Words mean things - but what does the word "journalist" actually mean?Literally, "jour" means "day" - and a journalist meets a daily deadline (or shorter, in the case of "breaking news"). From that perspective, it used to bother me when Rush would say, "I am not a journalist." But on further consideration, I have decided that we are better off recognizing the inherent negatives of journalism:
- The deadline which defines journalism ineluctably produces superficiality. "There's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper."
- News inherently emphasizes the negative. "No news is good news" - because generally, good news "isn't news." If it's bad news when a house burns down, it must be good news when a house gets built - but whereas the destructive fire is a sudden surprise, the construction of the house is a gradual process which, as Abraham Lincoln suggested with his "framing timbers" allusion, should surprise no one. And therefore isn't news (actually, it probably will make the newspaper - in the form of a paid advertisement seeking a buyer for the house).
- News is inherently unrepresentative. "Man Bites Dog" is the headline the editor wants to print, and "Dog Bites Man" - i.e., whatever is usual - makes page 13 below the fold in the unlikely event that it's in the paper at all.
- Journalism as we know it is extremely biased. Here you would probably expect to hear a litany of examples, but instead I simply refer to the fact that every journalist promotes the conceit that all journalists are objective -and that belief in his own objectivity is the defining characteristic of the man who is not objective.
So I say, accept the fact that "these people" are indeed journalists, doing exactly what journalists do - which is, and ought to be seen as, disreputable.You will say, "but what about the First Amendment and freedom of the press?" To which I reply that freedom of the press is a wonderful idea, and we ought to try it. Journalism presumes to call itself "the press," as if it were a class separate from we-the-people. But in fact, under the Constitution there are only three subdivisions - the federal government, the state governments, and the people. People who don't own a press aren't a separate species from those who do - they simply are people who don't own a press yet. More than anything, the First Amendment reference to freedom of "the press" is supposed to mean that anyone who decides to spend the money for a press (and ink and paper) is allowed to do so.
Those who style themselves "the press" actually depend for their self-definiton on the scarcity and expense of presses, not the "freedom" thereof. If every Tom, Dick, and Harriet had a press, journalists calling themselves "the press" would be no big deal. And that is actually now the case. To all intents and purposes, FreeRepublic.com is a press, and you are able to read this posting (so be that JimRob and his moderators don't object) anywhere in the world.
But is FreeRepublic.com actually a "press" under the intent of the First Amendment, which was written long before the telegraph - let alone the Internet? Absolutely. First, because "the progress of science and useful arts" was contemplated by the framers of the Constitution:
Article 1 Section 8.Under what logical framework is progress in the technology of communication excluded from the Constitution? If the Ninth Amendment means anything at all
The Congress shall have power . . . 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 . . .Amendment 9the First Amendment is a floor rather than a ceiling on our rights - and freedom of "the press" does not mean censorship of other, later, communication technologies. Else, can the newswires be censored because the telegraph isn't a printing press?The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
How Business Travelers Contributed to USA Today's Decline (Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™)
Poynter Online ^ | September 5, 2010 | Adam Hochberg
the enemedia clobbered him for it.The record that was set in 1929 for the biggest stock market decline in one day was broken in 1987. But Ronald Reagan did nothing – and the media clobbered him for it.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry about the term "the media." It tickles my vanity, I admit, to think that no matter how smart the conservative commentator - T. Sowell, exhibit A - there is a gap in their logic which I know how to fill. Ann Coulter, Rush Limabaugh, Mark Levin, you name them, I'll show you where they express that same block in their thinking. When it comes to "the media," nobody follows the money.Thomas Sowell: Things go better when politicians do nothing
- First of all, "the media" isn't the problem, journalism is. Granted that movies and TV fiction are consistently tendentious, they follow, they don't lead. If journalism were conservative, those cowards would all be conservatives too. But even if not, they wouldn't be the problem they are, by any means, if journalism weren't putting its propaganda wind at their back. In any event nobody, least of all me, wants to even think about the censorship which would follow from any serious effort to control tendentiousness in fiction. The First Amendment is fine as is, we just have to think straight about its implications.
Censorship is off the table. Period. In fact, I argue for less censorship, not more.
- You're right then, Jaz, to modify the word "media" into something else, and something negative. But it seems shocking and revolting to people to understand journalism as intrinsically representing a problem for conservatives. Doesn't that mean that we must be in the wrong? By no means.
There are reasons why journalism - at least journalism as we have always thought of it - is inherently tendentious. Let me repeat that: journalism is inherently tendentious. It was not always so.
- Before the Civil War, that was not the case. Newspapers were famous for their opinionated natures - newspapers were about the opinions of their printers. Newspapers were tendentious in the founding era, and they have remained so ever since - but what is different now is that "journalism" speaks with a single voice.
- What can possibly have effected that transformation? What could have thrown all those competing voices into a Cousinart, reducing them all to leftist twaddle? I have considered the possibility that the high speed printing press did it, and that could have considerable merit. But when you get right down to it, there is a culprit hiding in plain sight with motive, opportunity, and the right timing. The thing that homogenized journalism is the telegraph. The telegraph, and the Associated Press.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices." - Adam SmithIn 1945 the Associated Press lost a case in the Supreme Court, which held that the AP was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Associated Press, whatever its obvious merits, also functions as a conspiracy against the public.
- The AP functions as a conspiracy against the public when it limits competition between journalists and journalism outlets. It does that by limiting its own membership, on the one hand, and by sustaining and coordinating one of the most massive propaganda campaigns in history - the one which promotes the fatuous conceit that all journalists are objective. That conceit is not merely fatuous, with no means of support other than repetition, it is actually self-negating in that belief in one's own objectivity is proof, not of objectivity but of its reverse. What is subjectivity, if not a belief in one's own objectivity?
Most of all, the claim of journalistic objectivity eliminates ideological competition - outside the backwater of the paper known as the "editorial page," which mostly exists to position the rest of the paper as being objective. The absence of ideological competition within journalism inevitably frees journalism to default to its own self interest, which is promotion of its own importance. And denigration of reality outside of its own interest, leading to the promotion of (journalism-influenced) government at the expense of individual initiative and private enterprise.
I said that I want less censorship, not more. McCain-Feingold is nothing but censorship - and it is no accident that it was journalism which was in the forefront of promoting its passage. Journalism, and the Democrat Party which is an adjunct of it (it makes more sense to think of the Democrat Party as following journalism, rather than leading and controlling it). When journalism calls itself "the press," it is planting the axiom that journalism has a monopoly on First Amendment freedom. But the Constitution has never supported the conception of any but two classes - the government and the people. First Amendment freedom from censorship is a right of the people. All of us, whether we own a printing press right now, or not.
- The signal merit of the Associated Press is the efficient use of the telegraph to spread news reports nationwide, and the conservation of communication bandwidth which that entails. But whereas telegraph lines were expensive and provided only a limited bandwith, in the era of the communications satellite and the fiber optic cable, bandwidth is dirt cheap.
In the Internet era, the useful work of the Associated Press is done. What remains of it is the mischief which it now, and always has, worked. The Associated Press should be sued into richly deserved oblivion.
Washington Examiner ^ | September 6, 2010 | Thomas Sowell