That may or may not be the case, but I tend to believe it's mainly to have an outlet for straight up news.
Ah, yes, I remember “straight up news” - and the tooth fairy, as well.“Straight up news” isn’t - and never was. The First Amendment is not predicated on that assumption, and in fact stands as an impediment to the government assaying to guaranteed it.
Before the middle of the Nineteenth Century, newspapers were openly about the opinions of their printers. Some even had the name of a political party on their masthead. The origin of the “straight up news” conceit is the wire services generally and the Associated Press in particular. In the post-Civil War era, people became suspicious (very rightly) about the propaganda power of the AP. The AP responded to the questioning by asserting that it was a conduit for the newspapers which were its members - and (as was true at the time) everyone knew that newspapers mostly didn’t agree about anything. So, claimed the AP, the AP itself was “objective.”
The fallacy in that argument is that the AP “wire” was and is a continual virtual meeting of all its member newspapers. And, per - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
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 business of journalists is to interest the public. The consequence of asserting (with a massive propaganda campaign) that “journalists are objective” is to put the onus on journalists to avoid the appearance of “bias.” Being objective is a laudable goal but not a state of being. Attempting to be objective is hard work, involving self-scrutiny. Functioning as a member of a mutual admiration society, OTOH, is much easier. If all journalists go along, all journalists will get along - and “objectivity” simply becomes redefined as meaning in conformity with the consensus of journalists.The journalism cartel defines other terms for its own convenience as well. “Liberal,” “moderate,” “centrist,” or “progressive” all mean the self-same thing as “objective” - with the exception that the usage of “objective” is exclusively for journalists, and none of the other “synonyms” is ever applied to a journalist. That is, “objective journalist” is one word.
And, in the journalist’s conceit, “objective journalist” denotes membership in a priesthood - one putatively reified by the First Amendment. Such is implied in the Warren Court’s 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision, which asserted that
". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment”But that is clearly incorrect.Consider: the principal objection to ratification of the Constitution was the absence of a bill of rights within it, and the Federalists had to promise to add such by amendment in order to gain ratification. Thus, the Bill of Rights was a political obligation rather than a venue for adjusting the rights of the people. The first eight amendments enumerate rights which tyrants had historically abused to aggrandize themselves.
But as the Ninth Amendment
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.makes explicit, the “Bill of Rights” does not codify all the rights of the people. Germane to this discussion, the Bill of Rights does not mention the right to compensation for libel. At all. And yet compensation for libel, like prosecutions for pornography, were taken for granted as rights unaffected by the First Amendment until SCOTUS handed down the Sullivan decision.The Bill of Rights - emphatically including the First Amendment - was fundamentally conservative. The voters who ratified it did so on the understanding and intent that it did not change the right to sue for libel.
Some Republican should sue the AP and its membership - and perhaps all of wire service journalism - for systematic libel, in the teeth of Sullivan
Antonin Scalia pointed out that the (unanimous) Warren Court holding in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan that". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment”is bogus. Justice Scalia pointed out that there was no bill of rights in the unamended Constitution because the Ninth and Tenth AmendmentsThe enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.andThe powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.were implicit in that document. And also because the rights of the people were nowhere comprehensively enumerated (courts are after all still sorting that out 2&frac2; centuries later) and to assay to do so in a noncontroversial way would have been a fool’s errand. Scalia added that the first eight amendments enumerate only those rights which historically had been abused by tyrants.Scalia’s point was that freedom of speech and of the press already existed before the ratification of the First Amendment - and so did limitations such as laws against pornography. And, crucially, the wording of the First Amendment was crafted not to modify those limitations. That is what “the freedom of speech, or of the press” meant to the people who ratified the First Amendment. And nobody thought that the First Amendment modified libel law, from the Eighteenth Century all the way to the 1964 diktat of the Warren Court in Sullivan.
Sullivan blatantly violates the Ninth Amendment. Mr. Sullivan himself was not a Republican but a “Democrat.” The scare quotes signify that no present-day Democrat would associate with him, because he was a racist southern Democrat. But that nomenclature confusion aside, the reality is that Sullivan only affects conservatives - “liberals” don’t get libeled, for the simple reason that nobody whom the press is inclined to libel would ever be called “liberal” by the journalism cartel.