A Reader In Scotland Says That In Journalism It’s Who, Not What, You Know That Counts

By VDARE.com Reader

08/29/2007

08/28/07 — A Texas Reader Says Immigration Law Enforcement Will Lead To Self-Deportation

From: Martin Kelly

Re: Paul Gottfried’s Column: Buy Making Sense Of The American Right

Professor Gottfried asks:

" … Why, even at a time when the liberal news media has begun to pounceon W and his dying administration, does it continues to feature neoconservative columnists in the national press and on TV talk programs — honors that it would never conceivably extend to paleoconservatives or paleolibertarians, even though they fully share the Left’s distaste for the war in Iraq? "

The answer to Gottfried’s question is straightforward. In "mainstream" journalism, as in many other walks of life, it’s often who, not what, you know that gets you ahead.

Would the so-called conservative luminary, nay visionary, Jonah Goldberg ever have had a column if his mother hadn’t been a journalist before him?

Or would the world have ever heard of David Frum had his late mother not been a prominent media figure in his native Canada? How many doors did being Irving Kristol’s son open for Bill?

The families of 3,000 dead Americans surely want the answers they'll never get to those questions.

But in the meantime, three cheers for the Internet, free thought’s last refuge.

Kelly is the proprietor of the blog, "Thoughts From the West of Scotland." Read it here. His previous letters to VDARE.COM are here.

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