From the Easy Chair

The Media & Decadence

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 64-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BF108

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BF108, The Media & Decadence from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 190, March 10, 1989.

Our subject now is the press or the media. And, of course, in this Otto has considerable background having been a newspaper reporter, having served in an editorial capacity and having had years of association with the media. My limited experience apart from the publishing of the Chalcedon Report was that when I was in high school I covered sports for the weekly paper. And I got paid for it pretty well for those days.

The media, of course, is very, very important in our day. It has a tremendous influence through the press, through television, radio, magazines and other publications. And the press champions itself as a great citadel of freedom. It was very interesting some years ago to read a professor describing his visit to Italy and recognizing that it was public education that Mussolini possible, because only when you could reach the mind of everyone through a state controlled system could you begin to indoctrinate them into a statist way of life. And, of course, all modern Statism has depended on public education, on media that will give forth the kind of generalized Humanism so that the media, together with education has served to revolutionize the world in the 20th century. And in stead of being a citadel of freedom, which it can be, it has too often been an instrument in the hands of tyranny.

Otto, do you want to make some kind of statement now to develop your position on the subject?

[Scott] Well, I agree with what you said, but I wouldn’t limit it to the 20th century. The Reformation, really, was created by creating the press in the modern sense. It was the Christian community that created the press and Calvin in Geneva and, for that matter, Luther and the others, were great writers and polemicists and lots of publications and they with this new instrument reached the minds of millions of people.

And the press, as you say, has worked both for liberty and for tyranny, because the press in the hands of the Soviets, for example, is an example intellectual tyranny. And the journalists throughout all these centuries have played a dual role. They have undermined governments and traditions and values and Christianity on one hand. On the other hand they have expressed the values of freedom and liberty and individuality and so forth. And then when the pressure comes on, they succumb to greater power. I can’t help but count the number of newspapers they used to have in Havana under Batista. There was at least a dozen. Now there is, I think, one and it prints whatever Castro wants. And Castro says, “Of course, we didn’t have a revolution in order to print anything against the revolution.”

[Rushdoony] Well, it is interesting that the press has always boasted of its role in human freedom and as a champion of freedom, but only on rare occasions has it show much courage.

[Scott] Very little.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] My opinion of journalists in terms of courage is not high. And I have had a lot of ... some of my best friends are journalists. But they crawl before the city desk and they are very careful about people of power and influence. Nothing was said to any great extent against Mr. Roosevelt by the reporters. We have always had in recent years, recent generations, we have had conservative editorial writers who kind of calm the waters for the business people. And we have had ... now we have conservative columnists. But we have never had, in recent years, conservative reporters. For the last 25 or 30 years the reporters have all been Democrats and, in fact, the press is almost an instrument of the Democratic party.

[Rushdoony] I think one of the most distressing examples of the subservience of the press was in the instance of Ben Bradley, Washington Post and President Kennedy. In his book about Kennedy he admits that he suppressed news, that he worked to please Kennedy and it is a very sad book to read.

[Scott] He was proud of it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He was proud of being a... proud of being a confidant of the president.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And this is a lure, an attraction that power has for a great many people. Just to be close to the seat of power is such a wonderful and historic opportunity that consciences disappear. The evolution of the press since World War II here has been a matter of almost of astonishment to me. As you know, before World War II most of the journalists worked their way up and there is a value in working your way up, because you learn the world from the bottom. And the world from the bottom is not the same as the world from the top. You learn some things about people that are very essential to know if you are an observer of human behavior. We didn’t have press releases, not even the president had a press release. Somebody would ... who would call in with a story about somebody else would immediately be checked out. You would check him out first, because you would want to know what his motive was on reporting this on somebody else. Something like a cop. When you call the police and report a crime, the first thing they want to know is your name and your address because they want to know who is calling. And we felt the same way. Then we would go to the individual who was the subject of the information to find out what their defense was, or what the situation was. And by interviewing and by on the spot checking, we would put together a story.

If I... I was amazed in New York in later years to discover that stories against some of my P. R. clients, some of my corporations that I represented then, were filed by the New York Times without ever giving the company a chance to know that the charges being made or the opportunity to respond to it, as though a charge alone was sufficient. And I remember that covering crime we used to keep secrets or out of the article the way in which a burglar got into a place, because we didn’t want to give burglary instructions to the general public. We didn’t explain in explicit detail the terrible nature of sex crimes. And now, of course, whole books are written about the murders of such as Ted Bundy in explicit detail.

We were well aware in those days of the imitation factor. If you printed about a crime, if you featured a crime, there would be a wave of such crimes. But we felt a certain sense of responsibility to the society in which we lived which apparently is lacking now in the modern journalist.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Shortly after Reagan entered the White House he put into the federal register a regulation that would have meant the radical control of the churches and of Christian schools. It was really a regulation that led to a dictatorship over them. And a protest ensued and as a result of the protest the IRS which was to handle the control received more mail than they had ever before received in their history, which posed a problem for them, because they have to answer every letter by law.

[Scott] Oh, I didn’t know that.

[Rushdoony] Even with a form letter. So it is a good way to bug them, but, of course, they might remember you. But at any rate, the result was a week long of hearings and on the first morning the IRS testified and through the rest of the week four of the five days till nine o'clock at night a number of religious leaders, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish appeared to testify against the regulation. And the volume of those hearings is still available, I believe, from a private press, put out by a friend of Chalcedon.

The interesting thing to me was that the press appeared for the first morning when the IRS testified. And thereafter they came only to receive the IRS handout about the hearings. Only one publication made any investigative reporting of the subject of the story and that was the Wall Street Journal.

[Scott] That is very interesting, because it illustrates the growing division between the journalists and the people of the United States.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I think it began with the fact that the publishers began to hire... editors began to hire graduates from the universities schools of journalism and now majors in communications. Journalism at newspapers themselves not being sufficient, you are supposed to have some knowledge of electronic communications and so forth.

When a boy or a girl for that matter goes through school all the way through college and then emerges into the work force, they have learned how to look at the world. If they come out of the schools of communication which are a part of the liberal arts, they have been told that everything is explicable from a certain angle and they come out like so many lemmings. They don’t have to investigate because they already know the story. The only thing that they view individuals as symbols of class and place or race or ethnicity or religion. They didn't have to cover the religious witnesses at the hearing that you mentioned. I have that volume, by the way. It is very impressive. They didn’t have to attend because they already felt that they knew...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...what those people were going to say.

[Rushdoony] Well, as you know, I have for more than 10 years been frequently a witness at church and state trials or for trials of parents and so on. And a lot of the reporters who have appeared have been pretty wretched and fit the description you have made. But some of them have been good men. And some have back the second day to express on one or two occasions their chagrin at the story as it came out. And there is reason behind that. When we were young, Otto, you would have two or three printings of a paper in a single day. Nobody now is familiar with the idea of newsboys running around in the downtown area shouting, “Extra, extra.”

But then you would have several printings in a day with fresh news, on the spot reporting, a man calling it in and it being taken immediately to the typesetter. Now what happens is that the editor has all kinds of handouts given to him, let us say, by the state department of education or the state welfare department or whatever agency is involved. The reporter calls in his story or takes it in. It goes to a rewrite man and very often there isn’t a single thing that the turned in in the final story. One person told me of having his name on a story and he recognized two sentences of a two page article.

[Scott] That is true. The editors have complete liberty to rewrite anything that you submit even if you have a byline. You are not allowed today to cover a story that has not been assigned to you. And the editors decide what story is important and more and more governmental activities and handouts comprise the bulk of the news...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And next to that is the features, the comics, the columns, paste ups, you might say, the ladies’ fashions and so forth. The real estate section has always amused me. You talk about the freedom of the press. Have you ever looked at ... with an objective eye at the editorial content of the real estate section? Every bit of it reads like an advertisement.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And it is absolute... total, total creature of the real estate interests and of the developers and so forth. However, the ... there is a reason for the government comprising most of the news, because the government now is the largest entity in the land.

What really is surprising is how little interpretation of the government’s activities the people receive. They are not really told how it works.

In Berkeley, for instance, here is the... here is Berkeley which has just destroyed housing. Next to Berkeley is San Francisco which has two big newspapers. It has the Examiner and the Chronicle. They combine on their weekend edition, but they still presumably compete for five or six days of the week. I have never seen in any of them an analysis of the collapse of Berkeley right next doo.

[Rushdoony] No. That is right. Local coverage is the biggest gap in all the media throughout the country, because local coverage would mean confronting the evils at hand with entrenched interest.

[Scott] So local power...

[Rushdoony] Yes. The local power.

[Scott] New York Times, I shut up one of the writers of the New York Times one day when I said, “You guys sat, you sat looking out the window at the foreign policy of the United States, at Israel, at Belfast, at Japan and you wrote all these think pieces and in the meantime New York City turned into a swamp on your own doorstep and you never covered it.”

But, of course, it would mean going against the powers and that fits in with the cowardice of journalism. I wish I could recite this from memory, but I can’t, the famous incident when Napoleon escaped from Aetna. The monitor...

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Scott] The monitor, I believe it was who said the monster has escaped the first day. And then the second day it said, the adventurer. And it got progressively less stern until finally just before he reached Paris it said his majesty the emperor is at the gates.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is a famous incident, a good example of subservience.

Well, you mentioned San Francisco. In the 30s there were four newspapers there. And now there are only two and both ...

[Scott] Both... both...’

[Rushdoony] The story...

[Scott] ...both from the same view point.

[Rushdoony] Yes. There is no conflict between them and the was a very strong competitive spirit.

[Scott] At one time.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, we have the television news. Now about six months or so ago an item came over on the TV news, evening news to the effect that two men had been indicted for operating an illegal tax shelter. And I happen to know the tax shelter and all the people who were operating it and I was quite intrigued to know which of the two out of the whole crowd was indicted. So I spent at least an hour, an hour and a half turning on every news channel and every one of them read the same item out in the same words without naming the men. But what intrigued me was that the item was in the same words. And then since then I have several times checked on ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN and I find that same ... not only the same item being given on each one, but in the same sequence.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now they claim to be competing. I don't know whether they are competing in hairstyles or the appearance of the anchor lady who always looks admiringly at the anchor man or whatever. But the news is the same.

Now even Russia changes with its publications. They emphasize different things in Pravda and some of the other papers, because they have learned the hard way that otherwise nobody will even look at them.

[Rushdoony] Well, because of the present tax structure the accountant or the accounting mentality has taken over one area after another. The accounting mentality began to take over in Detroit on automobile row after World War II. And it has taken over since then in the world of the newspapers so that the accountant has created a media in which things like the real estate section are all important. And the volume of advertising, for example, in the Stockton Record is amazing. The paper comes out like that, very thick, a huge stack, mostly advertising.

[Scott] Well, I know they have food supplements and then they have... I notice advertisements now appear in the comic strip pages on Sunday or in between the comic strips on Sunday.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The comic strips have gotten political, you know. And some of them...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Some of them are sexual and filled with innuendos. The ... they are not funny particularly.

[Rushdoony] No. I read recently that there is a world of difference between the comic strips favored by those over 50 and those under 50. And most editors are bewildered by the strips that are popular and just throw up their hands in dismay.

[Scott] Is that so?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, if we go on into the role of the press in terms of governmental activity, one of the things that happened after... during World War II and after, as you recall, was the attempt by the government, for a period, to tie up the whole subject of physics, because atomic energy was supposed to be a secret. And for a while they really did practically classify the whole subject of physics. And then having applied classification in peace time for the first time in the history of the United States, you realize that before World War II there was no governmental secrets. The secrets came in during war time. But after war time the secrets were all released. Well now after World War II the war time classification of secrets never stopped because it moved into the Cold War. And since very bureaucrat had a classification stamp and the ability to use it, whole reaches of the American government’s activity became classified, to such an extent that by 1952 the organization inside the League of Nations which over monitored the freedom of the press around the world... I don’t know if it is still in existence or not, but it was one of the better elements of the League of Nations, took the United States off the free press list because it said by that time so much had been classified, the government of the United States was doing so many things that it wouldn’t tell the people about, that the people were no longer being given the information necessary by the press for a free country.

Now since then, efforts have been made to break that, but to break it from the left wing point of view. The Pentagon Papers, for instance, were not really valid secrets. What they were, were records of discussions in the Pentagon of possible courses of action in Vietnam, none of which were settled in the Pentagon. They were all settled by Lyndon Johnson and his predecessors and successors in the White House. The publication of the papers, then, was more of a publicity stunt than it was a violation of actual secrets of the United States government. But the fact is that they shouldn’t have been classified in the first place. There was no particular point.

Technically speaking we were not ever at war in Vietnam. If we had gone to war, then they would have had a right to censor and classify and also Congress would have voted it up or down.

But, of course, this is part of what you have so often brought up, the evasion of reality. Congress didn’t want to confront the reality of our policy in Vietnam, nor could anybody explain the policies. So therefore we got into this problem. So we have here a press that because of its predilection against the American tradition and its Socialism is almost a mischievous adversary of the government, but at the same time is part of the government in terms of influence, because our Congress and our White House operate in conjunction and our judiciary operate in conjunction with an agenda that the press sets. This is a unique situation. I don’t believe the world has ever seen it before.

[Rushdoony] No. I think you are right. I think especially since Reagan took office you had increasingly government by the media, partly because Reagan reacted so strongly to anything the media said. It was as though he was he was reading reviews by critics of his performance and amending his ways in terms of what the reviewers said.

[Scott] Well, the staff certainly does.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And you remember that Lyndon Johnson had three television sets in the oval office.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He used to watch the nightly news every night, all three of them.

[Rushdoony] I was interested today to read about a lecture by a man who is head of a school in another state, a state school that has no testing, no requirements, no grades, nothing. The lecture he gave at the university was viewed extensively, covered enthusiastically an ideal educational solution set forth and the sad reflection that we do not have this as yet in our area.

Now this was a rave review, you might say. But let us suppose that you had lectured on South Africa. I ... or on Abolitionism. The coverage you would have gotten would have been highly negative and critical.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] In other words, it is no longer a reporting of news in either case, the one actual, the other hypothetical, but a review, an editorial review. And this is what is wrong with the media today. Instead of reporting the news, it gives us an editorial perspective on it.

Otto, as we continue, I would like to hark back to Douglas Groothuis’ Confronting the New Age in which he speaks of the New Age thesis that everyone should create his own reality. I think as Groothuis points out in this book this is more than an organized movement. It has become these spirit of our age and people do believe they can create their own reality and live in terms of it. And the press lives under the illusion that the liberal word dream is the present and the future. And therefore anything else is treated as though it were a fantasy.

[Scott] Well, there is a lot to that. There is the argument—and it is a popular one and it has a certain element of truth—to the effect hat what people believe, exists. In the sense it does exist in the sense that people are affected, influenced by what they think is real. And, of course, the absence of contradiction which the press enjoys creates this bubble in which the journalists live. And shared by the politicians, the judges and our ruling class. The ruling class, in other words, has a ... has our press. The media exists as part of the ruling combination. The people have been exiled from consideration by our governing class and its instruments.

Now that may sound somewhat Marxist, but I don’t really mean it in the same sense, because I don’t believe that they are aware of what they are doing. They have all been educated in the same schools to the same conclusions and really the seed bed of this whole thing is in the university. The press takes its queue from the university. The lecturer that you just mentioned, for instance, is a perfect example of that. They think they discern in that lecture the latest trend in educational channels and they want to be au current. So therefore they give it a rave review.

And they hear all this business about Apartheid so they think the average American is going around muttering to himself over the injustices of Apartheid. The average American doesn’t know where South Africa is.

[Rushdoony] Well, this creating your own reality I can illustrate by something that happened to me last year. It was in Houston, Texas and I was lecturing. I gave a lecture on a subject that had no relationship to what the reporter came up and asked me about. He stopped me as I was leaving to say he wanted to ask a few questions. Would I mind taking the time? I have forgotten now what I spoke on, but it was in no way related to what he had to say. He wanted to know whether I subscribed to the theory that the Soviet Union was an evil empire, that foreign policy had to be dictated by moral considerations and so on. He made the long statement. The gist of it was: Do you view the world in terms of good and evil? And he said it contemptuously.

[Scott] Oh.

[Rushdoony] Now I had not been discussing the Soviet Union or what it was doing in the world, not even remotely, but this was what he was interested in. I obviously belonged to that realm of idiots who believe that there is such a thing as good and evil. And I just looked at him as though he were something that had crawled out from under a rock and he slunk away. But this is it. They have a view of reality that is decadent. So the press is a good example of decadence in the modern world, because it has forsaken a moral perspective and God is going to judge it.

[Scott] Well, I wouldn’t say they have forsaken the moral perspective entirely. Their moral perspective is different than the Christian perspective. They place relations between the races as the summa cum laude of all human effort. And yet their efforts to improve that situation have resulted in a series of calamitous results. The road to hell is paved with good intensions somebody said and the press certainly proves it. By attempting to create a fantasy America they have made the real America much worse than it has ever been.

[Rushdoony] Well, let me qualify what I said to buttress what I said. They do believe that the world is beyond good and evil in any objective sense. Their values are transitional, temporary. Do your own thing, just as in our schools today they boast of teaching values and having value education, but what they are teaching the students is you choose your own values. And therefore you have a radical equalitarianism, because all values and all people are the same. You cannot say one group of people here are morally superior. This church over here represents a higher moral level than the people in the jail. They have to be equal.

Now it is that type of beyond good and evil value...

[Scott] Well, in this case...

[Rushdoony] That is advocated in which the press reflects.

[Scott] In this case it is almost beneath good and evil. The press, though, has been given some unusual privileges here which they have never enjoyed anywhere else. The shield law, for instance, enables a reporter to keep his sources secret. He can print some charge against you of a terrible nature and say that his sources are secret and he is protected by law from divulging those sources.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Almost as though he were a minister or a priest who wouldn’t divulge the secrets of the confessional or a lawyer who is not to be forced into revealing the secrets of a client.

Now the shield law, of course, enables a man to invent a story, to invent a charge. And I think it is unconstitutional on the face of it, because we all have a right to face our accusers and to know precisely what they accuse us of so we can defend ourselves.

Now that particular constitutional guarantee seems to have dropped out of sight. Congress doesn’t know, never heard of such a thing, because we are now using raw FBI files. Do you know hat a raw FBI file is?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It contains any allegation that anybody made without revealing the source.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is the same as the shield law, only the FBI has it.

Now, they had three FBI investigations of former Senator Tower. Don’t you suppose that when his enemies knew that the FBI was coming around for the second time that they thought about a few new things to say? Especially since they knew that they would be protected? Can’t you imagine the third time around the size of the that file, because I understand that he had many personal enemies for many different reasons?

Well, the press is in this position. The press is in an extra... a position of extra territorial authority, you might say. It can ruin you and you have no legal recourse. It can elevate you for any reason that it chooses. It can take the most unsuitable individual and make him famous and keep him famous.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I think I said before that People magazine doesn’t even portray people. It portrays monsters of some sort. And it is almost as though the press really delights in putting it in our eye, in saying we are going not take the most obscene individual you have ever heard of and we are going to make him famous. And we are going to at the same time ignore true talent, real positions, actual work.

I had this discussion with a journalist who was bureau chief for the Washington Post and the New York Times in Vietnam over Tet. And I can’t think of his name off hand, but he is the one who wrote the big book about the Tet offensive in which later, later, much later he sat down and investigated how the press handled the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War and proved that they had misreported as a defeat one of our greatest military victories. But, he said, nobody intended it that way. We just happened to come out the same door by accident.

And I said, “Well, the coverage that you guys gave our forces in Vietnam was consistently negative. How is that?”

He said, “Well, look at ... look at Chesty Westmoreland.” He said, “He was a jock. He was a big handsome guy, broad shouldered, lots of ribbons and great stars on his shoulders.” Then he said, “Look at the average journalist.” He said, “We... we weren’t in the top of the class. We weren’t jocks. We wore glasses. We weren’t good with the girls.” He said, “We would take a look at somebody like Chesty Westmoreland,” and he said, “you couldn’t help but want to bring him down.”

And I was amazed that he said it. He was so unselfconscious about his dirty little envies. He didn’t care at all what it did to the country.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So we are really talking about ignorance in power.

[Rushdoony] Sin in power.

[Scott] Same thing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] As... well, no it isn’t. Sin is worse. It is sin in power.

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And it does not see itself as responsible to any higher power.

[Scott] None. That is the tragedy, because, of course, it is.

[Rushdoony] There is no... Yes. There is no fear of God in their eyes, the Bible says.

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] Well, I think one of the things we can be grateful for is that in recent years an alternate press has arisen. Newsletters and periodicals of all kinds dealing with the political, the economic and the religious scene. In fact, a major part of the reading of the American people today is becoming precisely this alternate media.

Now just think for example, of the number of things you receive apart from the major media.

[Scott] Oh, a whole ... I ... I can’t count them.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And this is true of people across country.

[Scott] Well, we don’t have... we have been blocked from the major platforms.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] There is no religious coverage. On Saturday there is a little sort of smattering of a few religious articles on Saturdays on one page in most of the metropolitan papers, maybe three articles. That is the great concession to tens of millions of people. And I wait for the day when Christian multi millionaires—and we have them—will take the daring step of buying a newspaper or doing something with the radio and television stations that they already have beyond the Christian circle.

[Rushdoony] Yes. One such man bought an entire radio network and was so timid that all the Christians and conservatives got kicked out in no time at all.

[Scott] Oh, I know that. I know the network.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I bought a book recently, or picked on up called The Seven Deadly Sins and I was interested in what the man might have to say. And the writer was a pastor and all the examples came from his congregation and himself and the Bible. And I thought ,well, the is a big world here that you are ignoring. It is a very small, slender book. And I would think the seven deadly sins would go for an encyclopedia size anyway.

[Rushdoony] Well, maybe he and his congregation are exceptionally holy.

[Scott] But we have to break out of this community group thinking. We have to look at the larger world.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] There is...

[Rushdoony] Well....

[Scott] There has been a tremendous advance where church bulletins before were only on the church meetings and now we have church publications that discuss abortion across these country and what is good... being done about it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And many other issues

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You are quite right about that.

[Rushdoony] Ten, 15 years ago some churches and ministerial associations would forbid any discussion of abortion. It was regarded as a social gospel. Now it is increasingly rare to find any such groups, because events are pushing them into the arena. They have got to fight.

[Scott] Ok. What has happened here somewhere along the line is that the Christian community erected what amounted to intellectual monasteries, nunneries...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...and retreats. And we have to get out of that. That is why I said a newspaper and also the radio and television stations have to start competing on world coverage in extra Christian areas as well as the Christian. After all, we are surrounded by tens of millions of people. And I would say that charity is something that is not restricted to food and shelter and clothing and money. Charity means helping people out of a bog of ignorance.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Helping their lives in a larger sense is a charitable undertaking which is our duty. Instruction, education, information, all of this comes under the heading, I think, of charity.

[Rushdoony] A number of other things are happening besides this alternate press, all in newsletters and periodicals and publications. You have video cassettes.

[Scott] Yes. They are a wonderful instrument.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And some of the people were not even noticed by the press are getting tens of thousands of video cassettes sold from coast to coast and these circulating from hand to hand to promote a particular bit of information.

Then you have cassettes and it is becoming increasingly common place for commuters in cities to listen to cassettes.

[Scott] Well, this is a cassette.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And there will be a lot of people listening, driving to and from work.

Then you have the fact that some people are now using video tapes to duplicate newsletters so that they are switching from the newsletter format to an exclusively cassette format or a video cassette, because they find that so many people will listen who will not read. So in a variety of ways information is getting out such as has never been the case before.

[Scott] Yeah, it is an end run around the media.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because most Americans hold the media in utmost contempt. They actually hate the journalists both on television and in print.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The journalists are blissfully unaware of this.

[Rushdoony] Well, you were at the monetary conference last week to speak.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And you remarked when you came back about the fact that it was not only professors and economists this time. There were many men in investments, in banking and so on. And all these men were aware of the basic issues. And I am sure that they have gotten it from the economic reports and newsletters.

[Scott] No question.

[Rushdoony] So that you have...

[Scott] They certainly don't get it from the press.

[Rushdoony] Oh, no.

[Scott] I mean, you know television news gives business the once over lightly, not even that much.

[Rushdoony] Well, just the Christian men who are producing economic reports and are on our mailing list is a considerable one.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] And this is just one aspect of a vast field now so that the United States is being economically educated apart from the established media. Religiously educated, politically educated in one sphere after another is receiving a separate kind of training. And now things have been happening in recent years in other spheres as well.

It is interesting to see the changing taste in art. Art periodicals are beginning to shift from the avant-garde garbage to a more traditional concept of art. And I think what you have noted about the cowboy museum of art and the art sales there is worth commenting about it is so important.

[Scott] Well, that was several years back in the cowboy museum in Tulsa... in Oklahoma City. And once or twice a year they have an auction of representational art by artists who are drawing mountains and snowscapes and cowboys and cattle and trees and so forth. And, incidentally, wonderfully, technically done. And there was a collection of different paintings in different parts of the museum and a bunch of very well dressed people attended the auction and there was an each... in front of each group of paintings was a man in a business suit with whom I first thought was the artist, but it wasn’t. It was the agent. And they would bid. The people would bid for these paintings and they went into the tens of thousands of dollars. There was an enormous amount of art sold, several million dollars worth in a few hours.

Now the New York galleries don’t do this.

[Rushdoony] No. And your avant-garde art has a market only with corporations who are trying to please the avant-garde and with some of the avant-garde museums.

[Scott] Well, yes. The corporation only listens to professors. The professors only listen to the avant-garde. It is another closed little circle. And, of course, when it comes to matters intellectual or cultural businessmen are timid and they want to go by what has been certified respectable. They wouldn’t dream of using their own ideas or their opinions.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That is too bad.

[Rushdoony] Well, there is still another area of the media that we haven’t covered, the computer. Computer networks are beginning to appear and the result is that people are passing information back and forth across country, reporting on local happenings of interest to the kind of audience they have. So you have the beginnings of a very important network there.

[Scott] Well, all of this takes more time than people realize. I discovered when I was an editor and it was in some ways dispiriting that it would take several years for a seminal article to really take effect in the audience. I was astonished at how long it took. And yet it sank deep and it would emerge as an important issue.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now these various changes, the newsletters, the computers, the fax machines and the cassettes, audio and video have just really hit. They have just really emerged.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In the last few years. It is going to take 10 or more years, I think of the full impact to occur, but it is going to be tremendous.

[Rushdoony] I think in time the fax machine will be as common in households as the telephone.

[Scott] Oh, I am sure of it.

[Rushdoony] And it will create a revolution in the sphere of information.

I think we are on the brink of a major revolution that is going to leave the existing press high and dry unless they change their ways.

[Scott] Well, like cable is leaving the networks. The networks are getting more and more desperate. Less and less people are looking at them. Who can stand to have 15 ads in order to have 12 seconds or program?

[Rushdoony] Well, the newspapers have decreased in number and I think they will continue to decrease unless they mend their ways. I know that it was rare to find a family that did not subscribe to at least one newspaper in the 20s and 30s.

[Scott] Oh, yes. I mean, daddy had to have the evening newspaper.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That was for sure.

[Rushdoony] Now a great many families don’t bother with the newspaper, might look at the television news, but are more and more indifferent to the established media.

[Scott] Well, you have to wade through an awful lot of feature stuff and the news is doctored. All the news that is fit to print really means all the news we want you to know.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

Well, our time is about up. Let’s hope about 10 or 15 years from now, Otto, we can do a similar one and report on the revolution that has taken place and how Christians are at the heart of it.

[Scott] Well I will say to you what Churchill said to the young painter. He said he hoped he could do it again in 10 years or so. Churchill said, “Well, why not? You look pretty healthy.”

[Rushdoony] Very good. Well, thank you all for listening.

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.