Reporters and good questions

Reporters are supposed to hunt for facts, to search for the truth, and their best tool is a good question.

Knowing a good question and knowing how and when to ask it are skills prized by the wisest members of society from Talmudic times in Judea to the philosophers of ancient Greece and China.

As Hillel the Elder, the philosopher Socrates, and many other wise thinkers knew, great truths reveal themselves to those who ask good questions.

Making a bold statement or throwing an insult or a challenge will get you an opportunity for a photo -- a “photo-op,” but asking a good question gives you the chance for something deeper and longer-lasting.

As the great New Yorker cartoonist and humorist James Thurber once wrote: “It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”

At White House press briefings, you often hear questions from those who think they already know all the answers. Not surprisingly, those who already “know the answers” do not know how to frame good questions.

The bottom line is that a press conference takes the president’s time, and if it is nothing more than an occasion to hurl insults at the president of the United States, that is worse than useless. It insults everyone who voted for him, and even thoughtful people who voted for someone else but who accept the fact that their candidate lost.
Acosta lost his pass. That would be the end of it, except that all the other journalists also wanted the president to be smeared on TV. Which simply means that we have a de facto monopoly in journalism, and ideological no diversity.
The First Amendment explicitly forbids the government to regulate journalism any more tightly than it was being regulated - i.e., by libel law - at the time of the passage of the amendment. But the purpose of that ban was to protect ideological heterogeneity - which flourished vigorously in the Founding Era - from being suppressed. The authors of the First Amendment could not foresee that journalists would homogenize themselves. So the First Amendment does not forbid it.
But that is different from saying that the First Amendment protects institutions which homogenize journalism, just because they are non governmental. The issue of monopoly industries was addressed legislatively in 1890 by the Sherman AntiTrust Act. On its face, there is no reason to suppose that Sherman does not apply to journalists, and every reason to believe that the people have the right to a fair opportunity to hear all sides of public issues. And that, the Associated Press and its members deny the public. The members of the AP occupy the space of independent journalism, but in reality they are all in cahoots.
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. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
The members of the AP have been in a virtual meeting about their business for over a century and a half, and in consequence journalists have no consciousness that they are not entitled to bombard the public with propaganda in favor of big government and freely libel anyone who opposes their viewpoint. The AP must be sued into oblivion, and its members brought up short by notice that systematic libel against the opponents of big government is actually against the law, and actionable because NY Times v. Sullivan was wrongly decided in 1964.
The NY Times v. Sullivan decision was based on the assumption that since the First Amendment prevented the government from homogeinizing journalism, journalism was ideologically diverse and if one newspaper attacked a public figure, another would defend him. Since journalism homogenized itself via the AP, that is grievously wrong - if one newspaper attacks a Republican, all the others pile on with abandon. If a newspaper unfairly attacks a Democrat - well, that doesn’t happen. We all know that if a politician gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar, his party affiliation will be in the lede - unless he’s a Democrat, in which case that affiliation is more likely to be omitted from the story entirely.

Thanks for your post and conveying your expertise on this subject.

I personally don’t believe that suspending his press pass for being obnoxious, disrespectful, and argumentative as well as his treatment of the intern in this incident would be prohibited under the First Amendment, especially after Acosta’s prior behavior leading up to this, I may well be wrong and correct me if I am.

Acosta was banned for bad behavior from the White House pressers but CNN, other journalists and other networks have not been, I believe CNN can send another journalist if they so desire.

Of course like Reily mentioned, why not just do away with public pressers and go to another system such as submitting questions in writing or something similar and answering in public?

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