Posted on 05/12/2008 5:31:32 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
I want . . Freedom of the press to be the right not to be lied to.
You are confused. So very seriously confused about the First Amendment, that you are not thinking any more clearly about it than I was before the mid-1990s, when I began to see through the system by which the "journalistic objectivity" con is perpetrated. And since I was already in my fifties by then, I have every reason to understand how you might see things the way you do.
Freedom of the press is much more like "the right to lie to you" than it is like "the right not to be lied to." And that is a good thing.
In the founding era, nobody claimed that a newspaper was objective - no more so than you would take me seriously if I claimed to be objective - or I, you. That was because the newspapers were actually independent of each other back then. Independent of each other, but not independent of the political factions of the day. For example, one paper was sponsored by Thomas Jefferson, to attack the politics of Alexander Hamilton - and to reply to the attacks on him by the newspaper sponsored by Hamilton himself. The idea of either of those newspapers ceding to the other respect for being "objective" - which after all implies wisdom - is laughable.
Why, then, does our culture have the idea that journalism should be, even could be, objective? Simple - the telegraph and the Associated Press transformed the newspaper business - and our culture - beginning back in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Prior to the advent of the telegraph, newspaper printers got their news about the same way that the other people in their towns got theirs - by word of mouth and by getting physical copies of other newspapers, delivered by sailboat and horse-drawn wagon. So in principle, any given local might easily have heard any given news item before the local newspaper printed it. Accordingly, most newspapers were not dailies, may were weeklies and some had no deadline at all and just printed when the printer was good and ready. Making it all the more likely that people would get news by word of mouth before the newspaper reported it to them.
Then along came the Associated Press. Suddenly the newspaper printer had a direct line to newspapers in all the other towns and cities of the country - and to reporters working directly for the AP who aggressively got the news from ships arriving from Europe before those ships even docked. The AP was an aggressive monopolizer of the use of the telegraph for transmission of the news; it cut exclusive deals with the telegraph lines which froze competitors out. That made the AP the target of criticism and challenge, since it was so obviously an unprecedented concentration of nationwide public influence. The AP proceeded to demonstrate that influence by deflecting those charges by asserting that since the Association was composed of member newspapers which famously did not agree on much of anything, the Association was - wait for it - "objective."
That was, is, and always will be absurd. First, of course, because thinking yourself to be objective is arguably the best possible definition of the word "subjectivity." And secondly, because the AP, and all of those "independent-thinking" papers which made up the AP, was selling something. The same thing - news, before you could get it from any other source. So the AP and every one of its members had the identical incentive to sell the idea that journalism - all journalism - was objective. How else to vouch for the news which suddenly was a pervasive, dominant theme of your newspaper which had not actually had that function before - when that news did not originate with your newspaper's own reporters but with those of a nominal competitor in a distant city? So with the AP, newspapers suddenly had not only the motive but the opportunity to claim objectivity as long as they did not compete with any other AP newspaper on the basis of objectivity claims. And the more opportunity they had to make that claim, the less compunction was necessary about taking care to vindicate the claim by actually being objective.
So what is the actual effect of the claim by all of journalism that all of journalism is objective? The actual effect of the claim of objectivity, running as it has for a century and a half, is to establish in custom the idea that journalists are a breed apart from we-the-people - more virtuous, more knowledgeable, and more civic-minded - and thus entitled not only to be listened to with respect by people who pay for the privilege but entitled to special privileges such as "shield" laws granting reporters the right to withhold the names of sources from courts of law which any citizen would be under legal compunction to yield up. And entitled to special rights to speak out about candidates for public office, to be denied, under McCain-Feingold, to we-the-people. Is there any real virtue in having our government officers selected by vote of the whole people on a date certain, when it would be far more manageable to simply read in the newspapers what the newspapers say is in the public interest? Or, for that matter, what the newspapers say the public thinks, based on "public opinion polls?" From the POV of the journalist - or anyone who thinks that journalists are more objective and hence wiser and more virtuous than the public at large - the answer would have to be, "No." What could be more patent than that the conceit of journalistic objectivity is profoundly subversive of democratic principle?
Before the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine and the rise of the Internet generally and FreeRepublic.com in particular, the public discourse was largely controlled by monolithic AP journalism. Journalism had extremely broad latitude to say whatever they wanted so say, and call that "objectivity." The most fundamental desire of journalism is to attract an attentive audience, and to be able to exploit that ability for fun and profit. The linchpin of the influence of AP journalism being perishable news - news that will soon no longer be new - journalism inexorably presses upon the public the idea that the news is important. The more important you think the news is, the less attention you will pay to things which change less, or not at all. That is why AP journalism is inherently anti conservative. Journalism also is maximally important when there is a crisis requiring public notice and action. But of course a putative crisis "requiring" government action implies that the powers-that-be have not already taken whatever action is needed, which is why the public should attend to the journalist and influence the politician accordingly. Again that makes the journalist anti conservative.
Another way of stating the above paragraph is to note that journalism's rules include "There's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper," and "If it bleeds, it leads." The former rule simply says that only what the public doesn't know yet matters, and the latter says that the bad news is most important. Journalism's rules also enjoin the editor that "Man Bites Dog" is news, and "Dog Bites Man" is not news. Which means that business-as-usual is not news, and if anything is reported in the newspaper it is probably not typical of what normally characterizes society. Most people never, in their entire lives, commit a murder or even know anyone who did commit a murder - but you will find plentiful stories about murders, and demands for the disarming of the general public, but rarely mention of how statistically rare murder actually is or how frequently the law-abiding use or, more commonly merely threaten to use, weapons to prevent crime. Likewise if our troops suffer casualties and deaths in Iraq that is news - even though the overwhelming majority of our troops return from Iraq without a scratch, and also with scant if any notice by journalism. All that comports with the rules of journalism - but the rules of journalism comport with the interest of journalism,. The rules of journalism purport to be about the public interest, but actually are only about interesting the public. And the two things are not only different, they are often in contradiction. So we see that journalism is anti conservative.
Since journalism not only has the inherent incentive to say what it wants to say, and since under the Associated Press regime journalism coheres as a single identifiable entity with identifiable interests and has a dominant position in the public discourse by which it is easily capable of stonewalling or otherwise dismissing contradiction, it is only natural to expect that journalism will promote those who scratch its back, and oppose those who do not. Conservatives are those who are least prone to scratch journalism's back. In this context the most satisfactory definition of American conservatism was implied in Theodore Roosevelt's famous speech at the Sorbonne in France in 1911:
"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . . who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds . . .That speech defines American conservatism - respect for those who take responsibility and work to a bottom line - and its opposite, which is criticism and second guessing of those who take responsibility to get things done. The latter is AP journalism's natural predilection, and it naturally tends to undercut the businessman and the policeman and the military man. There are others besides journalists who second guess the people who get things done, and journalists call them "liberals," or "progressives," or "moderates" - essentially any positive label but "objective." "Objective" is the label which journalists reserve to themselves but anyone who currently is labeled a "liberal" or a "progressive" can get a job as a journalist and instantly receive the "objective journalist" label without any change in his/her political perspective. George Stephanopolis is the outstanding example of the phenomenon; there is emphatically not any example of a conservative ever becoming recognized as an "objective" journalist.
It is interesting to note that American conservatives conserve a tradition which was started, not in the mists of time as in nations generally, but in a specific founding era in the second half of the Eighteenth Century. American constitutional norms do trace back to English antecedents, but they are codified as British and other nation's traditions have not been. The preamble to the US Constitution is a mission statement for America, and after all the specifics about providing for the common defense and so forth, it concludes with the nut of the matter, " . . . [to] secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity." American conservatives, therefore, conserve liberty - which, considering that liberty allows people to do things in different ways, and to do different things, than were done in the past, is such a unique form of "conservatism" that adherents to it have questioned whether that is even a proper term for it.
Indeed, the word which (anywhere outside the US, as recently as a decade ago) describes "American conservatism" is "liberalism." link Well one might ask, "how did the US acquire a definition of "liberalism" which is opposed to what is in America called "conservatism?" I make no pretense of specific knowledge of the event, but I have a hypothesis which I would defend against challenge until such time as more specific evidence is cited than has come to my attention. First, I would note that the term "socialism" would, on etymological grounds, be assumed to relate to support for organic societal decisions rather than - as we well know to be the actual case - relating to government control of things which in America are traditionally left to societal decisions made, perhaps most notably, in the marketplace. So I would argue that the term "socialism" was dishonestly coined by its proponents. And, everywhere outside the US, socialism was far more accepted by the public at large than it was in the US. We have had governments which were socialist in intent - FDR with his "New Deal" and LBJ and his "Great Society" perhaps most prominently - but at no time has a socialist run for POTUS openly advocating socialism as such, and won. Indeed there is exactly one avowedly Socialist senator - Bernie Sanders of Vermont - and he caucuses, surprise of surprises, with the senate Democrats. Essentially all of whom are readily classified as "liberals."
My inference is that since "socialism" was a failed brand name in the US but not elsewhere, people in the US who had the ability to rebrand socialist nostrums, and wanted to do so, seized upon the co-opting of the term for the political theory which already was popular. Associated Press journalism - especially in conjunction with academia, which as a group are critics and not doers just as reporters are - fits that bill exactly. It is a theory which seems to fit the facts as I know them perfectly - socialist-minded people had motive, in the US, and opportunity, to make the change. Certainly, or so it seems to me, it would have been impossible without at least the acquiescence, and probably the active support, of journalism. There would have been far less incentive for socialists in any other locale than the United States to make that change.
We see the process of the creation of a new word - a neologism - out of whole cloth springing out of the Democratic reaction to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign of 2004. In that case, the SBVT organization counted among its members the entire chain of command in Vietnam above John Kerry, and all his fellow officers on the other Swift Boats in Kerry's naval unit. If you wanted to ask anyone else but John Kerry and his subordinates on his boat, on the one hand, and the SBVT on the other, you would be embarrassed for want of anyone who could speak of about Kerry's performance on the basis of direct knowledge. You have to either believe one side or the other, and the SBVT group is far more numerous, and was more highly credentialed at the time and place in question, than Lt. John Kerry and his subordinates were. And their story was more consistent over time, and internally, than Kerry's story was - considering how certain Kerry was that he had been sent on a mission into Cambodia by a president who hadn't been inaugurated yet! Nevertheless, AP journalism and the rest of the Democratic smear machine has created, and imposed on the national dialog, the term "swiftboating" defined as the irresponsible and unjustified criticism of a Democrat.
So we have seen the imposition of a story line and a word meaning implemented before our very eyes, in real time. What reason is there to doubt that the same or similar things have been done in the past, when we didn't have the Internet and talk radio to help us keep our sanity when we thought that "objective" journalists were cooking the books! By the accounts of Ann Coulter and M. Stanton Evans, the coining of the word "McCarthyism" was done in exactly the same fashion, and with no more justification than the coining of "swiftboating" was done. And thus I have little doubt that the inversion of the meaning of the word "liberalism" was done the same way, by the same sort of people.
And "liberalism" is not the only word whose meaning has been inverted; the words "society" and "public" have received similar treatment. If you hear a "liberal" speak of "society" your very first impulse should be to question whether or not the speaker means anything other than government. Except in the absence of freedom, the two are not synonyms, but that is how the socialist "liberal" uses the word "society." And the socialist "liberal" uses the word "public" to exactly the same intent.
Another BUMP-TO-THE-TRUTH for OUTSTANDING work!
I see the religion clauses of the First Amendment as amplifying the speech and press clauses - we are to have freedom of speech and press even in matters of faith claims which cannot be proven or disproved.And the assembly and petition clause likewise make it clear that freedom of speech and press apply to criticism of the government.
The application to this case is simply that Senator Biden can state his opinion about Catholic doctrine, Bishop John Mashek can state his opinion as it relates to Senator Biden's remarks and exercise his rights as his religious organization stipulates - and Mark Finkelstein is free to be wrong about Bishop John Mashek's rights, in print. As long as no one attempts to enforce that error, it is - in secular terms - all good.
I’ll spend time later reading your . . . post more thoroughly, but from what I’ve read - although I do (sort of) understand where you are coming from when you link in the AP - I don’t agree that a the 1st Amendment establishing the right to a Free Press is more like having the RIGHT to be lied to, than the right NOT to be lied to. In saying that you sound exactly like the college interns at the RMN who were defending the papers’ decisions to print lies in their voters’ guide by saying the “First Amendment guarantees we can print WHATEVER we want”. If that were truly the case - as I said before - then there would be no slander or libel laws on our books. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2089183/posts?page=46#46
I agree that slander and libel laws are justified if carefully tempered by the right of people to be wrong at the top of their voice. There is of course a difference between me saying that the moon is made of green cheese and someone systematically attempting to obliterate a person's reputation with with callous disregard to fact.But to the point of the First Amendment in particular: what is there in 1A which promotes judgements against libel or slander? IMHO the only possible answer is, "Nothing." The only possible effect of 1A on libel/slander legislation would, it seems to me, be the possibility that 1A might be used to overturn such a law - not to enable a suit for libel/slander on the basis of 1A without any act of Congress.
So in that sense I would have to say that the First Amendment certainly is more like (even if it is not exactly) a right to lie than it is like a right not to be lied to. It is the right of the people to listen to and/or read what we chose to, and to make up our own minds - rather than to be fed a party line and be told that we have an obligation to believe it because it must be the truth or the government (or "objective" journalism) wouldn't be saying it.
Ping.
Link to your http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2095728/posts?page=1 and Ping.
Indeed - IF THEY HAVE NO HIGHER CALLING THAN THEMSELVES.Moderators are journalists, and journalists define "objectivity" as what they themselves are - and they define "liberal" (or, synonym, "progressive") as exactly the same as "objective" except that the term "objective" is...
And most today, unfortunately, do not. - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2096506/posts?page=90#90
Ping.
The fact that such a man may well become President of the United States is simply astounding. The fact that if this happens it will be because big media has ignored the evidence excavated by the blogosphere which requires the most urgent and thorough interrogation of Obama -- questions which simply have not been asked – is as terrifying as it is appalling.
Say rather, it is terrifying and appalling that so very many people - and I must recognize the extent to which I was once among their number, at least partially, and to some smaller extent still am - take for granted that they know what is going on because they listen to the news and read the paper.I say, "still am," because there are things like polls which I am easily suckered into taking at face value if I'm not careful. Is it not for such reasons that we come to FR to pool our skepticism?
Yes, perhaps absolute objectivity is impossible, but one can still, whether in journalism or in academia, at least make an effort to try and be objective and to consider different sides of an issue. It’s called being professional, and it’s very different from claiming to be objective when in fact your goal is present propaganda for one viewpoint.
Not only is objectivity impossible, the business of journalism is not about trying for it. Objectivity was not even notionally the objective of founding era newspapers; the paper sponsored by Hamilton was not about to recognize "objectivity" in the paper sponsored by Hamilton's political opponent Jefferson. And vice versa.Journalism claiming objectivity as we know it is an artifact of the telegraph and the Associated Press, which made nominally competitive newspapers actually partners in the business of reporting news from sources to which the man on the street could only be privy by reading an AP newspaper. It is journalism's interest that we believe that the news is important to know (it was during 9/11/01, but that is the exception), and that we believe that journalism is objective. But journalism follows rules which, if we are to believe that journalism is objective, we would have to believe to be in the public interest. It is easy to see how "If it bleeds, it leads" and "Man Bites Dog, not Dog Bites Man" are valid rules for interesting the public - but impossible, IMHO, to justify as being in the public interest.
And even the vaunted speed of communication of modern journalism appears fatuous if one asks what the two biggest stories of 2008 have been:
How did the vaunted speed of breaking news affect public knowledge of those stories? The answer is that journalism busied itself using its fast reaction reporting to talk about everything else. Once the casualty rate in Iraq dropped, journalism dropped Iraq - with the result that the public little notes the success of the surge. And the collapse of Fannie and Freddie was a decade in the making - but journalism took a "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" approach to that slow-motion train wreck. Until it was too late to prevent or ameliorate the consequences of the irresponsibility at the heart of the scandal.
- the success of the surge, and
- the collapse of Freddie/Fannie.
So yes, as the article suggests, objectivity - certainly objectivity of journalism - is not possible. Journalism is in fact inherently radical. Rather than arguing from the assumption of their own objectivity (i.e., their own superior wisdom), journalists would better approximate objectivity if they took the philosophical approach and assumed the posture of being lovers of wisdom rather than engaging in the sophistry of claiming to posses wisdom. But journalists cannot do so, because humility is not in their DNA or they would not be journalists.
OUTSTANDING article by Michael S. Malone. Thanks for posting.But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible. That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views, and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can’t achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty - especially in ourselves.
And thank you for the ping! Bookmarking - and a maximum-effort ping!IMHO the exact reason for the extreme tendentiousness of Big Journalism, and of the Democratic Party with which it is in symbiosis, is the fact that journalists do not write to be objective, they write from the assumption that they are objective. And that is sophistry.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2114806/posts?page=142#142
Ping to this thread which I expect you'll like.
The “off” switch works pretty well.
I think it was Matt Drudge who used to say on his radio show, the most violent action anyone can take against any form of media or entertainment was, to simply change the channel.
The OFF switch is, thank God, effective within your own house. But as MarkWar put it,Imagine you are a Native American 150 years ago. Imagine you complain to your tribe that the locomotives are making it possible for the Europeans to spread _their_ civilization west and _replace_ your civilization. And imagine one of your own tribe said, "Hey, buddy, if you don't like trains, just don't buy tickets and don't ride on them..."The OFF switch setting is indispensable. But it is also inadequate as a response. An adequate response must delegitimate the fatuous conceit of journalistic objectivity, which is profoundly subversive of democratic principle. But that fatuous conceit cannot be attacked from within journalism; journalism depends upon it for its existence - it cannot possibly internalize an honest critique of itself, or it would collapse. For then indeed it would be seen for the dinosaur that it is.Do you see my point? We can all choose to "not watch" -- journalists or the media in general. But we _know_ that the vast majority of people are going to be watching this garbage and it will be influencing their thinking/actions. Just as locomotives were the enabling technology (one of them) that made it possible for Europeans to replace the Indians, now media is the enabling technology (one of them) that is making it possible for our civilization to be replaced.
Problems don't go away just because we close our eyes. (I wish they did, but they don't.)
The First Amendment does not say that journalism is objective; to the contrary, so long as it is respected it is an impediment to the government in any attempt the government makes to require journalism to fit the government's definition of "objectivity." The newspapers of the founding era made no pretense to objectivity; Hamilton and Jefferson sponsored competing newspapers in which to wage their partisan battles with each other.
So the question is not, "Why isn't journalism objective," the proper question is why anyone would think that journalism is, or even might be, objective. And the answer to that is that journalism as we know it didn't exist in the founding era because the Associated Press didn't exist back then. Journalism as we and our grandparents have known it all our lives is a creature of the Associated Press (founded in 1848), which is itself a creature of the post-founding era technology of the telegraph.
. . .
It is plain that the McCain-Feingold law, indeed all "Campaign Finance Reform," is an object failure at its nominal objective of "taking money out of politics." Obama apparently, and most unsurprisingly, flouted money raising strictures massively. But even if his fundraising was technically legal, $600 billion is actually quite a lot of money, and I'm sure Obama's donors will get their money's worth. And over and above even that is the incalculable in-kind donation constituted by "objective" journalism which is explicitly exempted from McCain-Feingold "to make it constitutional."
Without McCain-Feingold, McCain probably faces more effective primary opposition and doesn't get the nomination; without McCain-Feingold and its equally unconstitutional (and useless) predecessor "Campaign Finance Reform" laws, a conservative Republican would have "gone negative" and therefore would have had a chance against Obama.
I predict a run on ipods and sat radio receivers.
Podcasts and satellite radio will be the medium.
Yes. The great difficulty is the still-dominant noise from monopolistic Associated Press journalism propaganda machine. There is a lot, but only so much, to be said for getting our information from sources which smell right to us rather than from the take-it-or-leave-it propaganda from the one-way media.That allows us to retain our sanity while others are losing their heads. But it does only so much when the mind-numbed robots of the left head to the polls. Even if every self-consciously conservative American were given satellite radio for free, that overarching problem would remain. I do not propose that leftists should be ghettoized any more than I think we should be. I recognize that there are tens of millions of those people, some of them close kin - and they should have a voice. But as Chuck Schumer's comment comparing Talk Radio to pornography makes chillingly clear, leftists simply will not be content with having a voice, they are determined that theirs shall be the voice - the Establishment.
Their claims sound perfectly reasonable once you make the absurd assumption that journalism is objective. But that assumption is ridiculous because journalism has obviously adheres slavishly to its own business interests while claiming to speak in the public interest. Journalism claims to be "the press," and yet journalism as we know it (and especially as it makes its fatuous claims of objectivity) is essentially a product of the Associated Press (founded 1848) and did not even exist in the founding era when the First Amendment was written and ratified. For leftism to be the Establishment, the Associated Press must be the Establishment. They are joined at the hip by mutual interest.
It’s not unlikely that you will find this interesting . . .
With respect to the SCOTUS, I ask why must we go hat in hand to them to ratify a right which we were born with? Do we not empower them to control us when we ask their permission to do something we already can do? I say we just speak out as we please and defy them to come after us.
It's similar to the Heller case. I'm glad we won it, but what if we hadn't? Why give them the power, I ask?
Perhaps I'm too belligerent, but I think it worth noting.
It is a question to be respected. But the Heller case did succeed (tho some would argue for the flat-out abolition of gun registration, rather than merely "shall issue").And in any event we do not face the same risk in seeking a rehearing of McConnell v. FEC for the simple reason that we already bear the burden of the adverse result of McConnell. And, whether you think it prudent or not, the Republican Party (or some subset thereof) is even now bringing the issue raised by McConnell v. FEC back into the courts. So in that sense the issue is out of our hands anyway, and the question is now whether the courts will burden us with yet another rebuff to our peading for relief from McCain-Feingold.
And as SCOTUS is constituted following the resignation of O'Connor, Justice Kennedy - in the minority in the court's erroneous 5-4 holding against McConnell in McConnell v. FEC - is now dominant. So there is lively hope of success in that suit. But even if SCOTUS were to overturn McConnell, that would hardly guarantee that SCOTUS would issue a broad enough ruling to protect the people's "freedom of the press" rights to FReep and to have Talk Radio be on an equal footing before the law with "objective journalism." So I suggest a "friend of the court" filing along the lines of my #54 which would suggest to the Court (i.e., to Justice Kennedy) a rationale by which the Court could settle the issue in a way which is readily defensible (far more so than Heller, which required a patient Justice Scalia to give the country a history lesson on the meaning of the language used in the Second Amendment) and congenial to the majority now sitting on the Court (again, essentially Justice Kennedy).
In summary, that rationale is that:
Accordingly any law (and McCain-Feingold in particular) which purports to restrict the right of the people, or any one of them, to spend money to propagate opinions (and most unambiguously, political or religious opinions explicitly mentioned in clauses of the First Amendment) is no law enforceable under constitutional government. Or else, the exceptions in McCain-Feingold for "the press" apply to all the people and not to a privileged subset of them.
- "freedom of the press" is a right of all the people, and each of them individually - and not limited to a subset thereof as yet unborn in the framing era.
- "freedom of the press" is not limited to the technology of printing circa 1792. It includes the high speed printing press developed since the 1830s - and it includes telegraphy, telephony, movies, radio, Xerography and television developed much later, the PC Internet today, and whatever communication technology may extend those capabilities in as yet unexplored ways in the future. If anyone can use the Internet and put up web sites, everyone (who can afford it) can put up web sites.
- The government does not get to elevate some people to privileged status officially recognized as "objective" or any other title of nobility. Anyone can claim to be objective - but no one may be obliged to defer to any such claim. People who make such claim do not, no matter what the weight of their purses or the printing presses or other communications equipment they may own or even the number of others similarly situated who may be in concert with them in making such claim, thereby attain even to the credibility of witnesses under oath. Let alone to that of the verdict of a jury. They are still only people with no authority over their fellow citizens, and no part of the government.
That would be the limit the holding which the case brought against the FEC by the Republican Party would immediately reach - but it would be a shot across the bow from SCOTUS delegitimating any threat to Talk Radio or Free Republic. I think it could be worth serious investigation as to the possibility of using the Republican Party's suit to ask SCOTUS for just such a ruling.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2136032/posts?page=73#73
My interest is in the relation between Homogeneous JournalismTM - what calls itself "the press," (as if the Constitution uniquely referred to journalism, even though journalism as we know it may scarcely be said to have existed in the founding era) - the First Amendment, and the various laws which touch on the ability of individual people outside of the Homogeneous JournalismTM axis to influence public opinion. The "Campaign Finance Reform" laws - McCain-Feingold and its predecessors - fall into this category. But so also do rules of the FCC promoting journalism as a public service - and once, and possibly future, FCC rules of what it has styled "fairness."
The newspapers of the founding era were typically weeklies not dailies, and some even had no deadline and just went to press when the printer thought he was good and ready. Few newspapers were dailies because, in general, newspaper printers didn't have news sources to which the general public was in principle not privy. So "newspapers" at the time of the ratification of the First Amendment were more similar to opinion journals like the National Review or The Nation than they were like The New York Times or The Washington Post of today.With that background, I ask the question - "How can any law in which the (unproven, unprovable, and factually false) "objectivity" of journalism is a planted axiom be squared with a First Amendment which forbids the government to enforce its idea of objectivity on religion, speech, press, or political assembly among the people?" In the realm of socialist politics, a Senator Schumer can rhetorically link censorship of conservative politics with censorship of pornography. But in the realm of law, which facts and logic are supposed to control, the answer to my question should IMHO be that that is absurd. If the government is permitted to define and enforce its idea of objectivity, what does the First Amendment actually mean?What changed between then and now? The telegraph. The telegraph, and the Associated Press. The AP was founded in 1848 as the New York Associated Press, and went national a few years later. But the AP was an aggressive monopolizer of the use of the telegraph to transmit news. According to Steve Boris,
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1945 . . . found the AP in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act . . .The book News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897 discusses some of the AP's monopolistic efforts. The AP was obviously a concentration of public influence, and it was challenged on that basis. The AP's response was to claim that its member newspapers famously were fractiously independent, and so the Associated Press itself was objective.But the reality is that the Associated Press transformed the newspaper business from a fractious bunch of independent printers publishing their own opinions to the Homogeneous JournalismTM news business with which we are familiar - in which, far from being fractious, journalists studiously avoid criticizing each other but instead claim that all journalists are "objective!" The AP made that transformation inevitable by changing the business model of the newspaper business to one in which reports from reporters not directly associated with a given newspaper make up much of that newspaper's most interesting content. So the "fractious membership" defense is no defense at all. Indeed, since nobody can print everything and since "Half the truth is often a great lie," it should be apparent that it is not possible to prove the negative that journalism is unbiased.
The Homogeneous JournalismTM establishment exploits the very impossibility of proving its claim as a way of begging the question, "How do you expect us to prove that?" But with constitutional principle and the freedom and equality before the law which is the very raison d' etre of the Constitution at stake, there is no justification for allowing them to deflect the burden of proof back onto the people who plead for relief from a monopolistic establishment. Even so, it is a burden which the plaintiff can easily bear. Whole books have of course been written which document instances of egregious bias in, not just a single newspaper, but in a consensus of Homogeneous JournalismTM without substantial exception. And web sites have been dedicated to that same task. And although Homogeneous JournalismTM's "anecdotal evidence" defense gets tedious as more and more "anecdotes" are piled up, plaintiff need not appeal to anecdotal evidence at all, other than to note that the "anecdotes" do in fact exist.
But in fact the perspective of Homogeneous JournalismTM is openly self-documented. Criticize a report for one-sidedness in reporting only the bad and not the good about the results of a particular policy, and the reporter will instantly reply that "bad news sells" and "If it bleeds, it leads" - all to the point the "No news is good news." Which is all very well from the point of view of the business interests of the newspaper - but which begs the question of whether the business interest of the newspaper is identical to the public interest. The result is following argument:
But where in that logic is there a proof of the starting premise? It is a planted axiom. A begged question, whenever Homogeneous JournalismTM calls itself "the press."
- the business interest of the Homogeneous JournalismTM is identical to the public interest.
- therefore, whatever promotes the interest of Homogeneous JournalismTM is in the public interest.
- therefore, one-sided coverage of the effects of a public policy is in the public interest.
And the same argument would apply to the very deadline structure of journalism, which starts from the premise that the interest of Homogeneous JournalismTM is identical to the public interest and leads to the conclusion that, simply because of the passage of a 24 hour period since the last "important" newspaper was published, the fate of the Republic depends on whether or not another newspaper" is published, irrespective of the events of the day or lack thereof, to promote the idea that it is important to read the newspaper.
The idea that it is important to read the newspaper is obviously the fundamental business interest of journalism. And an obvious way to promote that idea is to cast aspersions on people whose performance is important to the well being of society and who are not well situated, either to reciprocate in kind, or to help promote the idea that it is important to read the newspaper. The idea that the government should regulate business more closely, and that the US military and for that matter American law enforcement officers generally are inept and/or egregiously brutal, would imply that it is important to read the newspaper to read criticism of the transgressions of important people. Any political party which promoted those ideas, therefore, would promote the primary interest of Homogeneous JournalismTM - and would thereby insulate itself from criticism from Homogeneous JournalismTM.
Homogeneous JournalismTM rejects the idea that it is associated with a political party. But its refusal to publicize such association cannot prove that no such association exists de facto. And in fact that is transparently the case. There is in fact a political party associated with criticism of businessmen, the police, and the military - and the representatives of that party are systematically accorded positive labels by Homogeneous JournalismTM. And the opponents of that party are consistently the target of the brickbats of Homogeneous JournalismTM.
The effect of the claim that Homogeneous JournalismTM is objective, and of laws which take that claim as a given, is to position journalists as holders of an unconstitutional title of nobility. Journalists are not to be held to the same standard as the people at large. The consequences of that presumption on the part of Homogeneous JournalismTM are that
- the past election campaign was conducted with wildly unequal funding for the two parties. The one which goes along and gets along with Homogeneous JournalismTM being by far the better funded. It is an artifact of this particular election that the underfunded candidate was personally instrumental in the enactment of the McCain-Feingold law, and arguably that candidate had only himself to blame for his plight - but that logic ignores the reality of the compromise of the rights of those among the people who supported him only for lack of any other realistic venue to express profound reservations on the candidate and the party preferred by Homogeneous JournalismTM.
- over and above the difference in funding, Homogeneous JournalismTM found it to be "in the public interest" to give dramatically closer scrutiny to the credentials of the sitting governor who was the vice presidential candidate of the opponent of the party which Homogeneous JournalismTM prefers than to the credentials and associations of its preferred presidential candidate. This is indicative of the modus operandi of Homogeneous JournalismTM; it typically expresses its tendency far less in what it says than what it does not say. Criticism of any candidate would be unexceptionable if proportioned to the importance of the candidate and to the seriousness of the charges and the substance behind them. It is not the criticism of one candidate but the systematic aversion to criticism of the other candidate - without significant exception - which expresses the strong preference of so-called "objective" journalists. This is such a consistent trend that if an article reports on a politician caught up in scandal but the article does not mention the party association of the embarrassed politician, it is essentially certain that that politician is a member of the party which promotes criticism of businessmen, the military, and the police.
- Broadcast licenses are given on the basis that broadcasters perform a public service when they broadcast "objective" journalism which is actually biased against anyone who takes responsibility to work to a bottom line, and in favor of anyone who criticizes and second guesses those who do take responsibility.
- Talk Radio and, make no doubt, Free Republic and the rest of the internet is threatened with government sanction solely on the basis that it does not support the fatuous claim that Homogeneous JournalismTM makes to objectivity.
The Republican Party presently is mounting a renewed challenge to the McCain-Feingold law. Assuming that FR lacks the resources to mount its own Supreme Court case, can we not at least submit a "Friend of the Court" brief raising the above points? What expense would we have to incur to do that?
54 posted on November 21, 2008 8:42:16 PM EST by conservatism_IS_compassion
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2136032/posts?page=54#54
I am enamored of my latest point of attack on Big Journalism, which is to skip over "anecdotal" evidence of journalistic bias (you could show bias in every article in every newspaper in the country, and Big Journalism would still call your evidence "anecdotal"), and even elide the impossibility of proving that journalism is objective. And go straight to the heart of the matter, which is IMHO that the government simply lacks the authority to decide whether journalism is objective or biased.Of course the First Amendment supports that position, in that it only talks about freedom, and not at all about responsibility other than the responsibility of the government to butt out. So if freedom is the only issue, the government's opinion about the tendentiousness of journalism must be irrelevant. But further, it seems to me that the stronger case is to refer to the Article I Section 9 edict that
No title of nobility shall be granted by the United StatesAnd simply note that the Associated Press is a private organization which is entitled to call itself and it members and their employees anything it likes. It calls its members "the press?" Fine. It calls their employees "objective journalists?" Fine. There are all sorts of fraternal organizations which give their officials all sorts of grandiose names, and that is fine, too. But in court, those terms are merely labels having no more meaning than x and y do when used as algebraic symbols.Considering that "freedom" includes the possibility of doing things differently and better, and doing different things - and that the Constitution plainly contemplates progress as a general possibility to be promoted
Article 1 Section 8
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveriesthere is no warrant to read "the press" narrowly to mean only printing. A literal press means nothing if it is not fed ink and paper and if no writer, no editor, and no composer can be paid to create the text and graphics to give meaning to it. Freedom of the press is the right of Pinch Sulzberger, or anyone else, to spend money on the technological means to promote his opinions. It is a right of the people, not of the membership of the Associated Press (as it styles itself).Ownership of something is, patently, full control of that thing. If you own something you can burnish it and put it on display, or you can neglect it. You can use it, or you can dispose of it in any way you wish. Government ownership of a press is the very antithesis of freedom of that press. Thus we can readily see that "public" (meaning nothing other than "government") ownership of broadcasting stations - never mind "the airwaves" in general - is unconstitutional. Just as freedom of the press must entail freedom to buy paper on a nondiscriminatory basis to print on, freedom of the technological press must entail the freedom to buy spectrum on a nondiscriminatory basis.
I would certainly hope our personal information is being kept in a very secure location. If that information got hacked, it could be very ugly, in the larger context of a full scale attack on the First Amendment by Obama’s thugs.
Protection devoutly to be wished - but frankly, it took me awhile to decide to FReep because I thought so little of Clinton's respect for the law, and my appreciation of the difficulty of keeping identity information secret. I have no illusions that I cannot be traced, any more than Buckhead could remain anonymous.Someone has said, "Free speech isn't free." Pray for the Robinsons, because they are the ones whose freedom of the press is at issue. With our post submittals we are mere contributors; they actually do the publishing.
Actually the First Amendment, in a way, is used by our opposition to confuse the issue of freedom of the press. Associated Press journalism, which calls itself "the press" and calls its employees "objective journalists," did not exist before the advent of the Associated Press in 1848 - which was enabled by the development of the telegraph and the Morse Code long after the composition and ratification of the First Amendment. Newspapers of the founding era lacked sources which were inaccessible to the general public, and so were usually weeklies rather than dailies since scoops were not crucial to their business.
The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments to the Constitution, which were agreed to as a condition for the ratification of the Constitution as a whole. They exist as amendments rather than existing in the body of the document, not because the framers of the original document opposed the freedoms they specify but because they feared that the existence of an explicit "bill of rights" would ironically be used to denigrate rights which the "bill of rights" failed to articulate. Justices of the Supreme Court, including "liberal" ones, have recognized this, and understood that the First Amendment is a lower bound and not a limit to our rights to communicate. And that is how Associated Press Journalism, Obama, and the Democratic Party intend to euchre us out of our right to communicate with the public via this web site, and to do likewise to Rush Limbaugh et al and their rights to broadcast their political opinions.
The Constitution including the First Amendment plainly did not, and could not possibly have, include any mandate for the specific development of telegraphy - let alone the telephone, the radio, the TV, the Xerox copier, the computer with printer, cable TV, or the internet. But what the Constitution does explicitly do is to provide for incentive "to promote the progress of science and useful arts," (Article 1 Section 8). There can be no implication that the intention of the framers of the First Amendment intended to limit freedom of political advocacy to in-person speech and ink-on-paper printing - and certainly not to limit freedom of the press to members of an organization, The Associated Press, which did not even exist until two generations after the ratification of the First Amendment. of the framers of the Constitution.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2131682/posts?page=96
“I am enamored of my latest point of attack on Big Journalism”
A well deserved affection.
self ping
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