well, that is to counteract the one (ABC) that is giving him a free reign and shucking their constitutional obligation.
well, that is to counteract the one (ABC) that is giving him a free reign and shucking their constitutional obligation.
First of all, it is imprecise, and somewhat of an exaggeration, to call FNC a "television station." It is a cable network - which means that it isn't available to those who don't have cable or satellite TV (and also, to be fair, means that, as a network, it is nationwide rather than merely a single geographically defined "station."Secondly, there is no "constitutional obligation" of "the press" - because the Constitution doesn't define "the press" in the same way that the Associated Press does. The Associated Press model of "the press" is the one with which we are familiar, but the AP actually redefined journalism in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. The AP defended itself against political challenge to its undoubted propaganda power by noting that its constituent members were fractiously independent newspapers, so the AP was "objective." But by ballooning the so-called "hard news" section of the paper and relegating the opinion into a ghetto on the editorial page, the AP newspapers morphed from "fractious independence" to the de facto homogeneity with which we are familiar.
"The freedom . . . of the press" mentioned in the Constitution places no obligation on the people, including the ones who elect to buy printing presses. It simply means that it is hard for the government to justify a restriction on a newspaper to print only what the government claims is "objective." The reality is that the First Amendment doesn't (as it could not) say anything about radio or TV. The only way to understand the First Amendment is to see it as Madison saw it - as a floor and not a ceiling on the rights of the people.
The constitutional authority for the patent office implies that the Constitution did contemplate the development of technology not excluding communications, so the Constitution can reasonably be said to anticipate radio and TV, at least in general terms. Defining the "airwaves" as "public" - a word that in politics almost always means government - does seem to me to sit uneasily in the framework of constitutional liberty of the people. The government has systematically prevented broadcasting from resembling the Internet - and it is the Internet which is much more representative of what a constitutionalist would favor than is the centralized, government-supervised broadcast station system.