Posted on 11/23/2007 7:29:12 AM PST by Milhous
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Though journalism as we know it didn’t exist when the First Amendment was written, today’s reporters don’t hesitate to make the case for their importance by citing a famous Thomas Jefferson quote. Steve Boriss contends that mainstream news is the opposite of what the third president thought it should be.
By Steve Boriss
Many journalists are fond of telling us how central they are to our democracy. Some cite Thomas Jefferson’s quote, “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” These self-important boasts by journalists deserve to be challenged. Modern journalism is not only different from what Jefferson intended, it is almost completely the opposite in three fundamental ways: the role of the press, the voices that matter, and the importance of opinions.
1. The role of the press — Jefferson’s vision for the role of the press was completely integrated with his vision for the country. He believed that each of us is born with God-given rights that must not be taken away — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The potential thief he had in mind was government. Accordingly, he thought that the single most important role for newspapers was to serve as a “fence” to prevent government from encroaching on individual rights.
But modern journalism has hopped this fence by tending to side with the government establishment, often protecting it from people and corporations. Jon Ham notes that newspapers typically feature government as an enlightened class and make use of a “standard journalism template that the private sector has questionable motives, i.e., profit, whereas the public sector’s motives are pure, i.e., altruistic.” PBS’ Bill Moyers now tours the country lashing out against the dangers of too much corporate control over the news media, while singing the virtues of government-controlled NPR and PBS. This anti-corporate attitude has its roots in Marxist, not Jeffersonian thought. As ABC’s John Stossel points out, corporations do not have nearly the same power as government entities, which are “coercive monopolies that spend other people’s money taken by force.”
2. The voices that matter — Jefferson’s insistence on a Bill of Rights was also consistent with his vision for America. It reaffirmed the equal rights of all, and the First Amendment explicitly guaranteed to everyone freedom of expression to protect themselves from government encroachment on their rights.
But modern journalism has so confused us about the true meaning of “freedom of the press” that only a few outside of intellectually honest constitutional scholars can tell you what it really means. Despite all we have been taught, the phrase “freedom of the press” was not intended to highlight special freedoms of certain people known as “the press.” It refers to the freedom of all people to use the printing press. Just as the immediately preceding words grant all of us the right to speak our minds, these words grant each of us the right to publish what is on our minds. In his letters, Jefferson regularly referred to “free presses” — i.e., free use of printing presses. When the First Amendment was written, there were no journalists as we think of them now. Newspapers were produced mostly in one-man shops by those whose trade was “printer” - not “reporter,” “journalist,” “columnist,” or “editor.” It would be another 30 years before America had its first full-time reporter. Jefferson wanted newspapers filled with all of our voices, not just those who happen to make a living writing news.
3. The importance of opinions — What Jefferson really wanted in news was opinion and debate — a multitude of voices competing in a freewheeling marketplace of ideas. He wrote “nature has given to man no other means of sifting out the truth whether in religion, law or politics” than “the fair operation of attack and defense.” He himself threw his hat in the ring by founding his own highly partisan newspaper to attack Federalists like Alexander Hamilton.
Instead, modern journalism has attempted to create for itself a faux-scientific world, where facts are sacred, opinions are contaminants, and debate is a waste of time. Allegedly, their methods are “objective” and their content is a pure stream of verified truths. But, new media has taught us that mainstream media often do not get the story straight and regularly masquerade center-left opinion as singular truths. Journalists also strangely insist that the public has an incontestable “right to know” these “truths,” and tend to recklessly dismiss the sometimes real risks that their exposure might threaten the survival of our Jeffersonian government at the hands of enemies who do not protect individual rights.
Clearly, when Jefferson said he would prefer “newspapers without a government” to “government without newspapers,” he did not imagine a journalism that was favorably disposed to government and that presented only one view. No doubt, he would have preferred “bloggers without a government” even more.
Steve Boriss blogs at The Future of News. He works for Washington University in St. Louis, where he is Associate Director of the Center for the Application of Information Technology (CAIT) and teaches a class called “The Future of News.”
Bttt
Modern Journalism is simply the political arm of tyranny. It has nothing to do with free speech.
mark
More and more I am finding cases on the ‘Net where folks are actually telling the truth!
Three times already just this month—all bloggers...
“Instead, modern journalism has attempted to create for itself a faux-scientific world, where facts are sacred, opinions are contaminants, and debate is a waste of time.”
Only, possibly, when I was a child and with increasingly less applications as each year has gone by were “facts” ever “sacred” to journalism and “opinions” held as “contaminants”.
Every front page report in the NYSlimes is no more than an editorial masquerading as “news”, and if any fact is allowed to appear in the text that would refute the editorial bent of the heading or subheading (rarely happens), it is mentioned as if in-passing and inconsequential, lest the opinion of the times be destroyed by the facts.
Understanding that as clearly as we do about modern journalism, I must dismiss the rest of the article as misguided, even if well intended.
Yet New York Times editor Kate Phillips seems to still treat opinions as contaminants as evidenced by her recent disclosure that, "I almost wish we could go back to the days when we never heard their voices."
“Yet New York Times editor Kate Phillips seems to still treat opinions as contaminants as evidenced by her recent disclosure that, “I almost wish we could go back to the days when we never heard their voices.”
It is only others opinions, not hers or her bosses that concern her. To her and her bosses THEIR opinions are far from a contaminant - they are a requirement.
Thanks for the ping; this is a fine piece - short and sweet.Despite all we have been taught, the phrase “freedom of the press” was not intended to highlight special freedoms of certain people known as “the press.” It refers to the freedom of all people to use the printing press. Just as the immediately preceding words grant all of us the right to speak our minds, these words grant each of us the right to publish what is on our minds. In his letters, Jefferson regularly referred to “free presses” — i.e., free use of printing presses. When the First Amendment was written, there were no journalists as we think of them now. Newspapers were produced mostly in one-man shops by those whose trade was “printer” - not “reporter,” “journalist,” “columnist,” or “editor.” It would be another 30 years before America had its first full-time reporter. Jefferson wanted newspapers filled with all of our voices, not just those who happen to make a living writing news.
I always wondered, naively in retrospect, how we got from the openly opinionated journals of the founding era to the covertly, and hence extremely, partisan journalism of today. It is tempting to think of some past golden age when journalism actually was "objective" as it has sold itself - but in fact that time passed before it ever even started.Undoubtedly the high speed printing press contributed to the development of the hyperpartisan "objective" press. That dates to around 1830, give or take, and accords with the allusion to a 30 year interval between the founding of the country and the advent of "objective" jouralism. But the real transformation seems to have occurred with the advent of telegraphy, and of the (1848) founding of the Associated Press. The AP raised exactly the same question that broadcasting raised - monopoly control of information, and raised it even more strongly than the licensed broadcasting of news did. And so the Associated Press raised its defense - it was, it claimed, necessarily objective because the association included newspapers of all political perspectives.
But the reality is that no mortal is objective, and that the claim of objectivity is nothing more than an expression of extreme subjectivity. The fundamental bias of journalism is that journalism is important - and, since journalism is pure talk, that talk is more important than action. That bias is the negation of the Theodore Roosevelt dictum that
It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . .Journalism is biased against the person who takes action and in favor of the person who criticizes him. The terms "liberal" and "conservative" in the political context are merely expressions of the approval of those fellow critics to whom the labels are applied by journalists.
“Instead, modern journalism has attempted to create for itself a faux-scientific world, where facts are sacred, opinions are contaminants, and debate is a waste of time.”Only, possibly, when I was a child and with increasingly less applications as each year has gone by were “facts” ever “sacred” to journalism and “opinions” held as “contaminants”.
Even if you are older than I (and me retired), I doubt that you are old enough to have seen the day when reality was sacred to journalism. Journalism is constantly selling the idea that journalism (that is, mere criticism of those who actually do things) is and not the doing of things, is what is important. Indeed the idea that journalism's interest is identical to the public interest is a planted axiom in much discussion by journalism.Every front page report in the NYSlimes is no more than an editorial masquerading as “news”, and if any fact is allowed to appear in the text that would refute the editorial bent of the heading or subheading (rarely happens), it is mentioned as if in-passing and inconsequential, lest the opinion of the times be destroyed by the facts.
Understanding that as clearly as we do about modern journalism, I must dismiss the rest of the article as misguided, even if well intended.
I can agree with you only to the extent that the writer should have included scare quotes in his sentence,Instead, modern journalism has attempted to create for itself a faux-scientific world, where "facts" are sacred, "opinions" are contaminants, and debate is a waste of time.In claiming to be objective, journalism effectively claims not only that everything it says is true, but that whatever it does not say is unimportant. We have all seen journalism putting forth "facts" which don't happen to be true - the salient example being the "Killian memos" which Dan Rather promoted as true documents from 1973 when they patently were created by Microsoft Word, almost certainly in 2004 but certainly much later than their putative dates of origin. So scare quotes around "facts" would certainly have been appropriate. But the really extensive tendentiousness of journalism lies in what journalism deems "not news."In light of the fact that
Half the truth is often a great lie. - Benjamin Franklin,what journalism does not say - which journalists themselves would freely admit is far more extensive than what they in fact do report - is presumptively of great significance. Journalists demand that we presume that what they do not report is not "a great lie," because they cannot prove that, and in the nature of things cannot possibly prove that negative. But the fact that something could not be proven true even if it were the gospel truth does not prove that it is in fact true. In fact it might be possible to prove it false.By claiming to be objective, journalists demand that we accept their "facts" - and their silences - as dispositive. They are claiming that debate is a waste of time because debating us is beneath them. And that is what the article was saying. It is an excellent article.
Very good article. Thanks for posting. Thanks for the ping c_I_c. Great discussion. Thanks to all.
BTTT
The Third President would probably toss his cookies if he'd heard what I did while watching Entertainment Weekly and TV Land's 50 Most Influential TV Icons, where an ABC News correspondent had the audacity to say Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's Daily Show was a better Journalist than actual Journalists out there in the field.
...If this is indeed the case, than Modern Journalism as we know it is in serious trouble...and oh, did I mention this list of 'Icons' did not include a single individual from Fox News Channel?
Surprise, surprise.
As the article notes, there were no "actual journalists" in Jefferson's time.
Just isolated individuals, called "printers," who weren't electronically linked. They often were weeklies, and some didn't have a deadline at all - the printer just went to press when he decided to. They were a lot like modern-day local freebie weeklies.Our trouble is not that "actual journalists" don't live up to their hype - it is that we believe their hype when we should know better.
No kidding...The more I think about it, these people are nothing more than a bunch of pampered Prima Donnas with an over inflated view of themselves. And besides (as we all know by now), the MSM only tells America what it wants to tell, and not what we need to know.
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