One fact - and one dictum by Adam Smith - are very difficult to refute:
- The fact is that any wire service is a virtual meeting of its members or subscribers. Most certainly that is true of the Associated Press and its members.
- The Adam Smith dictum is that
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.The ineluctable conclusion is that anyone who argues from, or argues for, the assumption that there is no such thing as a “conspiracy” among journalists is either naive himself, or thinks that you are naive.
But cut the journalists a small amount of slack: that conspiracy is the air they breathe, they are like the fish who will be the last one to discover water. Or like I was, once, in a rec league basketball game.
It happened that I had occasion to complain to the ref that “It’s getting a little rough in there.” My opponent groaned - and an instant’s reflection made me entirely sympathetic. In that league I was a power forward, and in that game the team we were playing was without its center/enforcer. So as it worked out, the most the other team could muster under the boards was a smallish forward - up against our center and a distinctly bigger forward. it probably was "getting a little rough in there” - but I was undoubtedly dishing out as good as I got, and more. And not even realizing it.
In the Warren Court’s 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, Justice Brennan asserted that "libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment.” In that reading, government officials are the danger, and a free press in need of protection. And certainly there was potential truth in that - in that the first eight amendments to the Constitution all enumerate rights which tyrannical governments had historically denied. And yet.
The initial absence of a bill of rights in the Constitution was neither an oversight nor an effort to subvert the rights of the people. In seeking to supplant the weak Articles of Confederation with the Constitution establishing a strong federal government, the Federalists had all the fish they could fry, without risking the reputation of their Constitution by allowing the perception that they were allowing for the weakening of anyone’s rights.
And yet the rights of the people were matters of common law, nowhere comprehensively codified. In that sense the demand of the Antifederalists for a bill of rights was potentially a poison pill - any such enumeration simply had to leave room for complaint of serious omissions. Indeed, the boundaries among the various rights routinely get resolved in court cases to this day, with no end in sight. Enumerating all rights in the Constitution simply was not a legitimate option. Thus, the Ninth Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.The right to compensation for libel is a Ninth Amendment right. But, Justice Brennan would argue, the First Amendment clearly established "freedom of the press.” That would have been correct if the First Amendment spoke of a general, absolute “freedom of the press.” Instead, 1A enshrines “the freedom of the press.” The freedom of the press, that is, which traditionally existed, as traditionally limited. Otherwise, libel would logically have been eliminated not only for political figures but for everyone. The fact that Sullivan preserved the right to freedom from libel for some (most) while denying it to others is a mark of judicial activism - of judges legislating.For the last half-century, we have lived under the Sullivan dispensation. It is no accident, comrades (the word a trophy of our victory in the Cold War), that Political Correctness has grown apace in that time. Without the discipline imposed by the realistic threat of libel damages, journalists are free to vent what they want people to believe, with less and less relation to that old-fashioned “truth” thing.
The journalism cartel allows no one to be called “objective,” save for its own membership. Indeed, it allows no member of the cartel to be called anything else. The journalism cartel allows no one to be called “liberal” - or “moderate” or “progressive” or “centrist” or any other label connotations political virtue - who does not assiduously go along and get along with the journalism cartel. So “liberals” do not get libeled. As a practical matter Sullivan prevents any court from adjudicating any fact brought before it solely to vindicate a truth inconvenient to the perspective of the journalism cartel. It thereby entitles “liberals” not only to their own opinions but to their own facts.
That is the very definition of political correctness. The entire Warren Court ruled incorrectly in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. Journalists - the people generally - have IMHO the right to express their own opinions as opinions. But not the people generally, and certainly not a cartel of journalists, have the right to damage reputations by expressing untruth as fact without diligence commensurate with the venue in which such untruth is expressed.
And journalists are liable to antitrust law just like anyone else.
“Half the truth is often a great lie” - Benjamin FranklinSince nobody ever tells the whole truth - “Ain’t nobody got time for that” - the attitude and perspective of the writer has to color any report.
The decision to withdraw rather than correct a story when the villain of the piece turns out to be a Democrat instead of a Republican simply reveals that the editor of the publication favors the Democrat Party. There’s no law against that - and there shouldn’t be, and under the First Amendment there can’t be. But.
The actual problem is the existence of the journalism cartel, spontaneously generated by the wire services and empowered by the Warren Court’s unanimous - unanimously wrong - 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision.
Objection to the claim that American journalism is a cartel is fatuous. Evidence which can be criticized as “anecdotal“ abounds, but what cannot be refuted is that the wire services constitute continual virtual meetings of all major US journalism. “Meetings” which began before the Civil War and are ongoing with not end in sight. The logical implication is drawn by Adam Smith: 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.” It is naive to believe that journalists whose entire culture is defined by meeting among themselves about business - and who belong to organizations with names like “Associated” Press or “United” Press International - would not take behavior which is actually “conspiracy against the public” for granted as unexceptionable “business as usual.”
The wire services and their member/subscriber outlets are wide open for antitrust suits or prosecution.
To see the “conspiracy against the public,” it is logical to evaluate the actual business model of journalism. Journalism is actually about bad news. Consequently journalism is systematically negative - which naturally tends to imply that “the government should do something” about one situation or another. Journalism is negative towards society, but claims to be objective. But claiming that “negativity is objectivity” is nothing if not a description of cynicism.
The cartel’s claim of objectivity has the effect of redefining “objectivity” to mean cynicism towards society (and naiveté towards government). The cartel systematically rejects applying the term “objective” to anyone outside the cartel - and systematically labels that member of the cartel “objective.” But the cynical conspiracy doesn’t end there; the cartel also redefines every politically positive adjective - starting with “liberal,” but including “centrist,” “moderate,” and “progressive” - to mean exactly what they make “objective” mean (differing from “objective" only in the usage the cartel will allow).
The cartel eliminates ideological competition among journalists. The Sullivan decision - which eliminates libel suits by Republican government officials (“liberals” obviously don’t get libeled) - entitles “liberals” and “objective journalists” not only to their own opinions but to their own facts. And that is the engine of Political Correctness; Republicans are denied any peaceable venue to establish facts not congenial to “liberals.”
The fallacy of the Sullivan decision is that it justifies itself with the claim that ‘'libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment.” One is tempted to take that at face value, but Antonin Scalia pointed out that The Bill of Rights was intentionally structured not to compromise the right to sue for libel. The purpose of the entire BoR was to assure everyone that the Constitution did not compromise any right; the great project of the creation of the strong Federal Government depended on the success of that project. The Ninth Amendment practically says exactly that, and the wording “the freedom . . . of the press” in the First Amendment refers to traditional freedom of the press as traditionally limited (by libel and pornography laws, for example).