Sulzberger Is Right (And Wrong)

I never thought I would write this, but the publisher of The New York Times, A.G. Sulzberger, is right. Sulzberger wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in response to President Trump's claim that his newspaper committed "treason" by publishing a story about U.S. efforts to compromise Russia's power grid should Moscow again try to meddle in U.S. elections. The Times says it consulted National Security officials who raised no objections to its publication.

It is one thing for the president to criticize sloppy, inaccurate and biased reporting by the media, including The New York Times. It is quite another to use such an incendiary word as "treason," whose definition does not fit what the president sees as a crime: "the offense of acting to overthrow one's government or to harm or kill its sovereign; a violation of allegiance to one's sovereign or to one's state; the betrayal of a trust or confidence; breach of faith; treachery."

Before becoming a columnist, I was a reporter for local TV stations and one network. In the early '70s, during a pro-Vietnam War demonstration in Washington, I was called a communist by one of the demonstrators, simply because I had an NBC News logo on my microphone.

Hostility toward the press for failing to report, or ignoring, what many conservatives believe to be true (but isn't always) has been around for some time. It has grown worse during the Trump administration.

It might help lower the temperature if what is collectively known as "the media" engaged in serious introspection. Why is public distrust of journalists so high?

Columbia Journalism Review reports on results of a new Knight Foundation and Gallup poll: "A majority of those who were surveyed said they had lost trust in the media in recent years, and more than 30 percent of those who identified themselves as being on the conservative end of the spectrum said they had not only lost faith in the media, but they 'expect that change to be permanent.' According to a separate Gallup poll from earlier this year that tracked trust in major institutions, newspapers and television news were among the lowest, exceeded only by Congress."

This is dangerous, not only for journalism, which is seeing the decline of newspapers and an increase in staff layoffs, but also because a vibrant press is crucial to a strong nation, as the Founders believed.

The response to this and similar surveys over decades has been a collective shrug. There is no self-examination by the media and no change. Campaigns for "diversity" are about hiring more women and minorities, not ideological balance. Consumers of media -- especially religious and conservative people -- view the press as hostile to their core values.

Journalism is a business. Think of it this way. If you owned a gas station and were losing customers because gas prices were too high, the lighting was poor so that people felt unsafe at night and the restrooms were dirty, would you allow these conditions to persist? Would you even if a competitor opened a station across the street with lower prices, cleaner restrooms and better lighting? Not if you wanted to stay in business, you wouldn't.

Too many in the media are like the guy who owns the substandard gas station, ignoring complaints about their performance. The predictable results are fewer readers of newspapers and lower ratings for television news programs.

What should frighten all of us in this latest survey is the number of people who say they expect their loss of faith in the media to be permanent.

Does any other business so disrespect its current customers and not try to win back the disaffected? While A.G. Sulzberger is right to criticize the president for his incendiary remark, he should also consider putting his own house in order, asking former readers what can be done to rebuild trust, not only for the good of the profession, but for the greater good of the country.

“This is dangerous, not only for journalism, which is seeing the decline of newspapers and an increase in staff layoffs, but also because a vibrant press is crucial to a strong nation, as the Founders believed.”

The “press” is being used here as a nasty lie. The nasty lie is that the “press” is a special class of people, with special rights and privileges.

Let’s revisit what the Constitution actually says about the “press”:

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

We can see plainly that the “press” is referring to the printing press—a machine.

Just like speech, EVERYONE has the right to disseminate his or her thoughts and ideas in writing by the use of the printed word. We do not need to amend the Constitution to extend the meaning here to electronically printed and published words. The computer, Internet, text messaging, electronic books and magazines, etc. all fall under this same category.

What all of us here post on Free Republic is every bit as much part of a “free press” as anything published by the NYT, as well as outlets that lean slightly more conservative, such as Fox News.

Liberals have taken the concept of freedom of the press and turned it on its head. They advocate the importance of a select group of privileged people to be able to control the narrative. Coincidentally, those people are pre-selected by powerful political and financial interests.

Unfortunately, even Town Hall and Cal Thomas, though not liberal, seem to be vulnerable to the deception.

A “vibrant press” is Free Republic, not NYT. And the NYT is full of treasonous, anti-American Socialists and Communists. Has been for a long time.

Journalism as we know it is monopolistic. Adam Smith would have considered it miraculous if it were not: " 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.” And the wire services in general and the AP in particular are virtual meetings of all major journalism outlets - “meetings” which have been ongoing since before the Civil War (at least in the case of the AP).

The resulting “conspiracy against the public” is journalism’s massive propaganda campaign to the effect that “journalists are objective.” This is a vicious fallacy:

objectivity is a laudable goal but not a state of being. You have to really challenge yourself in order to make a good-faith effort at objectivity - and why would you do that when you have been anointed by your peers with the label of objectivity? Just take their word for it - and vouch for their objectivity in your turn.

In reality, journalism is systematically negative - knowingly so. “If it bleeds, it leads,” and all that. Thus, a claim that “negativity is objectivity” - and that is cynicism. The trouble with cynicism is that is not the absence of faith but faith in the opposite of whatever one is cynical about. Thus, if Thomas Paine is correct that government is necessary only to the extent of failures in society, government is in a real sense the opposite of society - and cynicism towards society is naiveté towards government. And that combination is the necessary and sufficient condition for advocacy of socialism.

Any politician has the right to associate himself with any news organization’s political perspective - and vice versa. Democrats naturally associate with cynicism towards society/naiveté towards government, and therefore there is a symbiotic relation between Democrats and journalists. Thus, the notorious “MSM.” In the absence of ideological diversity in journalism, there is no reason to expect anything else.

There is a legal right which gets systematically violated under those conditions; the right of Republicans not to be libeled. It is not to be thought that the Constitution abolished libel law, in principle or (up ’til 1964) in practice. 1A does not simply refer to “freedom of the press” but “the freedom of the press” - the freedom with limits for libel and pornography which existed before the Constitution was ratified. In 1964 the Warren Court got all excited about “protecting the First Amendment” and ruled (New York Times v. Sullivan) that government officials “almost” never can sue. That intimidates politicians (read, Republicans) from ever suing for libel. Sullivan was a unanimous decision, but then, Morrison v. Olson would have been unanimous too, without freshman Justice Scalia - and Sullivan is just as wrong as Morrison was.

The result of Sullivan has been Political Correctness - has been that Democrat are entitled, not only to their own opinions but to their own facts. A Judge Kavanaugh can be mercilessly libeled without consequence. Ditto President Trump. Some Republican is simply going to have to challenge the Sullivan decision, on the basis of what I’ve said above, and other things, which are true but were not before the Court in 1964. We know of at least two SCOTUS justices who would be interested in hearing the argument . . .

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