Having the government give the MSM special priviledges is something the MSM has pushed for decades. They were all for the first amendment as long as they had a lock on the media. Now that they have some competition, not so much.U.S. District Judge Marco A. Hernández ruled that “investigative blogger” Crystal L. Cox “was not a journalist and cannot claim the protections afforded to mainstream reporters and news outlets.”
Can we examine the nomenclature "main stream media" (MSM) a bit critically, please?
- A television channel or a magazine or newspaper or radio station is a medium. Article 1 Section 8 the Constitution provides explicit congressional authority
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 discoveries . . .The invention of high speed printing presses, the telegraph, phonographs, radio, movies, TV, the Internet, and so forth are all therefore condoned by the Constitution. Such "media" are in principle content neutral. We should have no argument against "media" of communication, as such, so railing against "the media" is really basically stupid. Therefore protection of "the freedom of . . . the press" should be understood as covering all media of communication.
- To suggest that fiction be censored, other than that parents should control content to which their children are exposed, is anathema. If lefties make good fiction writers, we will just have to live with that. So that leaves nonfiction. And again, nonfiction books don't have to be right in every particular to have some or even a lot of wisdom in them. So censoring nonfiction books is also a nonstarter, constitutionally and practically.
Any legitimate brief must therefore be directed at topical nonfiction - i.e., journalism.
- In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, newspapers were notoriously fractiously independent, and were more like modern opinion journals than like modern newspapers. Something changed the newspapers into the homogenous "press" of today. IMHO the reason for that change is bound and gagged, and lying on our doorstep - the reason is the telegraph. The telegraph, and The Associated Press. The AP has its roots smack in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, and by the Twentieth Century it was in full flower. Meaning, that by then the economic incentives of the use of the AP had by then driven the "fractious independence" of the various newspapers into the ghetto known as the editorial page.
- The AP based its claim to objectivity on the fact that its members notoriously did not agree on much of anything - but over the course of a generation or two wire service journalism destroyed that fractiousness almost completely. What remains is the overarching self interest of journalists. The standard rules of journalism which are promoted as "objectivity" are transparently designed not for objectivity but for selling newspapers. "If it bleeds, it leads." "'Man Bites Dog,' not 'Dog Bites Man.'" "Always make your deadline." These things have nothing to do with objectivity and everything to do with protecting the journalist's job by selling newspapers. If you think about it, subjectivity - the natural tendency of anyone to see things from a self-interested point of view - is only to be expected. And while it is possible to attempt objectivity, it is not possible to know that you are being objective.
The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . .Notice, dear reader, not only how apt the above Adam Smith quote is to the point, but how quoting it changes the discussion from "objectivity" to wisdom. And I contend that a journalist's claim "objectivity" cannot be distinguished logically from a claim of wisdom. I would welcome a serious discussion of that point from anyone who discerns a true logical distinction. Absent any serious debate on that point, this has a very significant implication. Because a claim of superior wisdom is precisely the origin of the term, "sophistry." So when the wire service journalist claims that journalism is objective, he is engaging in sophistry. Another way of reaching the same conclusion is to note that the first action of one who is seriously attempting to be objective is to try to discern, and openly declare, any reasons why he might not be objective - and that such self-abnegation is precisely what the journalist who is claiming to be objective is not doing. Thus, we see that your "objective" wire service journalist is not even trying to be objective.It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity,
and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith
- As I noted earlier, the AP based its claim to objectivity on the fact that its members notoriously did not agree on much of anything - but over the course of a generation or two wire service journalism destroyed that fractiousness almost completely. What remains is the overarching self interest of journalists. The self interest of journalists is to make journalism profitable. Profitable, and influential. Journalists "want to make a difference." Journalists can influence politicians, journalists can influence government. Thus, the bigger government is, the more influence journalism has. Journalists tell you who goes along and gets along with journalists by awarding such people positive labels, and tarring their opponents with negative labels.
Dear Reader, the Constitution is a progressive, liberal document. One of the (relatively few) enumerated powers of Congress is justified on the basis that it was expected "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." And the mission of the Constitution. summarized in last objective listed in its preamble, is to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." So America was founded as a progressive, liberal nation. A progressive, liberal nation is not a conservative nation. Indeed, I recall a quotation in a history book I read (in the dim past) in school, in which a Briton criticized the Constitution and the government it created as "all sheet and no anchor." Yet the very people who want to preserve liberty and the opportunity for progress which liberty provides get labelled "conservative" - and the very people who would restrict oil drilling, coal mining, genetic engineering of crops, etc. are called "liberal" or "progressive." "Moderation" is a classical virtue, which the immodest people who claim to be objective use as a label for people most like themselves, who want the scope and size of government to be anything but moderate. They always want more.
The only positive label which journalists apply in politics but do not give their friends is the one they reserve soley for themselves - "objective." Unless of course one of their "liberal" friends (George Stephanopolis, poster boy) changes hats and gets a job as a journalist colleague. Then, without any change of attitude on his part, he instantaneously becomes "objective."
- The conclusion of the matter is that the government should not define "journalists" at all, but its working definition is that which journalism itself adheres to - that a journalist never questions the objectivity of any other journalist. Any law which gives special treatment to journalism's "borg" sets them apart from the people, and illegitimately establishes them as a sort of priesthood, in contravention rather than in furtherance of the intent of the First Amendment.
Do you mean movies and TV shows and books? No, I didn't think so. Why then do we talk about "media" when what we actually are concerned about is journalism?Wire Service journalism is actually the culprit. Certainly, wire services came into being at the right time to be the culprit; the Granddaddy of them all - the Associated Press - began life in 1848 as the New York Associated Press. Before that era, newspapers were about the opinions of their printers as much as, or more than, they were about news reports not otherwise available to the public. The advent of the AP was a game changer - suddenly there was this expensive newfangled device which poured out more news stories than would fit in your paper - most of which told about events too far away, and too recent, to be available to the general public anywhere but in the newspaper. But, what to make of reports written by reporters whom the editor of the newspaper didn't even know, much less employ? Was the public to take reports off the wire as mere rumors, or as fact? Obviously the way to maximize the value of the expensive newswire asset was to promote news off the wire as being objective.
The newspapers of the day were famous for disagreeing about just about everything, and the member newspapers of the Associated Press were the source of most of the reporting which came in over the wire. The AP exploited that public perception by saying that news over the wire came from reporters from all perspectives, not just one newspaper - and therefore AP journalism was objective. That might have seemed to have some merit in the 1800s - but the trouble, as we now so readily observe, is that the AP now takes up so much of any given newspaper as to moot the differences in perspective of the editors of that paper. So most papers don't sell their editorial opinion - the Wall Street Journal being a notable exception - but basically sell their gloss on the same AP stories which differs mostly cosmetically from one paper to the next. Thus, the newspapers stopped being independent of each other. So that now, if you've seen one newspaper you've basically seen them all.
And the "all" newspapers that you've seen? They all reflect, not their claimed objectivity, but the desires of journalists as a group. Those desires center on the profitability and influence of journalism itself. Journalists want to have jobs and be paid - and they want to "make a difference." Journalism can influence voters, and thereby can influence government. Would you expect journalism to maximize its overall influence by urging for less of what is thinks it controls, or more? As we observe, journalism lines up behind more government. Providing a propaganda wind at the backs of politicians who promote the same thing.
What will it take to destroy the Associated Press? I don't know how to literally destroy it, without doing violence to the First Amendment which would be very foolish IMHO. But, it is AFAIK a fact that the AP was found to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act way back in 1945. Only trouble, then the mission of the AP was "too big to fail." The mission of the AP was to transmit news while conserving scarce long-distance bandwidth. Does that sound like a critical mission to you today? Of course not - bandwidth is now dirt cheap. You might not be able literally to destroy the AP, but you could transform it if you sued it as a monopoly, and demanded that it divest itself of its membership (i.e., required its members to become truly competitive again), allowing the AP to reconstitute itself as a global outlet of public news, rather than a broker of news to the nominally competitive but actually cooperative news outlets we have today.Never again should a Dan Rather promote a pack of lies and, when called on it, double down, secure in the knowledge that no journalist ever questioned the objectivity of another journalist, and lived (remained respected as a journalist) to tell the tale.