
Huff Post’s Marty Kaplan has a nice piece prophesizing the up-coming onslaught that Fox will be making against George Soros’ There You Go Again conference celebrating George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”
Marty Kaplan: Soros or Murdoch – Media on The Huffington Post:
The name of George Soros’s foundation, the Open Society Institute, comes from a phrase popularized by a hero of his, the British philosopher Karl Popper. His two-volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies, was an attack on a philosophical tradition from Plato to Hegel, and on the modern tyrannies, from communism to Nazism, which Popper saw as its consequence. Reading it in graduate school was, for me, one of those intellectually life-changing experiences. The difference between a closed and an open society, says Popper, is not that an open society says yes to all propositions. If it were, then the modern media — where propagandists and nutjobs are cloaked in the same plausibility afforded to, say, legitimate investigative reporters and scientists — would be the bedrock of a civic utopia. Openness doesn’t mean “anything goes”; it doesn’t mean “pick your poison.” It means that there is a broadly agreed-upon process for a society to test and refute, or test and accept-for-now, the contentions and conjectures on the table.
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