The perils of free speech are well known. The perils of unfree speech are well known to be much worse. I’m afraid the problems Sowell complains about cannot be remedied. They’re as essential part of our system, part of what makes it, as Churchill put it, the worst system ever invented - except for all the others.
The perils of free speech are well known. The perils of unfree speech are well known to be much worse. I’m afraid the problems Sowell complains about cannot be remedied. They’re as essential part of our system, part of what makes it, as Churchill put it, the worst system ever invented - except for all the others.
Your point is apt, and I would have agreed with it fully if I hadn't (finally!) tumbled to the reason why journalism as we have known it all our lives differs from the newspapers of the founding era which were consiously protected by the First Amendment.In the founding era, Thomas Jefferson sponsored a newspaper in which to attack the politics of Alexander Hamilton - and to reply to the attacks on Jefferson's politics by the newspaper which Alexander Hamilton himself sponsored. So the newspapers with which the framers and ratifiers of the First Amendment were familiar were openly partisan, and would not freely allow printers of competing newspapers to claim to be objective without a rebuttal.
What happened between the founding era and our time, which made the journalists of our lifetimes so ready to accord the title of "objective journalist" to each other? When you think about it, the answer is obvious. No, it isn't radio/TV broadcasting - the answer is far more fundamental to journalism as we know it. The answer is the telegraph and the Associated Press.
Before the (1848) founding of the AP, newspapers were about the political opinions of their printers as much or more than they were about the news - for the simple reason that the printers of the newspapers of that time did not have a systematic source of news which was certain to be new to its readers. Consequently most "newspapers" were not dailies - most were weeklies, and some had no deadline at all and just printed when their printers were good and ready. With the AP, newspapers actually went into the "news" business with both feet.
With the AP, the printer of your local paper had a source of news from distant places that it knew that you the reader, lacking an AP feed, would not yet have known. The catch to that was that the printer of your local newspaper didn't employ - and didn't even know - the reporters who wrote the stories which came in over the wire. Those reporters worked for other, theoretically competitive, newspapers. So suddenly the business model of your local newspaper depended on the credence placed by its readers on reports written by distant, nominally competitive, strangers. And that is the source of the convention that reporters do not question the objectivity of other reporters.
Before the AP, "newspapers" were not really journalism as we know it. Journalism as we know it is obsessed with getting the story quick and interesting. That places the emphasis on short deadline superficiality and on stories which may not be representative of society and in fact systematically are unrepresentative. "Man Bites Dog" rather than "Dog Bites Man."
Your concerns about censorship are valid assuming that the public has a right to know, quick. But what Sowell is pointing out is that, within limits, the speed with which the public learns of events is less a function of the actual need for the public to be informed than of the need of the newspapers to attract attention with a sensational story which may ultimately prove (as in the example of the anthrax suspect, or the example of the Duke Lacrosse rape allegations) to be not information but actually disinformation.
How much substantive and significant information could have been conveyed to the public with all the ink and broadcast bandwidth which were dedicated to the disinformation put out by Michael Nifong in the Duke "rape" case?