Its simple . . . from the founding era up to the Civil War era, newspapers were about the opinions of their printers, as much or more than about the news. What changed in the Civil War era? The advent of the telegraph and the Associated Press. And any other wire service you can name, the AP is just the biggest and most monopolistic of the bunch. The legitimate mission of the wire service is to economically share news over expensive telegraph bandwidth. But the wire service concomitantly functions as a continuous virtual meeting of the newspapers which belong to it - and therein lies the rub: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 NationsIn plain sight, the wire services - basically, the AP - functions as a conspiracy against the public by journalists. A conspiracy to promote journalists above the public by creating the impression that journalists are superior beings who are objective. But what is the journalist? journalists are critics rather than doers. The wire service journalist is an ordinary citizen telling you what went wrong when people other than journalists (and their acolytes) were in charge. Back in 1910, before the meaning of the word liberalism was inverted (in the 1920s, according to Safires New Political Dictionary), Theodore Rooseveltfamously asserted that"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . . who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds . . .In saying that, Roosevelt was articulating liberalism., as the word was then understood (and as it continued to be understood outside the US). The liberalism we are used to is the precise opposite of that; according to liberalism, the critic is the only one who counts, because nothing actually matters except PR. The perfect inversion of the credit belongs to the man in the arena is,If youve got a business, you didnt build that.Political correctness, AKA liberalism, is the natural thought process of the journalist. Everything has to be wrong to the extent that it is controlled or executed by people who work to a bottom line in an effort to win credit by deeds rather than words. The long and the short of the matter is that freedom of the press is subverted by wire services. Because the press is homogenized into a single entity, and the newspapers are no longer about the divergent opinions of the printers but about wire service copy. In this milieu you dont become a printer unless you are simpatico with wire service journalism. So we have the irony that our free press is not a defender of the First Amendment. In fact, our free press was the driving force behind campaign finance reform because it weakens the ability of others to compete with our unified free press in promoting or opposing candidates.Back when Senator Bill Bradley was promoting Campaign Finance Reform on the grounds that the poor mans soap box couldnt compete with the rich mans wallet, the Internet was in its infancy. But in reality, it is wire service journalism which is the rich mans wallet - and it has been since memory of living man runneth not to the contrary. And it is the Internet which is now the poor mans soap box. And even the ads by truly rich people like the Koch brothers cant compete on level ground with wire service journalism backed up by FCC broadcasting licenses.
It is a joke to take campaign finance regulation seriously as constitutionally legitimate. Campaign finance regulation is inimical to freedom of speech and of the press.
There is no such thing as a low risk, high reward strategy for a politician - except to be a liberal." The reason for that is simple; there is a notional distinction only, and no difference, between a liberal and an objective journalist. Journalism is criticism; journalists never are responsible for getting anything done, all they do is report what went wrong when others had authority. Consequently journalists are the natural political enemies of the people who actually try to do things.And journalists are the natural allies of anyone else whose forte is criticism. Therefore journalists assign to their fellow critics positive labels such as moderate, progressive, or liberal - labels which are actually descriptive of those whom they malign as conservative).
All major journalism outlets have behaved in this manner ever since the advent of the Associated Press in the mid-to-late Nineteenth Century. The wire services in general, and the AP in particular, transformed Nineteenth Century journalism from a cacophony of independent political voices into a politically homogenous left-wing institution. Which it has been, since memory of living man runneth not to the contrary.
All Campaign Finance Reform laws are based on the fatuous premise that journalism is objective. The Federal Election Commission is unconstitutional. Not only so, but since journalism is highly tendentious, and since there is no ideological diversity in wire service journalism, the promotion of journalism in broadcasting in the public interest is also unconstitutional.