcity, life would be good, we would just party all the time.
And you think I'm exaggerating. I have seen things that some of the arts and sciences faculties have written.
I mean, people really believe this sort of thing.
And again, look at the disconnect.
As faculty members, we do not directly sell our services to our customers, okay?
Now, ultimately, in the Mengerian sense, if you remember Carl Menger, one of his important insights,
And he was not just simply solving the issue of what we call marginal utility, but also
it was Menger who pointed out that the value of the factors of production ultimately was
derived from, or we would say that their value was imputed from the value of the final good
that was consumed.
Or what Menger said was that it's the final good, it's the goods characteristic of a final good that gives goods characteristic to these other...
He didn't call them factors of production, he called them higher order goods.
And in essence, in journalism, you have to remember that I think there's a notion, well, they're just trying to sell papers.
They're writing, they're just trying to sell papers.
The journalist, in his or her world, that's not really a big deal to them.
They're selling their work to their employer or to a publication.
They're not trying to sell the publication.
I'm talking about that larger publication.
That's really not where they're at.
There is going to be somewhat of a disconnect.
Look, if you ever read the New York Times editorial page, day after day after day, or the Baltimore Sun. I remember, in fact, I used an example from the Baltimore Sun editorial.
It was this editorial appeared 24 years ago, and the editorialist said that Americans obviously don't value education because professional athletes make more than teachers, and so that was, you know, proof positive.
Well, I wrote something in the Freeman that appeared, I think, in August of 2000 entitled
In Praise of Athlete's High Salaries.
And I took that and basically I said, look, this is an example of the Diamond Water Paradox.
Well, it's very, very interesting, you see, that a journalist could not...if you said
Diamond Water Paradox to a journalist, this person might have a master's degree from Columbia
University, but I can assure you that he or she would just have their eyes glazed over.
And you might as well try and explain the Diamond Water Paradox to the wall over there.
But read the New York Times.
They believe that we can conquer poverty by raising minimum wages.
That if we order the automobile companies to build automobiles, lots and lots of automobiles
that get higher gas mileage, there's no opportunity cost to this.
This would just simply produce nothing but benefits.
It would help us save oil. Nothing about forcing automobile companies to spend billions of dollars in new capitalization for which there is little return.
And if you said that, they can't understand. So you're really dealing with, I think, a real disconnect.
And to a certain extent, you want to try to educate them. I know that the Political Economy Resource Center has done that over the years with journalists and environmental issues.
And it sort of had mixed results. Ultimately, these journalists go back to where they work, and anything that they write that's against the zeitgeist of the day, or the prevailing view, is one in which it's a view that's going to be scorned.
And sooner or later they realize, you know, if I keep writing stuff that's getting me scorned, you know, my employment, you know, things like raises and promotions, all these other things really, you know, start playing a role.
I'll give you another example. It's more personal. I actually, and I will admit it in this room to these people now that it's being streamed over the internet, the whole world will know, that I actually am friends with Jack Abramoff.
and yes and no I have not got any money from him but we did have dinner in his house but the there was a national editor from the Washingtonian and name is Kim Eisler and he was interviewed by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post and he said you know I know Jack Abramoff he really is not the monster that he's being portrayed in the press well you can
The next thing you know, I emailed Isler about it and he emails me back and he says,
Well, you're not going to believe it. I got a handwritten note from Chris Matthews telling me that I was defending a dirt bag that I was now the laughing stock of all his friends.
He says, Why would a guy who makes a million and a half a year take the trouble to do this?
And to him, now he's got a problem because now he's committed a major sin in the eyes of other journalists
If you look, for example, at the Sunday morning news shows, Phase the Nation, Press the Meat, and the George Stephanopoulos show, or whatever that's called, you'll find some other things that you can do.
You find some other things too. Again, people talk about the general consumption, the audience, the purpose of this is to educate Americans.
Well, no. You get a sense of what's going on when you look at the advertisements.
Only on Sunday morning do you find that Arthur Daniels Midland really is the supermarket to the world.
We don't see ADM advertisements the rest of the time.
People have this idea that movie producers are just simply out there trying to, quote, make money, and then they're always puzzled.
Well, gee, the G-movies do really well. Why do they keep giving us this R-rated stuff and the like?
Well, you have to keep in mind that a lot of times producers really do not see the general public as their final customers.
The people they're playing to are the Academy Awards people, other people living in Hollywood.
You've got to show some nudity once in a while. You've got to have some bad words, or something that's pushing the envelope.
And so, again, you have to understand that we have this notion that what these people are saying they're doing is writing the news why to help educate the people.
And sometimes there's complaints about those people. Recently, Aaron Brown, an ex-CNN broadcaster, complained that, well, we were trying to give people real news, and it's those damn people over at Fox, and they're covering Natalie Holloway. We were trying to cover the tsunami, and they gave us the Natalie Holloway story, the girl who disappeared in Aruba.
and Aruba.
Of course, Natalie Holloway disappeared in around, I think, the beginning of June 2005
and the tsunami occurred in very late 2004, so maybe CNN was just getting around to covering
the tsunami, I can't tell you.
But the idea, of course, that there is this contempt ultimately for this public that they
say they're trying to reach and trying to give them the news that they have to have.
Now, again, how does the Austrian look at this?
Well, number one, I think that the Austrian understands that an institution that was derived in the progressive era
is not going to do what it supposedly is created to do.
The modern journalism with all of its canons of journalism, they were updated in 1975 by Sigma Delta Chi, which is the Society of Professional Journalists,
and it's basically the same sort of thing, that modern journalism is not a regulator of the state, no matter what they say.
These people are not the watchdogs of government. They are the lapdogs of government.
I would like to give you a couple of anecdotes, again, to explain to you just how serious this particular problem is.
I've written a lot about the case of Michael Milken and Rudy Giuliani.
And anytime I can get a little slapping against Giuliani, I'm always glad to do it.
During the late 1980s, Giuliani decided that he was going to clean up Wall Street.
Now, it was presented in the press as the honest prosecutor simply looking and saying,
there are dishonest and wrong things going on on Wall Street and I've got to clean it up.
Michael Milken was actually doing, let's face it people, if it weren't for Michael Milken, our standard of living would be substantially lower today than it was.
There have been other papers presented about that and that's as much as I can say with it.
but certainly Milken's competitors didn't like him getting his clients and they
didn't like what Milken was doing and Rudy Giuliani had, let's just say that he
had aspirations of being more than just the US Attorney for the Southern
District of New York and so Giuliani started his raids, if you remember the
I had a raid on the trading floor at Princeton Newport Securities in which people were hauled out literally in chains and you had U.S. Marshals going in with loaded submachine guns with their fingers on the trigger going up against a bunch of unarmed traders.
and the idea like they're raiding a drug house in Southern California or something, or an illicit arms factory or something.
Of course, why did they do that?
Because so the press could come behind and film all this and have the perp walk and these people dragged out in chains.
Obviously, well, we have a criminal here. This must be dangerous crimes going on.
And in his investigation of Giuliani, Milken found that things were being leaked to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
And the Wall Street Journal, the two reporters here were Laurie Cohen and James Stewart.
And what Giuliani was doing was leaking material from the grand jury. Now this is a felony.
This is a real live on the books felony. Okay? And he kept leaking this material out and so what you had were two,
were a number of journalists aiding and abetting a felony. Alright? And of course they were all on a great crusade of course of law and order.
And this went on and then later Giuliani leaked to Laurie Cohen a story that he was about to come in a new superseding indictment of a hundred more indictments for Milken.
And Milken was getting ready to go to trial. He said, we have no idea. What are these indictments about? We have no idea.
It turned out Giuliani didn't have any indictments. The whole thing was made up out of whole cloth.
That, again, is a felony. It's called obstruction of justice.
So what we had here, in the name, of course, of following the law,
we had the destruction of a human being, with journalists aiding and abetting,
a criminal or a prosecutor engaging in acts of criminality.
And all of this is the public's right to know? I don't think so.
What we're dealing with here is simply this incestuous relationship between the press and government.
The Martha Stewart case. The Martha Stewart case is almost as egregious.
In that we had the leaking of testimony from congressional committees and also from the grand jury.
and Jury.
Those also were felonies and they were doing it in order to make hits so that Martha Stock
and Martha Stewart's company would take a hit and they were trying to get her to come
meet with them because she was not going to be meeting with investigators.
She said, I have nothing to say.
And so they kept illegally leaking things, of course, to the press and then her company
would take a hit and then finally she did that to stop the bleeding.
And of course we all know what followed afterwards and I always love it when James Comey, the prosecutor said,
well I was just trying to protect the interests of her stockholders.
Again, I don't think so.
I think that what we had was another example of a very incestuous relationship between the press and the government.
You know, I could go on and on with these kinds of stories.
Certainly in the, you know, Mises understood the nature of bureaucracy and the idea of spreading bureaucracy.
We have reporters all over the place. What do they do? You know, a lot of the, if you cover the EPA, what do you do?
Well, you cover the, you know, you always are talking about the need for more bureaucracy.
and that if there's ever criticism of these government agencies, it's that they're not really doing enough regulating.
They need to do even more regulating than they're already doing.
And again, you see this relationship that really thrives on the growth of government.
Well, if you think of the power of the press and what a free press was supposed to mean,
The idea that a quote free press would be a major engine in making government grow simply doesn't compute.
It doesn't make sense. It certainly did not make a sense at the founding of this country.
The founders of the United States did not want a situation in which government was just going to continue to grow and grow and grow.
And certainly they saw having a press as a check on that.
And, but once it became institutionalized and once it became a progressive era institution, then we saw that, we saw a whole, you know, a whole new direction being taken, one that supported the growth of government, one that supported regulatory agencies and the like, and in fact one that modeled that very incestuous relationship of the relationship between government and the private sector, this being government entities and the private sector.
Press. But I would like to also say that there is some hope on the horizon. That we are finding, for example, that the breakup of these large press entities, and I'm not talking about just as businesses, but what I mean also, the breakup in influence.
If you think of the influence that Walter Cronkite had, no journalist has anywhere close to that today.
And there are just literally too many choices out there for people.
Now, journalists complain about this and they blame the public for actually wanting choices.
And they say, no, this isn't what you should be having.
But also, the Internet has proven to be something far more powerful, I think, than anybody could have ever imagined.
When we moved to Cumberland, Maryland in August of 2001, we had already adopted one child and we had two others that we were in the process of adopting that would be coming to us soon.
And my wife and I decided not to get cable TV.
And if you live in Cumberland, and Cumberland is right in the middle of a bunch of ridges,
you don't have cable, you're not getting TV reception.
And so we opted not to get TV reception, which is very tough for, I love college football,
and so when my team is playing, sometimes I don't get to see them, that's tough, but I put up with that.
Don't watch television news. Don't subscribe to a newspaper. How do I keep up?
Well, it's pretty darn easy to be honest. It's a thing called the Internet.
And what we're finding with the Internet is, in fact, to a certain extent, almost a return to the old days.
Return to the Party Press and also a return to being able to get the story from a lot of different sources of what's going on.
And you have some enterprising people who have jumped into this and I think they really are doing a great job.
And so, you know, we're starting to see some real competition again that we hadn't seen in a long time.
Of course, the big boys don't like it. The New York Times sure doesn't like it.
I remember in the last election, Alex Jones, and I actually know Alex Jones because I used to work with him.
And Alex was with the Times for many years. He got a Pulitzer Prize.
Now he teaches journalism. Last time I checked in with him, he was teaching journalism at Duke University.
And Alex just was kind of sniffing about the bloggers.
What could they know that a trained journalist doesn't know and the like?
Although I look at it, the same analogy is the dartboard and the trained stock picker.
What they found over the years is that the dartboard works about as well as the supposedly highly trained securities expert.
And certainly I think that the bloggers have done a very very good job. If you want to take a Hayekian view of it, what we now see is a way to connect knowledge and information from across a really wide spectrum.
And be able to put it together in a way that wasn't being done before. So I really see this as a positive development.
Now, you know, the growth of government continues and, you know, one can, you know, one can
only hope, but in conclusion, I would like to say that certainly the old, like everything
else that came out of the progressive era, that the press as an institution is finally
running into market forces that are forcing people to take a very, very different approach
and a bunch of things.
Now, you're still going to have the staffs of the New York Times and the Washington Post
basically having the fanciful views of somebody who's a member of a college of liberal arts
someplace.
But they're also going to be countered by a lot of other people.
And they are not going to have the same control over what goes over airwaves and what goes
Thank you very much.