Why Broadcast Journalism is Unnecessary and Illegitimate

The framers of our Constitution gave carte blance protection to “speech” and “the press”. They did not grant that anyone was then in possession of complete and unalloyed truth, and it was impossible that they should be able to a priori institutionalize the truth of a future such human paragon even if she/he/it were to arrive.

At the time of the framing, the 1830s advent of mass marketing was in the distant future. Since that era, journalism has positioned itself as the embodiment of nonpartisan truth-telling, and used its enormous propaganda power to make the burden of proof of any “bias” essentially infinite. If somehow you nail them dead to rights in consistent tendentiousness, they will merely shrug and change the subject. And the press is protected by the First Amendment. That is where conservatives have always been stuck.

And make no mistake, conservatives are right to think that journalism is their opponent. Examples abound so that any conservative must scratch his/her head and ask “Why?” Why do those whose job it is to tell the truth tell it so tendentiously, and even lie? The answer is bound and gagged, and lying on your doorstep in plain sight. The money in the business of journalism is in entertainment, not truth. It is that imperative to entertain which produces the perspective of journalism.

And that journalism does indeed have a perspective is demonstrated every day in what it considers a good news story, and what is no news story at all. Part of that perspective is that news must be new--fresh today--as if the events of every new day were of equal importance with the events of all other days. So journalism is superficial. Journalism is negative as well, because the bad news is best suited to keep the audience from daring to ignore the news. Those two characteristics predominate in the perspective of journalism.

But how is that related to political bias? Since superficiality and negativity are anthema to conservatives there is inherent conflict between journalism and conservatism.. By contrast, and whatever pious intentions the journalist might have, political liberalism simply aligns itself with whatever journalism deems a “good story.” Journalists would have to work to create differences between journalism and liberalism, and simply lack any motive to do so. Indeed, the echo chamber of political “liberalism” aids the journalist--and since liberalism consistently exacerbates the issues it addresses, successful liberal politicians make plenty of bad news to report.

The First Amendment which protects the expression of opinion must also be understood to protect claims by people of infallibility--and to forbid claims of infallibility to be made by the government. What, after all, is the point of elections if the government is infallible? Clearly the free criticism of the government is at the heart of freedom of speech and press. Freedom, that is, of communication.

By formatting the bands and standardizing the bandwiths the government actually created broadcasting as we know it. The FCC regulates broadcasting--licensing a handful of priveledged people to broadcast at different frequency bands in particular locations. That is something not contemplated in the First Amendment, and which should never pass constitutional muster if applied to the literal press. Not only so, but the FCC requires application for renewal on the basis that a licensee broadcaster is “operating in the public interest as a public trustee.” That is a breathtaking departure from the First Amendment.

No one questions the political power of broadcasting; the broadcasters themselves obviously sell that viewpoint when they are taking money for political advertising. What does it mean, therefore, when the government (FCC) creates a political venue which transcends the literal press? And what does it mean when the government excludes you and me--and almost everyone else--from that venue in favor of a few priviledged licensees? And what does it mean when the government maintains the right to pull the license of anyone it does allow to participate in that venue? It means a government far outside its First Amendment limits. When it comes to broadcasting and the FCC, clearly the First Amendment has nothing to do with the case.

The problem of journalism’s control of the venue of argument would be ameliorated if we could get them into court. In front of SCOTUS they would not be permitted to use their mighty megaphones. And to get to court all it takes is the filing of a civil suit. A lawsuit must be filed against broadcast journalism, naming not only the broadcast licensees, but the FCC.

We saw the tendency of broadcast journalism in the past election, when the delay in calling any given State for Bush was out of all proportion to the delay in calling a state for Gore, the margin of victory being similar--and, most notoriously, the state of Florida was wrongly called for Gore in time to suppress legal voting in the Central Time Zone portion of the state, to the detriment of Bush and very nearly turning the election. That was electioneering over the regulated airwaves on election day, quite on a par with the impact that illegal electioneering inside a polling place would have. It was an enormous tort.

And it is on that basis that someone should sue the socks off the FCC and all of broadcast journalism.

Journalism has a simbiotic relation with liberal Democrat politicians, journalists and liberal politicians are interchangable parts. Print journalism is only part of the press (which also includes books and magazines and, it should be argued, the internet), and broadcast journalism is no part of the press at all. Liberals never take issue with the perspective of journalism, so liberal politicians and journalists are interchangable parts. The FCC compromises my ability to compete in the marketplace of ideas by giving preferential access addresses to broadcasters, thus advantaging its licensees over me. And broadcast journalism, with the imprimatur of the government, casts a long shadow over elections. Its role in our political life is illegitimate.

The First Amendment, far from guaranteeing that journalism will be the truth, protects your right to speak and print your fallible opinion. Appeal to the First Amendment is appeal to the right to be, by the government or anyone else’s lights, wrong. A claim of objectivity has nothing to do with the case; we all think our own opinions are right.

When the Constitution was written communication from one end of the country to the othe could take weeks. Our republic is designed to work admirably if most of the electorate is not up to date on every cause celebre. Leave aside traffic and weather, and broadcast journalism essentially never tells you anything that you need to know on a real-time basis.

The behavior of journalism is explained by Adam Smith - partly in Wealth of Nations, and partly in Theory of Moral Sentiments. The applicable quote from the latter is
The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing.
The man whom we believe is necessarily, in the things concerning which we believe him, our leader and director, and we look up to him with a certain degree of esteem and respect.
That is the default assumption and perspective of the journalist, about the public at large. The public, journalists believe in their gut, is a bunch of boobs to be impressed and led by their betters. Namely, them:
But as from admiring other people we come to wish to be admired ourselves; so from being led and directed by other people we learn to wish to become ourselves leaders and directors. - Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments
Journalists employ rank sophistry to position themselves as our betters; they engage in Monday morning quarterbacking on a grand scale to insinuate that anyone other than the specialists in a field could do a better job than the specialists in that field, if only they were as well-intentioned as the journalist is. Nobody would trust their own liver to the ministrations of a journalist in the operating room, but the journalist seeks to promote his own reputation above that of the surgeon by claiming that doctors do unnecessary operations to pad their own wallets. And if that sounds like something a “liberal” politician such as Obama might say, well - in Karl Marx’s formulation - that is no accident, comrades. Journalism, and socialism, is nothing but cheap talk (believing and acting on cheap talk is, however, very expensive).
Journalists use claims of their own (or, what is the same thing, each others’) objectivity to precisely the same purpose and intent that the ancient Sophists used their claims of superior wisdom. If the Sophist is wise, or if the journalist is objective, the person who is not a Sophist or a journalist would seem to have no standing to question them. And appearances are what journalists are all about. In reality it is unwise for anyone to assume his own wisdom, and it is not objective of anyone to assume her own objectivity.
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. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Book I, Ch 10)
It is said that “This problem, when solved, will be simple.” And so it is with the question as to why modern journalists never engage in ideological competition, as journalists of earlier times notoriously did. The answer is the telegraph - the telegraph and the wire services, notably the AP. For the AP is nothing other than a virtual meeting of all the major journalism outlets in America.
Adam Smith is correct - a meeting of “competitive” journalists which has been in continuous operation since before the Civil War, and which is not about “merriment or diversion” but precisely about business, could not have failed to produce “a conspiracy against the public.” A conspiracy which is not content merely to systematically omit mention of certain salient facts, but which will actually lie in furtherance of its own interest and against the public interest.

Im not seeing this overwhelming popular support but what I am seeing is the flood of money from Soros , corporate media and tech giants, into the game to manipulate elections across the board. This needs to be investigated. It seems as though the losers in the last election, the prior administration and their weaponized agencies are keeping Trump and his team busy while the others are making these moves at the state and local levels

New York Times v. Sullivan was a case decided by SCOTUS in 1964. It was a unanimous decision (of the Warren Court). Mr. Sullivan was a Southern Democrat who sued the NYT over an advertisement which the Times published. The ad was critical of a particular situation in a city in which Mr. Sullivan served (I think as chief of police) - tho Mr. Sullivan was not named explicitly in the ad. My point is that the Sullivan case has plenty of particularities - and yet SCOTUS elected to take the occasion of Sullivan to announce the sweeping principle that judges can’t sue for libel at all, and public figures generally can do so only if they can meet an onerous burden of proof of malicious intent on the part of the publisher. Not only was the majority unanimous, but the opinion was joined by two concurrences expressing the wish of three justices to go even further.
So there’s that. Another way to look at it is that the Morrison v. Olson SCOTUS decision was 8-1 - unanimous but for the dissent of then-freshman Justice Scalia - and history quickly showed that only Scalia had been right. Point being, Scalia wasn’t on the Court in 1964 - and maybe that is the only difference in the validity of the two “consensus” SCOTUS decisions.
IMHO SCOTUS was grossly overenthusiastic in Sullivan because of salient issues they were uniquely situated, in 1964, to be oblivious to. First, let us dispose of the conceit that the First Amendment established freedom of speech and press. Obviously it articulated that, but there is a reason for the “odd” expression “the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The freedom of speech and press already existed at the time of the ratification of the Constitution and of 1A. But the freedom of the press was traditionally limited to non-pornographic, non-libelous press.
In short, like the Second Amendment with its reference to "the right of the people to" keep and bear arms, the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights was conservative. It created no rights, but merely made some rights explicit in the Constitution - and rejected the conceit that the Constitution touched the rights of the people or of the states in any way not explicitly articulated in the Constitution.
One of the rights not explicitly articulated by the Constitution but whose existence is clearly implied is the right of the people not to be libeled. And to sue for compensation if they are. And, judges and other public officers are people in addition to having an official capacity. Not only do public officers have a right to the reputations they have earned, but the people at large have a right to access to the earned reputations of public officials and candidates. All very well to say that I have a right to my own opinion, which is unfavorable to some politicians and favorable, in one degree or another, to others. I do not have a right to my own facts about those public figures. And that is what I have if I have a press, and none of those figures have any recourse against libel.
For example, I might think of a particular person as a racist. If so, articulating that belief is in bounds. But if I say that so-and-so is an open racist, and he sues, it would be incumbent on me to be able to cite actual documentation of his open racism. It is a matter of fact, not merely of opinion. And if he is not an open racist - such as an old-line Dixiecrat, openly articulating racism - he has a right to compensation to protect his reputation. The alternative, frankly, is anarchy and ultimately appeals to the sword. And not one-way only - but consider what happened at the Republican congressional baseball practice.
In 1964 “bias in the media” was rampant. It was so rampant, and so casually suggested, that it was taken for granted as being “objectivity.” After the Thomas-Hill hearings and the Kavanaugh-Ford hearings, the idea that any fewer than two justices on SCOTUS know better than that is a fatuous conceit. The conundrum is that criticism - even erroneous criticism - of public figures must be accepted, on the one hand - and blatant disregard for fact about public figures can be a toxic hazard. Another conundrum is that on the one hand, any given journalist has a right to associate his views with any given politician or political party (and vice versa) - but when all journalists are of one accord - favoring the Democrat Party, in this case - a rule inhibiting lawsuits by government officials is a rule inhibiting lawsuits by Republican government officials - Democrats simply do not get libeled.
And it is not to be thought that this is pure self-pleading on the part of a Republican voter. Books such as Slander by Coulter, and others, document it. And it has a logical explanation in the fact that journalism is systematically slanted to be bad news, systematically suggesting flaws in society - and just as systematically suggesting that the government must “do something.” Which is precisely the position of the Democrat Party, and in opposition of the Republican position that society spontaneously creates progress faster than the government can - or ever would intend to. There is a deep problem with systematically disadvantaging that philosophy, which is precisely the perspective the founders of the country espoused.

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