"Our republic and its press will rise or fall together."

Joseph Pulitzer said it in 1947: "Our republic and its press will rise or fall together."

There's an excellent piece by John Reiniers in the Online Edition of Hernando Today which cites some well publicized, but quickly and conveniently forgotten incidents from the past when our enemies sidled up to Big Media. Our enemies knew full well they would have the support of leftist media as their best means of defeating us. Nothing has changed. Big Media (as well as leftist politicians) continues to side with those who oppose us.

This is an important piece. Please read it here in its entirety:

Nikita Khrushchev remarked to the New York Times on Sept. 29, 1957 that "The press is our chief ideological weapon." So it came as no surprise when North Vietnam's leader Ho Chi Minh echoed Mao Tse-tung's truism that by using the "media and elitist peace activists, an enemy of America could convince the American people" that they couldn't win a war. The trick was not to defeat the military - they knew they couldn't - but rather to use the media and activists to break the will of the American people.
And the beat goes on.
Pulitzer Prize winning liberal Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted recently, referring to Vietnam, that "We suffered defeat in an unwinnable war... Vietnam was hopeless enough, but to repeat the same folly 30 years later in Iraq is unforgivable."
Here we go again - breaking the will of the American people and our troops. Most military experts will point out that the Viet Cong were all but destroyed four years into the war when it went from insurgency to a more conventional war between the south and north. But the media convinced Americans that we had already lost. The most accurate similarity between the two wars is the manipulation of the public by the traditional media - from Walter Cronkite to Jon Stewart. (Yes, most 18- to 35-year-olds get their hard news from the Daily Show on Comedy Central.)
The high priest of the print media, Joseph Pulitzer, commenting on the power of the press in 1947, said "The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalism of future generations." How prescient. Coincidentally, another part of this quotation was used on the U.S. 3-cent stamp: "Our republic and its press will rise or fall together."
Given the media's bias, I have a sinking feeling. As Adlai Stevenson quipped in 1952, "We are developing a one-party press in a two-party country." And neither of these iconic men was aware of the oncoming juggernaut of the TV networks that would be in lockstep with the traditional print media.
And that towering figure in American journalism, E.W. Scripps, flatly said in 1951, "Few people...have any idea of the tremendous, the almost invincible power...of the daily press....the press rules the country, it rules its politics, it rules its religion, its social practice." (And this, too, was in the pre-network era). Nobody in the liberal mainstream media would have the courage to say this today because it's the truth. The president of the American Newspaper Publishers Association flatly stated in 1936, "The daily press has more power in the shaping of public opinion than any other force in America." (Jerome D. Barnum).
And the greatest ally of the media is not the truth - or the facts - but rather the perceptions they create. (Even John Stuart Mill noted way back in 1859 that "The mass do not now take their opinions from dignitaries...Their thinking is done for them... through the newspapers.") These perceptions are often created by nuance - such as George Bush "misled" us about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) morphing into "he lied." Or Bush has no "gravitas" to morphing into just plain dumb (No matter that his grades and SAT score were slightly higher than John Kerry's at Yale, and he is our first MBA president).
Most people don't realize that, just as a good motivational speaker or preacher will gradually have an audience/congregation "eating out of their hand," the media, too, will create demons or heroes or ideas of myth-like proportions which become very real with the passage of time.
The venerable Atlantic Monthly has been in publication since the 19th century. The January/February edition has on its cover a picture of a grim George Bush and a headline, "Why Presidents lie," with a piece entitled "Untruth and Consequences" by Carl Cannon who tells us that Bush went "in the public eye from truth teller to prevaricator in chief." (How subtle.) He admits that because of "a heavy dose of anti-Bush feeling on the part of the networks, news outlets, and publishing houses, much of the American public has altered its opinion" of Bush. Really. Is that why opinions changed? He finesses the WMD issue because the entire civilized world thought they existed and then proceeds to list Bush's lies. One would assume the first untruth would be the mother of all whoppers. Yet he selects Bush's 2006 State of the Union address when he cited Afghanistan and Iraq as examples of the advance of freedom - that the number of democracies have "increased from about two dozen at the end of 1945 to 123," but he had the temerity, notes Cannon, not to "mention that neither country was counted...by the organization...he was touting." Wow! What a whopper of a lie! (For all we know, the list hadn't been updated. Who cares? The point was these are two fledgling democracies.) How nit-picking can you get?
Except for Bush's resolute attitude toward promoting democracy, I am not a fan. He has been a surprising disappointment. But his treatment by the media has been bizarre. As Pulitzer observed, the media has the "power to mold the future of the republic." Since the beginning of Bush's presidency, to paraphrase Cannon, its heavy dose of anti-Bush rhetoric has in fact caused the public to alter its opinion. This started before Afghanistan and Iraq. Now unfortunately the success of our troops, the will of the American people and the continued success of democracy is falling victim to the passion and anti-Bush emotion of the elite network television and print media opinion-makers. The public didn't stand a chance. As John Stuart Mill observed, their "thinking" has been done for them.