Not sure how to accomplish this. Florida had passed laws to address many of these issues but election officials just find a judge to let them have their way. If unable to do that, they just ignore the law without consequence. Attempts to get them to comply are met with claims of “voter suppression” which are amplified by the press.
That is easy to fix...just change the legal laws so that election issues can only be sent to the Supreme Court for consideration...period!!! Voting in the USA has become the joke of the world!!!
. . . which simply emphasizes that without reform of journalism, nothing else will have a big effect. Journalism reform is mandatory and, fortunately, possible. Give SCOTUS the right case, and it can do it."But wouldnt that run afoul of the Constitution? What about the First Amendment?
My answer is that 1A intends to assure that the people will have access to an unrestricted (other than by libel law, which 1A legitimately does not repeal) variety of expressed opinion. The way it assays to do so is by prohibiting the government to restrict the variety of opinions published/spoken. But the issue now is that the wire services in general and the AP in particular have done what 1A forbids the government to do. The AP (primarily) has created a monopoly on the expression of political opinion. Not in the editorial pages of the nation - not completely, at any rate - but by systematically libeling Republicans and stonewalling news uncongenial to Democrats in the news portion of the paper.It is not journalism alone, but also the FCC enabling broadcast journalism which postures as objective, and educators - mostly government sponsored - who assist in that same project. In fact, SCOTUS itself fell for the con in its 1964 NY Times v. Sullivan decision - which made it difficult for politicians to sue for libel on the theory that if some news outlets attacked a politician, others would defend him. But, empirically, if one news outlet attacks a Republican, the others pile on with abandon. And in an instance when a news outlet attacks a Democrat, that journalist will be read out of the fraternity as not a journalist, not objective.
My conclusions are that
- the AP, perhaps all wire services, are standing violations of the Sherman AntiTrust Act and, given that their prime virtue is to conserve expensive - in the Internet age, dirt cheap - telegraphy bandwidth, their ideologically anticompetitive effects make their continued existence unacceptable. They are not too big to fail anymore, and the First Amendment does not protect their anticompetiveness.
- the NY Times v. Sullivan decision is bad precedent because based on the assumption that the First Amendment accomplished its objective, whereas in fact the application of Sherman is historically necessary but not certainly sufficient to reinstate ideological diversity in published/broadcast opinion.
- PBS/NPR are illegitimate, and the FCC must be enjoined not to place the imprimatur of the government on so-called objective journalism.
SCOTUS can do it all - perhaps not in a single case, but the facts and the law are in place.