Nbc News Before Context - Road to the Middle Class

YESTERDAY, if you were a conservative blogreader you would have read InstaPundit or Road to the Middle Class and learned about this report from StrategyPage.

StrategyPage reported that war in Iraq against the insurgency, Al Qaeda and the Saddamites, is all but over. Now the conflict was going to be between the official government and the Sadr and Badr militias. The government was getting ready to deal with the Iran-backed parties and their armed followers.

But of course when NBC�s Brian Williams reported that very day that Iraqi special forces assaulted a militia stronghold in Iraq we got first the Sadrist accusations of US forces attacking a mosque. Later did we hear from an American commander denying that the building attacked was a mosque.

But we never got to hear about the new strategy of the Iraqi government. All we could see was that the big explosions and the bloodshed continued.

In addition, NBC also reported on people marching in the US against immigration reform without telling us who is organizing and participating in the marches.

Who is organizing them, Brian Williams? Liberal activist groups? The Democrats? Labor Unions? Chicano groups funded by US philanthropic foundations? Authentic organizations of the undocumented workers? The world would like to get some context here, as in Who What When Why, and so forth.

When the MSM has a dog in the fight they are punctilious about cutting to their analyst and making sure that their great unwashed audience understands what to think. But when it comes to immigration and the War in Iraq then they would prefer to have the American people feel that they are being attacked on their TV screens by confusing, incomprehensible forces.

Don�t forget, MSM, that when you refuse to provide context you allow other people to offer context and meaning. Karl Rove: any ideas?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems� No more rules, no more models� Genius conjures up rather than learns� ” —Victor Hugo
C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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