Few people read, let alone study the history books, and the better history books recognize that popular press is an unreliable source of fact.
Imagine a history of the Soviet Union, based on Pravda. We have the same situation, just more outlets to give an illusion of independent media.
At any rate, history is presently down the memory hole. What’s really fascinating is how few people understand that present day reality is deliberately hidden and misrepresented, never mind how history will be recorded. The DEMs have delcared war on reality!
bttt
Imagine a history of the Soviet Union, based on Pravda. We have the same situation, just more outlets to give an illusion of independent media.
Precisely. The situation of printers in the Founding Era, which the First Amendment was crafted to preserve, was that each was free to express his own political agenda independent of the government (subject to libel and pornography laws), and independent of each other.IMHO the wire services in general, and the AP in particular, create continual virtual meetings of all major newspapers - with precisely the effect (“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”) that Adam Smith would have predicted.
The "conspiracy against the public” which results from that “meeting” is the massive propaganda campaign promoting the fatuous conceit that journalist are objective - and the system of going along and getting along ideologically, on pain of having your journalism career “pecked to death” by charges of being “not a journalist, not objective.” Since journalism is the business of promoting bad news, journalism is hyper criticism of society, and critical of government for not being omnipotent and omnipresent. Thus, a party which promotes big government naturally joins itself at the hip to monopoly journalism.
The result - ideological homogeneity promoting government and condemning freedom in society - is precisely the same under the auspices of monopoly journalism as it would be under a regime of censorship by government.
I see two avenues for SCOTUS to ameliorate this situation. First, SCOTUS must find that wire service journalism is monopoly journalism - and abolish the wire services. That sound like heresy to anyone who thinks that the wire services are necessary to distribute the news quickly and widely - but the only rationale for allowing wire services to homogenize journalism is the cost of telegraphy bandwidth. When the wire services were created, that was a convincing rationale. In the Internet Age, OTOH . . .
Second, SCOTUS must find that monopoly journalism moots the arguments in favor of its 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan decision basically banning lawsuits by government officials for libel. The conservative majority on SCOTUS knows perfectly well that Sullivan - a case brought by a Southern Democrat against a single media outlet - is anomalous. In the real world, modern Democrats don’t get libeled - and Republicans, all to routinely, do. The effect of banning libel suits by government officials is, consequently, that Democrats are entitled not only to their own opinions but also to their own facts.