From the Easy Chair

The Media

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 115-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CH157

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CH157, The Media, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 267, June 9, 1992.

This evening Otto Scott, Douglas Murray and I are going to discuss the media. The term the media covers a great deal of territory and it certainly is inclusive of things like the Chalcedon Report, but we are going to confine ourselves basically to the national media, things with a national scope and what they are doing that indicates a dereliction on their part. And I am going to ask Otto Scott to give an introduction to the subject.

[ Scott ] Thank you, Rush. I think the most arresting examples of the national media in recent weeks has been its coverage and reaction to the riots in Los Angeles. For the first time in my recollection—and I became acquainted with the newspaper business when I was a boy many years ago and was involved in it for many years later on—for the first time in my recollection the reaction of all the press to a single event was the same. Pravda never commanded such unanimity under the Soviets. The analysis, the blame, the type of coverage, the angle of the story as editors would say was the same all the way from coast to coast. And the odd part about the coverage was that it is totally different from the reaction of the average person. The average person was horrified at the violence, at the destruction of innocent people, at the beatings, at the arson and all the rest of it. And the press went out of its way to say that this was not the result of the rioters, but the result of lack of concern for the people in the inner cities with an emphasis upon the black people and the total indifference to what happened to the Korean merchants and to the whites and to the others involved.

Now do we have a free press that speaks with one voice and one voice only? It amounts to the fact that the press has become politically correct, political correctness has moved from the universities into the media and into the government. And that means that the rest of us are silently being told or tacitly told that there is only one view point to be allowed and that any contradiction is going to lead to punishment by the social order. Now I think this is a very sinister turn in the road, because a public that has had its throat cut can no longer speak and that is what we are moving into.

[ Rushdoony ] I think, Otto, it would be worthwhile at this point to discuss the film footage of which less than a minute and a half was shown to the exclusion of other materials and what the jury saw when those films were blown up.

[ Scott ] Well they showed... they edited the tape, the video tape down to 87 seconds. They edited out the part where Mr. King. Is that is name?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, Rodney King.

[ Scott ] Rodney King lunged at the police and was hit with one of these electric instruments....

[ Rushdoony ] Prods.

[ Scott ] Prods... went to his knees, got up again and lunged again and was hit with a prod again and got up again. And the press then moved in and apparently they have a technique where they swing their batons to merely graze and not to hit the individual, but if he raises up from the ground he feels and he will be hit. And the idea is to keep him prone until they can handcuff him and get control. All that was shown during the trial to the jury frame by frame by frame by frame. And they realized that if those blows had actually hit him, he would have been inured to the point where he would still be in the hospital. It was a bluff. It was a technique. That has never been explained to the general public.

Now the essence of propaganda is to tell part of the truth. A real good propaganda technique—and I remember this from my days in public relations—is always to stick to the facts, but not all of the facts. So if you only give part of the facts you are not lying, but you do mislead and this, of course, is what our press is doing. Our press is sitting upon items that they do not want us to know and showing us only items that they can prove which they want us to believe in a certain way. We are, in other words, being manipulated by the media whose duty really is to report us and not to direct us.

[ Rushdoony ] Douglas, would you like to comment on the subject?

[ Murray ] Well, the common denominator of unanimity in the press is the question in my mind. How does this arise? There simply... there can’t be a conspiracy, because these people don’t all talk to each other. The only place they could have developed this attitude of ... of a similar line of thinking is from their education. And so it is really a ... a result, a direct result of the education that they have received in ... in liberal institutions by Marxist oriented professors. And they have now got an army in the press which is leading the charge in this culture war.

[ Scott ] Well, the press is like every other industry. Every industry has its patterns and fashions and you... you are correct when you say that it comes from the education. They come out of schools of journalism now are really schools of communications. They don’t use the term journalism, but communication across the board. They all come out with the same orientation. They go into the city room ... the city room or the studio or whatever and everyone there has had the same education and agreed on the same central points. If, for instance, you filed a story or I filed a story on the L A riots that took a different tact, it wouldn’t get printed, but it would lose you your job, because you can’t get out of step. You know, as well as I do, we all do, that we are witnessing a phenomenon among the younger people of the United States. They are politically correct and anyone who doesn’t agree is a Fascist or a monster or an imbecile. In any event it is enough to wash you out. And, of course, the press is controlled in a managerial sense by the editors and the producers of TV shows and radio shows.

Now the... the second echelon up is older than the reporter on the front line. The second echelon up is in that ... in between their 40s and their 50s. This is the 60s generation. And we are seeing the results now of an entire generation of indoctrination. I would never have believed it if I hadn't seen it, but I never before realized the full force of fashion in intellectual positions.

[ Rushdoony ] I think it is worth noting that no one has a right to expect the media to be impartial. That is impossible. They are going to represent a position just as the Chalcedon Report represents a position. The requirement is that whatever your point of view or your position that you be honest, that you do to lie, distort or misrepresent.

To give an example of this kind of this, when Vice President Quayle spoke about the television show Murphy Brown and the immoral values it conveyed, how it was really an implicit attack on family values, on biblical standards, the media at once acted as though Vice President Quayle had attacked the citadels of freedom, had denied freedom of expression, freedom of speech and so on. They acted as though he had talked like an idiot. But the ironic fact is that apparently Quayle got the idea from an article in the Washington Post by a very liberal woman. And he said substantially what she did. But she was not attacked. She had the right political stance. She was politically correct. So she could say it, but Quayle could not say the same things without a savage blistering attack on him.

[ Murray ] You know, you hear the real irony of that situation? Shortly after that confrontation took place the network started charging an additional 100,000 dollars a minute more for adds on the Murphy Brown TV program.

[ Scott ] So it is wonderful publicity for the program.

[ Murray ] It certainly was.

[ Scott ] And it reminds me of the accusation that chastity is now considered a religious position.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] We have two things operating then. We have not only political correctness, but we political correctness which is only acceptable from certain viewpoint by certain people. In effect, the opinions of those who differ with the politically correct crowd have been ruled out of order. Now, of course, what this does to freedom of speech is something new all know. Everyone in the United States knows that we do not have freedom of speech. We are free to speak to an extent, but we are also free to be punished for using the freedom of speech.

And so it is very similar to the recent election in South Africa. In South Africa the corporations sent letters to their employees saying those who voted against the new black government to come would lose their jobs. The ballots were not open. The balloting was ... the balloting was not secret. It was open. The ballots were numbered so that a record could be kept of who voted how. Now this is very similar to some of the developments that have take place here. Those who contributed to David Duke, for instance, received death threats because their name and addresses were printed in the newspapers. They were obtainable from the election commission. Those who voted for Pat Buchanan may find themselves in trouble in times to come. Those people on the jury in the L A case received death threats and even before this there was a closing down of freedom of speech and discussion in the United States on a variety of topics to take certain positions on certain issues was to label yourself as prejudiced against certain groups, because those groups might favor a certain position.

[ Murray ] Let me elaborate just a little bit on the distortion that is taking place that you touched on in current events that enhances the media’s point of view. The Washington Times in March wrote a story about the National Park Service came out and admitted that its official crowd counts for the women’s rights rally was really only 250,000 and not the 500,000 reported by three news media or the 750,000 that were claimed by the organizers, deliberate distortion to make it look larger than it really was.

Then on the Dan Rather’s CBS news there was a congressional candidate, Michael Bailey of Indiana, who opposes abortion and he had ads during the election which showed actual aborted fetus and the ... they put this blurring technique of censoring the content of the picture. And what is the point of showing the picture if you are going to eliminate the ... the true content of the picture? So they have become much more overt in their censorship about what they want people to see and what they don’t want them to see.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, have discussed the newspapers and not directly television and television has become a monster because it is the baby sitter for the younger generation to a great extent. And the 60s generation the student rioters were brought up on television and admittedly influenced by it, imitated it, the hippie style was picked up from old silent pictures and 30s pictures of revolutionary mobs and the French Revolution, Tale of Two Cities and that sort of thing so that I think it was Oscar Wilde who made the statement—not a very good source—but he said, I believe that nature imitates art. And we could say life imitates art, because that is what is happening. We have an image created by the media, by films and television and the world at large imitating it. It has been demonstrated that anything touted on television is very quickly picked up by the younger generation. They are profoundly influenced by it. Their language, their speech is colored by what they hear on television and in the films.

[ Murray ] I often think that the producers of television go out in the public and listen for the words that they have injected into some of the TV scripts just to find out how effective they are. I think that has become their {?} gold mine, their method of determining how effective they are at communicating these ideas.

[ Scott ] Well, Ben Stein, Junior, wrote a book once called The View from Sunset Boulevard.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... in which he said that almost all of these scripts are produced by about 100 writers almost all of whom come from the same area in Manhattan.

[ Rushdoony ] I talked to a script writer once and this was a good many years back, 15, perhaps. And I said, rather facetiously, “These scripts look as... or read as though pot heads produced them.”

And he said, “That is no joke. It is literally true.”

[ Scott ] Pot and cocaine.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And also a view which is antithetical to the fact of American life in which Fascism lives in all the small towns of America and various and sundry other delusions. But, nevertheless, if they are promoted in one form or another across the country, they have the same effect upon young people today as our literature had in our youth.

[ Murray ] Edgar Allen Poe revisited.

[ Scott ] Well, it is worse than that. When you are young you want to catch up with the world. You want to find out what the world is doing and you want to catch up with the parade. I used to read fiction in order to find out about society when fiction was relatively free. It wasn’t completely free. It wasn’t explicitly sexual as it is today, but, on the other hand the implications were... were clear enough and the meaning was clear enough. But now we have fiction which is totally at odds with the facts of American life, completely different than anything we actually live. Minorities are misrepresented as a matte of course and in this case they are given spurious virtues. They are never guilty of crimes or prejudice. Everything is loaded upon white middle class individuals and especially white Christians and white males.

So we have here a false literature and a false press and therefore young people have a false idea of reality. And in the long run, this is going to cause more trouble than our government or the politically correct people can believe.

[ Murray ] Well, I think it is what contributed to this current malaise in the United States today is... you know, what started out as a vague discontent is something that is wrong has become much more intensified and because of this relentless daily outpouring of negativity toward Christian values.

[ Scott ] And toward every other value. The ... it is almost like being nagged. If you are nagged 24 hours a day, if you have somebody sitting on your shoulder to tell you what you did wrong, watch out. Some... some thing is going to happen to you. You are not eating right. You are not living right. You are not thinking right. You eventually go crazy. I have never seen young people. I never expected to see young people going around with somber faces. Do you remember when youth was a time of laughter and joy and singing? I remember singing at night where you actually used to sing on the bus traveling at night...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...everybody would break into song. And we would sing the old songs that we sang in school. It has been years since I have heard anybody sing.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, a few years ago, Otto, I read something in a periodical which made reference to the two of us. And it cited the fact that Christians are ... the word was not used, but basically yahoos with no appreciation for art. And their justification for using us to illustrate that was that we gave no evidence of reading modern novels. And I sat down and wrote to the person and I said, “I suspect we both have a far more extensive knowledge of novels and literature up until fairly recent years than, perhaps, some professors.” But I said, “I gave up reading the modern novel when I began to realize that it was the equivalent to jumping into a cesspool.” And I said, “Otto Scott himself used to be a short story writer and he has abandoned fiction because fiction has become something that is totally alien to the world around us. It constructs an artificial world that resembles a cesspool more than ordinary life.”

I never got an answer back.

[ Scott ] No. I am not surprised.

[ Murray ] The result is that people are killing themselves trying to imitate art.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I wish the writers would do it.

[ Scott ] Well, we have the publishers to thank. I had the strangest reaction the last time I had a New York copy editor ... I remember on the James book when I described his homosexual proclivities as a vice and the little girl from Swarthmore who was doing the copy editing when she flagged that particular sentence said some people don’t agree that it is a vice. Do you really want to keep this in?

And I wrote back, “It is a vice to me and I am the author.” And it stayed in.

But I am not sure that I could have had that book published today at all.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, around 1950 I attended a meeting of a great many important people, men in the sciences, the arts, industry, really major figures, Nobel prize winning scientists and so on. And I was the youngest and the most out of place, so to speak, in that I had hardly anything not my name except one article that had been published from coast to coast, reprinted hundreds of thousands of times and written into the Congressional Record. I was very interested at that meeting that one person stated that a novel had been returned by the publisher with suggestions for making it acceptable for publication. And he cited the suggestions. They were really to sexualize as much as he could. And he indicated he was not going to bother with that particular publisher.

Now that early that trend was in effect.

[ Scott ] Well, on almost most of our national magazines they do not like a completed article. And this goes back 25 years. They did not like to receive a finished article. What they wanted was an outline of an article which you will suggest. And then they would change the outline to have it slant the way the magazine felt was correct. If you didn’t go along with that, they would throw the suggestion out and you were not commissioned.

Recently I sent and I was requested to send an article to a conservative magazine and out of kindness toward the people I won’t tell you the name of the magazine. But the editor wrote and suggested that I write something about business because, he said, and I quote, “That is something you understand.”

And I wrote the article about business and conservatives in which I castigated both for their indifference to one another. I received in due course a letter from an associate editor saying that the entire of a business issue had been dropped and that they didn’t know when my article would appear if ever and suggested that I place it somewhere else in case I didn’t want to wait forever.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the disposition now is such that I really have not for years submitted a ... an article to any magazine. And I used to have some published from time to time. I had not problem getting them published a good many years ago. But I gave up on it. The rigidity that has set in and the feeling that the writer had only one duty, namely to express what the editor wanted.

[ Scott ] That is where... very well said. That is what it amounts to. What the editor would have written if the editor could have written.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. This is really not the place for this, but I can’t resist it. I read a definition of a critic recently that was ... it went, thus: A critic is a eunuch at a gang bang who can only admire the performance of other eunuchs.

[ Scott ] Oh, great.

[ Rushdoony ] And the literary world is now full of eunuchs.

[ Scott ] Well, cowards.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Grown cowards. You mentioned TV just in passing and I meant to bring up the fact that their... every stick which mentions even tangentially homosexuality is submitted to a group of homosexuals for their approval...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... before it appears on television. Now no group of Christians are allowed that privilege.

[ Rushdoony ] No. Well, this is a very important subject because it affects every one of us. We are all surrounded by the media. We find it at our front door or our mailbox, in our house, radio and television and it is in most places, although not in this county in the form of films. We are one of those counties without a single movie theater. We are barbarians, I guess.

[ Scott ] We have video ... the shop.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, we do have some, but they are going down hill. They are not doing too well now. Well...

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] ... I think the media is not only destroying the country, but it is destroying itself. All one has to do is look at the fact that the newspapers are declining with great rapidity.

Did you know, by the way, that a couple of the papers in San Diego merged?

[ Scott ] Yes. I knew them. Jerry Warner fell out enough and not too unhappy about that, because he fired me from my book column because I wrote about the Bible during the Christmas season and he said, “That is the last straw.” So I was happy to see him retire.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, you know, the new paper is continuing to receive the Chalcedon Report which one of the old papers received.

[ Scott ] Oh, I didn’t know that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Oh, I am happy to hear that.

[ Rushdoony ] So your ...

[ Scott ] I have outlasted him.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. You have outlasted them. And they are reading you every month.

[ Murray ] You should have pointed out to them that people have been writing reviews on the Bible for centuries.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, part of the newspaper problem is the decline in literacy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] In the... the metropolitan populous with its influx of foreigners who don't even put out papers of their own with the exception of the Spanish community. I don’t know whether the oriental community is putting out its own papers or not.

[ Rushdoony ] In San Francisco...’

[ Scott ] In San Francisco... in Chinatown they always have.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I believe. But at any rate you have here a metropolitan populous which does not buy and believe the newspapers. This is affecting the New York Times which is now making all its money from the small country newspapers that it has picked up. The Times itself does ... it breaks even. It... it... on a good year. The L A Times has had to go farther and farther into the suburbs in order to maintain readership. The Washington Post is in a unique position because there is a higher level of literacy among the government employees in Washington, DC. But across the board people are not buying afternoon newspapers. They are turning in, instead, on the six o'clock news. And they get the stock exchange reports on the six o'clock news. But they don’t get the paper for the market reports or anything of the sort.

And the other thing is that they all sound the same. You are not going to get any news of any real importance in your own locality from your local paper, because it is afraid to offend the powers that be. All their scandals are in some other part of the country.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, in the 1930s there were four daily papers in San Francisco. The are two now, the Chronicle and the Examiner and they have a combined Sunday edition. The Old Call and The News are gone. And those papers had a tremendous circulation. It was not unusual for people to get two and three papers because the difference was substantial.

[ Scott ] The difference in coverage.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I... I was thinking about that when you are talking about the difference in the feminine parade, how many there were. Well, every different newspaper used to have a different number that was collected of the crowd. A Republican paper always gave a small crowd at a Democrat meeting and vice versa. And the diversity was... was interesting. I remember when New York had six daily papers, New York City.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. There are only two now aren’t there?

[ Scott ] Well, that is... see, there is The Post and the New York Times and I can’t think of any other.

[ Rushdoony ] The Daily News?

[ Scott ] No, the... yes and the Daily News. The Daily News is hanging on by its finger nails.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] The San Francisco News was... was my first employer. And I remember the masthead on the paper, the Scripps Howard paper and it used to say, “Give the people light and they will find their own way.” Nowadays it is the mushroom point of view. Give the people manure and keep them in the dark.

[ Scott ] That is very good. I met Roy Howard once, you know. I was called in to be disciplined and ... because years ago I had written a parody of Roy Howard and the Communist Manifesto.

[ Murray ] I can’t imagine you being disciplined.

[ Scott ] No. I was and I won’t go into all the details, but when I walked into... I remember when I was called in and his secretary said, “Are you Scott?” And I said, “Yes.” And she said, “You are in trouble.”

The was a great feeling and he had iron grey hair and a salt and pepper mustache and he was wearing a tweed shirt with a tweed bow tie and tweed trousers all made of the same bolt of cloth and I had never seen that {?}. And it took my breath away. And I... I looked around for the jacket. And there was one. The same bolt of cloth hanging on a clothes tree. And at any rate I won’t go into why I was disciplined. There was good reason for it, I assure you. But when I left I said, “Does he always dress like that?” And they said, “Yes.” I said, “How come?” They said, “Oh, that was the style amongst skilled working men in World War I and he liked it and he has always kept it.”

He owned United Press.

[ Murray ] You stand next to the drapes and disappear.

[ Scott ] Yes, he could. Yes, he could. But there was an awful lot of room for diversity of expression. The editors did not tell you the slant. They told you to cover the story and they printed more or less what you brought back. They didn’t change it fundamentally. They didn’t print it always in its entirety, but they kept the substance. Now they tell the reporter the angle and if he brings in something that they don’t think is the proper angle it is not printed. And if he does it too often he won’t stay. It is like crossing a professor.

[ Murray ] Well, I think this... I am just wondering a moment ago what that genesis is on this term political correctness. Does anybody know where it originated from?

[ Scott ] No. I think it was originated really as a satiric observation. Somebody—and nobody knows who—observed the synonymous opinions that were being expressed and called them politically correct. And every so often you will see a letter defending them because they are saying, “What would you to expect us to do, to encourage Fascism, to encourage prejudice, to encourage bigotry?” And the... the I... the central idea is that people should not be free to say the wrong things, lest it offend.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. There are people who have publicly expressed the opinion that Rush Limbaugh should be silenced. He should not be allowed to speak. And they accuse him of being a Fascist.

[ Scott ] Well, do you remember in 1968 when the U N debate was going on, just before the six day war? We listened to it in New York every day. And they were fascinating debates. There was an uproar at one point when the ambassador from Israel spoke about the six million Jews which were killed in World War II. He was followed by a train of other ambassadors raging about the fact that their deaths were not mentioned. Well, then the war erupted and if you recall Israel jumped the gun. And at the end of that one week of war the U N went off the air and never came back again. No debates from the U N have ever been broadcast since 1968 because it was charged that they had provided a platform for anti Semitism.

[ Murray ] When was ... a method, incidentally, for countering that people that hurl this epithet of Fascism at him is defined Fascism. And he finds very few people that use the word as an epithet that know what Fascism is.

[ Scott ] They confuse it with Racism. They ... let’s say it was Racism, but they consider it only Racism. They don’t see it as a method of governance or an economics.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Fascism came from Italy and Mussolini was definitely not racist. He went along with Hitler because as a partner he was pushed into it and as a subordinate partner he had lost his freedom.

[ Scott ] Hitler always credited Mussolini with investing the system, which, I think, is not quite true. Mussolini was more of a scholar and more organized. He was a newspaper editor, if you recall before the war at a time when that required considerable literacy. And it was really the old Roman state.

[ Rushdoony ] It was... and a device whereby Mussolini was going to make Socialism palatable to the masses by retaining the façade of freedom while taking away the substance of freedom of private property, of everything.

[ Scott ] We are close to it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. We are a Fascist power now because we have a façade of freedom. We have a vote. We have our name on the title deed to properties. Industry is supposedly owned by shareholders, but at every point the state totally controls everything. And that is Fascism.

[ Scott ] Through regulatory agencies.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And the media is interesting because the media is the only area which so far can say what it chooses, built it chooses to say what suits the government. And I think that is very significant.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Well, how about remedies? You know, there has been some attempts to remedy this lock that the media has on this... what really is a mind control situation to this political correctness I often think is a term... kind of a laundered term that the liberal press has agreed upon for mass mind control. It is a more palatable term that they can use to describe mass mind control. But there has been some attempts.... Jessie Helms suggested buying the media outlets as a means of ... of changing them. Don Wildman of American Family Association is using the boycott. But I don’t think either one of these methods either one or both will achieve the desired result over the long haul. I think that the ... you have got to get your new from as many sources as possible.

[ Scott ] Well, the general attitude of conservatives and Christians is to deplore what the media does without investing in the media. The easiest ways to get into the act would be to get into the advertising business, because if the advertising business that supports the media, not the readers. And that is the reason that the media can pay no attention to what the readers think.

I have never been able to dissuade either Christians or conservatives or conservative Christians to get into the advertising business. They don’t understand that the advertising business is what supports the media. You cannot change the media without withdrawing or increasing its advertising. The left wing advertising agencies starve their enemies and feed their friends. That is very simple.

[ Murray ] Why do you think it is at a time when people are being taxed virtually half their income, they work almost six months out of the year now, five and half months out of the year. The government is bankrupt. They can’t pay their bills on demand. They need their ... they are staying up night and day looking for more revenue. Why haven’t they taxed advertising?

[ Scott ] Because advertising created the media which creates political offices. It... it... up until now it has been considered the only vehicle by which you can get office or stay in office. Now there is on reason in the world why advertising, the only industry in the country that is untaxed, should continue this way. It is an enormous industry with all kinds of money. If it buys a truck, if an advertising ... if... if... it just doesn’t pay the same taxes.

[ Rushdoony ] I think one of the mistakes, too, on the part of those who are conservatives or Christians is that when they confront this problem they want to start at the top. They went to go in and buy something big and have a major impact on the country. And it doesn't work. It doesn’t work.

[ Scott ] Nothing works from the top.

[ Rushdoony ] No. And I have seen efforts like this in one area after another for the last 50 years. And a great many people of means have thrown millions down the drain in this top down approach.

Then another factor, we have a wide open market if we are ready to use it, I we are ready to pay for it. For example, John Upton of our staff has a list of 81 television stations that are hungry for programming. They don’t have anything. They just have to use what they can get in the way of old reruns. And they would welcome something.

Now John, for 3500 to 5000 can produce one half hour segment that these people can use. They are begging him for it, but nobody is interested in funding it. And yet if there are 81 stations there are 200 if one really worked at it where you could feed in material and these people, they are in major metropolitan areas. They are in not so metropolitan areas. They are from coast to coast. And they are dependent on the networks and they don’t like it, but no one will produce material for them.

[ Scott ] Well, the problem is that you... a lot of people could put up the 5000, but they would immediately tell John how to do it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The world is filled with editors. I can tell you, as a writer...’

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... that there is many more editors than there are writers.

[ Murray ] Do you remember what Jimmy Durante said?

[ Scott ] Everyone wants to get into the act.

[ Murray ] Exactly.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, what is happening from the bottom up is that whereas 50 years ago the mini media did not exist, it is now everywhere from coast to coast.

[ Scott ] Well, look at the newsletters. They are... they are the equivalent of our {?}.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. In the field of Christian education alone, the home schoolers periodicals, the Christian school periodicals, there are many of them from coast to coast in a state or in a region and they supply their readers with a tremendous amount of specialized knowledge in their field and how to fight the state in their field and so on.

You have, of course, a number of economic reports, something that did not exist not too many years ago and the are now very, very numerous. I have no how idea how many there are.

[ Scott ] Thousands.

[ Rushdoony ] Thousands of them and they are doing well. Then you have the political reports, some tremendously important ones and very, very influential, that are to be found all over the country.

[ Scott ] There is {?}. I am sorry to interrupt.

[ Rushdoony ] That is all right.

[ Scott ] I was talking to Don Mc Ilveny today and he said that he has a relatively small circulation in Utah, maybe 500. And yet he said thousands of people read his reports in Utah because the subscribers duplicate them by the hundreds and redistribute them. So he estimates his actual readership at several times...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. That is true of all of them. People will reproduce an article in the Chalcedon Report and circulate a few hundred copies.

[ Scott ] Don’t forget word of mouth.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] In my period on Madison Avenue we estimated word of mouth as the best of all vehicles. Information can be carried across this country as quickly as the telephone. And something that is said or written which strikes a nerve is repeated over night all across the country.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I recall some years ago a very amusing incident that occurred somewhere in my travels in the South and it was a delightful story. Within days it was being repeated from coast to coast.

[ Scott ] People were telling you.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I am sure.

[ Rushdoony ] And I believe it appeared in the Reader’s Digest or someplace else.

[ Scott ] With some other name on it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And it actually began in a frack. And it swept the country because it caught the fancy of people.

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Rushdoony ] And whenever there has been a humorous story, for example, about the Kennedys after the episode in Florida there were stories told in Washington, DC that were being repeated in California within a day.

[ Scott ] Sure. Oh, it happened to me once with the silent majority. I was astonished at the way that...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... and then I read Renora Ephrain had introduced it.

[ Murray ] One of the problems with people accepting the idea that reform is going to come from the bottom is that inevitably that takes a long time and the media has seen to it that people’s perception of how long it takes to solve a problem should be very short. There is the now society.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] The now generation, now society. And people are looking for quick fixes. They are looking for aspirin tablets for their headache. And it is not that simple. If it took two, three generations for things to get the way they are, it is logical to assume that it is going to take two or three generations to wind them back the other way.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Murray ] People are not willing to accept that.

[ Scott ] It won’t wind back the other way. What they are more apt to do is to crack. It is almost something like the unexpected nature of the presidential campaign. The reason that most large corporations gave up computer projections is that there was no way to put into the program the unexpected events which distorts everything. Perot in this instance turns out to have been an unexpected event.

Now I am sure there are people behind Perot. I have come to the conclusion that Mc Ilveny has a very good point on that score. But they cannot program, neither Mr. Perot nor anyone else can program the effect of rendering both the major parties {?}. This is going to have a fall out which is going to go beyond Perot even if he is elected, because once you knock Humpty Dumpty off the wall you can’t really put him back together. We are going into a new area. The same thing, in my opinion, is true of the media. The media suddenly exposed itself in its coverage of the L A riots and it lost a lot. It lost its credibility.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes and things happen so rapidly nowadays in the way of new developments. For example, the fax machine is revolutionizing...

[ Scott ] Mail.

[ Rushdoony ] America. It is making it possible for people to communicate in a very rapid way. It is cutting into the mail service and it is making it possible for people to transmit instant information to keep people all over the world.

I had someone in Europe today tell me, “Well, I will fax some matters to you as soon as I have them ready.”

[ Scott ] Sure.

[ Murray ] You know, that the fax machine was available in World War II? One of my first jobs in electronics was to repair fax machines in the business district and financial district in San Francisco that had been installed during World War II. But because we were unable to send data over long distance lines it never achieved the importance that it has today in the business community.

[ Scott ] I didn’t know that.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think we are going to see some dramatic developments in the days ahead.

[ Scott ] I do, too. And I don’t think they are predictable.

[ Rushdoony ] No. I know one that was described to me a few years back, something that is being worked on is the equipment whereby a book can be typeset and then run off and bound as a continuous operation.

[ Scott ] Well, I know it can be scanned and turned into a... a program, a computer program in a matter of an hour or so.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, this would enable the publisher to run off only a given number of copies and then to do it again at the right time.

I think we are going to see a breakdown of the giants in the media and their replacement by some new approaches.

[ Scott ] Well, I do, too. And if you recall years ago I compared this to Gutenberg’s...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...introduction of printing. So far it is in its pioneering stages, but let us assume that Perot is elected or not elected. It doesn’t make any difference. If it goes into the House and the House, being Democratic will give the nod to Mr. Clinton. These fax machines and newsletters and so forth will probably expand geometrically in protest.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And there will be an argument against keeping the electoral college, because it has been misused. And that will lead to an effort by the liberal elite to write up a new Constitution. And that all... will be a dog fight par excellence.

[ Rushdoony ] The news tonight carried a statement that a drive is underway to bind the electors so that they cannot play games and then to bind Congress somehow if it goes to Congress, a disputed election so that there is no brokering and selling out of any particular candidate.

[ Scott ] Well, this ... this sort of argument stands is... it is Totalitarian at its heart. To bind the decisions of other people...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...is a Totalitarian thing to do.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I mean, the very people who present such a matter, such an argument should be driven out of public life.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, we had a presidency, as a result of a deal in the electoral college some years ago.

[ Scott ] Oh, sure. We have had several presidencies stolen.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] In the 19th century and, of course, Nixon the great non fighter let John Kennedy steal an election from him.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But to bind the decisions of individuals is, at its heart, a dictatorial answer.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, our time is about up. Thank you all for listening.

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