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The journalists of the establishment media see themselves not merely as people who approach politics from different first principles than do Donald Trump and his supporters. They see themselves as members of a superior tribe that is justified in taking any action to protect its territory and members.
But “superior tribes” are forbidden by the Constitution. We have neither official priests nor titles of nobility.
So, what do we do with creatures like this? The First Amendment ^{as interpreted by SCOTUS in its 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan} allows them to say and write absurd and malicious things.
The Sullivan decision was unanimous, but it seems quaint today. Of course no Court is likely to overturn Sullivan explicitly, now or in the future. But the plain fact is that it is an artifact of a different time. After the 1964 election Barry Goldwater complained about “the referees,” which now are called “the media” - and in simple fact are just: journalists. But the systematic assault on “bias in the media" did not go viral until later. Reed Irvine’s “Accuracy in Media” wasn’t founded until 1969, and I didn’t subscribe to the AIM Report until after the election of Jimmy Carter. Before that, I confess, I used to listen to the news assiduously. After a year of that, I was convinced - and became systematically skeptical of journalism.
After the 50^th anniversary of the Sullivan decision it is time and past time to critique that ruling, and the inferences drawn from it. To give the Warren Court its due, Sullivan is a full-throated defense of the First Amendment, and the decision had to go against the plaintiff. The problem with Sullivan is the facts which were not presented, and in the inferences which are clear in hindsight only. First, the facts. Plaintiff was neither a Republican nor, as presently conceived by the party, a Democrat. He was a southern Democrat. An unsympathetic character to any right-thinking New York Times reader of that era, or now. And as unsympathetic to Republicans as well as Democrats. An absolutely perfect target for the Warren Court. And, in contradistinction to the planted axiom of this article, there was no claim by the plaintiff that he was being ganged up on by a journalistic cabal. He complained only about the decision of the Times to publish an ad - one which did not so much as explicitly name the plaintiff.
The explicit purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from unifying the newspapers on the side of the government. But logically, the implied purpose is to prevent newspapers from unifying, not only on the side of the government, but from unifying, period. What good is it if the government does not unify journalism, but journalism unifies itself - and on the side, not of the government as such, but of a political party dedicated to the proposition that society is deeply flawed and corrupt, and that therefore government should expand without limit? That plainly is the situation we face, and nobody brought that fact before SCOTUS in 1964.
Before the 1844 advent of the telegraph and the 1848 advent of the first wire service (the AP), newspapers were fractiously independent, and were famous for not agreeing with each other a lot. But over the succeeding decades, journalists were in the position of conducting a virtual meeting over the AP “wire.” And
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 Nations (1776)
The "conspiracy against the public” projected by Adam Smith inevitably followed:
The journalists of the establishment media . . . see themselves as members of a superior tribe that is justified in taking any action to protect its territory and members.
Another way of putting it is that journalists have one obvious power - the power to produce and publish propaganda. And so the inevitable result of a conspiracy against the public by journalists is a systematic barrage of pro-conspirator propaganda. Claims that we have no justification for questioning the objectivity (a word which is fairly close to meaning “wisdom”, and thus is a slippery way of engaging in sophistry) of the conspirators, and claims that those not inside the conspiracy are “not journalists, not objective.”
Because the object of the conspiracy is to make the conspirators the de facto leaders of journalism and of the Democrat Party - and through that, of government itself - blind application of the Sullivan precedent to subvert the right of proponents of limited government, and of the Constitution, to redress in the courts for systematic libel by those who seek to grow the government. is a perversion of the intent of the First Amendment. A case must be brought to SCOTUS which sidesteps Sullivan by attacking the journalistic “conspiracy against the public” on anti trust grounds as well as libel.