The Crisis of Information

Carlson's Daily Caller, drawing upon e-mails between MSM journalists, exposes the deep dishonesty practiced by them on Obama's behalf. When the Jeremiah Wright story broke during the 2008 campaign, reporters for mainstream publications conspired to bury it and to change the subject lest it hurt Obama's chances for election.

Read about it here.

Andrew Breitbart notes that the supposedly free press is coming more and more to resemble Pravda [here].

Ann Althouse notes that moral and ethical considerations never arose during discussions among the journalists as to how best to deal with the Wright crisis [here].

And in a related story, the Chronicle of Higher Education admits that a recent story by Michael Bellesile's latest publication is false. Eugene Volokh notes that Bellesiles [like Lawrence Tribe before him] blames the errors and instances of plagarism on a student assistant. Bellesiles first rose to prominence several years ago with a bogus study of gun ownership in early America. Because his findings fit well with liberal biases the work was widely praised by scholars and even won the highest prizes awarded by the History profession. When Bellesiles' duplicity was exposed, by conservative commentators, the profession, to its credit, withdrew the honors, but the willingness of major figures in academia remains an embarrassment.

Read about it here.

There is a real crisis here. The major institutions upon which we, as citizens, depend for timely and accurate information [the MSM and academia] have been revealed to be so deeply corrupted by ideological bias as to be, to all intents and purposes, useless. So unreliable have these sources of information become that they cannot be trusted on any subject. This is important because academia and professional journalism are supposed to constitute trustworthy, self-correcting, communities of competence. That has been a bedrock assumption of our modern democracy Neither is currently functioning as such nor have they done so for a long time and in an environment in which no reliable source of information is available, all we have to fall back on is our prejudices.