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.

. . . there were two newspapers with reasonable circulations. That was the typical situation in much of the United States. One paper was pro Democrat and the other was pro Republican. From the 1860s to the 1930s the two papers were very biased... openly and honestly so. . . . But in the biased days both papers were like talk radio in that every effort was made to disclose the bias. The Democrat paper was proudly a Democrat paper and so was the Republican paper. Everyone knew where both papers stood on the issues of the day. They were biased but there was no attempt to deceive.

The term "bias" relates to codes of journalistic ethics which presume that objectivity is possible and desirable. As your example illustrates, competitive papers with differing perspectives, honestly forwarded, are less deceptive than any so-called "objective" journalism.
There is no need to use a perjorative when a paper has an identifiable perspective--in fact, all commercial, free, competitive mass-market journalism does have an identifiable (liberal) perspective. Consequently a journalism with an explicit "conservative perspective" is likely to consistently outperform any other kind of journalism as measured by how well that journalism stands up to subsequent historical scrutiny.

Gee. Isn't the stuff on censorship an ammendment to the original constitution. I could be wrong there.

An amendment, yes--but the first, and part of the block of ten known as "The Bill of Rights"--thus essentially of a piece with the body of the document, in terms of provenance. Interestingly, amendments are superior to the original document--otherwise what would be the point? That is of course an excellent reason for caution in framing an amendment; unintended consequences can't necessarily be trumped by reference to the rest of the Constitution, nor for that matter by earlier amendments.

You might want to look at the intention and spirit of your constitution as well - I am quite sure that the Founding Fathers intended it more so that free speech would not be supressed. They would all have a collective heart attack if they could see what successive generations have done to the Constitution and in the name of it. or are you really trying to tell me they would have been all for porno.

I think the topic of censorship came up pretty quickly; Thomas Jefferson said something about "Whose foot is to be the measure . . . ?" in opposition to censorship.
You will notice that this posting is a reply, not to the thread from which I quoted your posting, but to a different thread altogether. My own creation, as you'll see by the first essay. A rather quixiotic exercise, some say, in pure First Amendment study, revealing the gap between theory and practice.
(The particular posting to which the "TO 39" button points quotes the First Amendment).

The American Media in Wartime - Brit HumeTed [Koppel] was an embedded reporter in Iraq, and after he came home he . . . spoke with real generosity about the American officers and enlisted men that he dealt with, and how able they were and how good they were and how effective they were. But he went out of his way to make a point of distinguishing between them and the policy makers in Washington. About the latter he said, “I’m very cynical, and I remain very cynical, about the reasons for getting into this war.”

Cynical? We journalists pride ourselves, and properly so, on being skeptical. That’s our job. But I have always thought a cynic is a bad thing to be. A cynic, as I understand the term, means someone who interprets others’ actions as coming from the worst motives. It’s a knee-jerk way of thinking. A cynic, it is said, understands the price of everything and the value of nothing. So I don’t understand why Ted Koppel would say with such pride and ferocity – he said it more than once – that he is a cynic. But I think he speaks for many in the media, and I think it’s a very deep problem.

Yes. But cynicism is just superficial negativity. And as Hume points out elsewhere in the piece,

One of the problems we in the news business face, of course, is that sometimes there’s not much news. And there’s an old saying in newsrooms: “No news is bad news, good news is dull news, and bad news makes marvelous copy.” And that’s essentially true. Some good news, like Jessica Lynch’s rescue, is spectacular stuff. But generally speaking, news is what’s exceptional, and bad stuff tends to be exceptional in our world. Reporters have a natural instinct, therefore, to look for the negative.

A superfical focus on the negative cannot be far removed from cynicism. Hume is right, that's a problem--but the problem inheres in journalism.
Fox News is just as superficial as the rest of journalism--it's just not as negative. Consequently Fox News reports will stand the test of time much better than journalism which is overwhelmingly negative towards institutions upon which we have to depend--and which are actually quite good.

when it comes to the exercise of American power in the world by a Republican, particularly military power, there seems to be a suspicion among those in the media – indeed, a suspicion bordering on a presumption – of illegitimacy, incompetence and ineffectiveness.

Contrast this with Kosovo and Haiti during the Clinton years. And compare with the reality of "incompetence and ineffectiveness" reflected in Clinton's Mogadishu, Carter's Iranian hostage rescue attempt, Kennedy/Johnson's Vietnam and Kennedy's Bay of Pigs fiasco and even--yes, in this context it has to be said--Truman's narrow escape from complete failure in Korea on the heels of his choice not to include Korea in a speech in which he listed countries the US was willing to defend.
In none of which cases did the Democratic president face a hostile majority in even one branch of Congress. Eisenhower has no such blemish, Nixon's "blemish" is an inability to turn around Vietnam in the teeth of a bitterly hostile Congressional majority, Ford's blemish is the Mayaguez, Reagan's blemish is the suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon. Neither Bush has, as of this writing, a military blot on his estucheon--leaving aside the issue of a certain incaution with respect to ben Laden which certainly was not opposed by any Democrat of note before 9/11.
It has to be said that since the Soviet Union ~~fell~~ was successfully pushed by Reagan, military failure has been inexcusable. But as witness Mogadishu, still possible--given a Democratic Secretary of Defense . . .

The American Media in Wartime - Brit Hume

If you go back and look at American military operations beginning with the Grenada invasion and including Panama, the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, and you study what U.S. military spokesmen said about how those conflicts were going at each stage, you’ll see that they were right, and that they told the truth, by and large. No doubt they made some mistakes, but there was nothing like the large deceptions and misrepresentations that made so many journalistic careers in Vietnam. The military learned its lesson in Vietnam, and it has not behaved that way since. You’d think journalists would have noticed. They haven’t, but it’s not too late: When retired General Jay Garner or his successor says that things will work out in post-war Iraq, it might be wise for Western journalists to wait more than a month to declare him wrong.

The American Media in Wartime - Brit Hume

Quite.
But on the record as Hume cites it, "objective" journalists define themselves by the premise that there must be something seriously wrong with America's fundamental premises, and hence with conservative Americans.
Since that is indistinguishable from the premise of the typical liberal politician, it is unsurprising that there is a revolving door (poster boy George Stephanopolis) between "objective" journalist and liberal, but emphatically not conservative, political operative.
Hence "objective journalist" unambiguously belongs in scare quotes, and an explicitly conservative perspective is a clearer view of history than the so-called "objective" perspective.
. . . and why I treat "objective journalism" as a commercial for a product I wouldn't buy . . .+

The First Amendment gets wildly distorted by those who style themselves "the press." First, journalism is only a part of the press, since the First Amendment obviously covers magazines and books.
Second, the First Amendment gives protection but not authority to the press. Precisely because of the blanket protection the First Amendment gives the press, journalism deserves no special standing in court. How could it, when any Tom, Dick, or Harry can on his own whim start up a newspaper? How could it, when you practically have to drop your printing press on someone's head in order to be punished for abusing a press? Journalism's intrinsic authority is therefore only just above that of grafitti on the men's room wall.
If a court is to have respect it must act on the basis of fact. To have a basis in fact it must have testimony under oath rather than urban legends--whether they be spread through the internet or printed in The New York Times by a Jason Blair or a Maureen Dowd and echoed by the rest of journalism.

In response to the controversy, the director of BBC News is acknowledging the difficulties in reporting the conflict with Iraq accurately.
"Nobody, including the media, has the full picture of what's going on," Richard Sambrook told the BBC's Breakfast program. "Reporting the war is about putting together fragments of information. We're all trying to work out this jigsaw and what the overall picture is."
He added that fact verification was especially problematic with live, continuous coverage.

"The difficulty with a 24-hour news channel is you're trying to work out live on air what's true and what isn't," he said.

IOW, when you get into "live, continuous coverage" you are essentially down to the level of rumor.
"The fog of war" is just a critical example of the general problem of the fog of current events, and in fact "live, continuous coverage" is a lot like an ink blot test--it tells you as much about what the reporter expects or desires as it does about reality on the ground. As the "live continuous coverage" prediction of GORE WINS FLORIDA illustrates . . .
And as that also illustrates, "live continuous coverage" of an election is illegitimate--it can affect the outcome it claims merely to report, e.g. by suppressing the turnout at the last minute in the Florida panhandle.
And the tendentiousness of the 2000 election coverage was notable in the fast calling of states for Gore compared to the slower calling of states for Bush, when the final margin of victory or defeat was comparable. The solution is not to improve "live continuous coverage" of elections, but to abolish it. Just as electioneering at a polling place was abolished, to create the secret ballot.

Is coverage of war favoring Saddam?

It isn't true that you have to "get people to listen first." For a rather small number of people that is true; for the vast majority of people it isn't a very effective way to communicate with them. The mere fact that ideas are presented and are repeated changes the way people look at things. Like it or not, most people respond to emotionally-charged language, rather than subdued language with all of the corners knocked off.

And this is exactly what the Left does. They've managed to use the language so effectively that they control nearly all of the governments of the entire Western world. . .[and] they did it by using emotional appeals that we've all heard literally thousands of times.

IOW, liberals live and die by PR, and use the "Big Lie" technique. They are able to do so because journalists are liberals.
That sounds like tinfoil to a lot of people who aren't paying attention. But the best way to understand it is simply that journalists are people who can make money by being bigmouthed, and claiming preternatural knowledge and objectivity is just part of being bigmouthed. Actually being knowledgable and dispassionate are not job requirements, and indeed are qualities seldom found in journalists.
And political "liberalism" is best understood as the consequence of the nature of journalism. The unprincipled approach to getting along in politics is to go along with journalists. That is what Joe McCarthy did not do--and consequently they found it necessary to pull out all stops to destroy his reputation and effectiveness.

Andrew Sullivan: It’s all getting a little hysterical (Ann Coulter = Michael Moore)

End of Chapter 5, on page 93:

In 1954, critic Leslie Fieldler captured the essence of "McCarthyism":"From one end of the country to another rings the cry, 'I am cowed! I am afraid to speak out!', and the even louder response, 'Look, he is cowed! He is afraid to speak out!'"

The only actual example which comes to mind of an American journalist admitting to having actually been cowed is The News We (CNN) Kept To Ourselves [must read]. But then, CNN wasn't dealing with a Republican senator but with Saddam Hussain--and CNN wasn't talking about it until he had been deposed!

It puts me in mind of the comedian Herb Shriner, who I loved to hear on black-and-white TV. The one story of his that sticks with me is how

My sister met a man once in the lobby of a hotel and he handed her a note saying,
'You are the only woman I have ever loved.
Please come to me in room 103.'
She wasn't sure it was sincere, though--it was mimeographed!

The message denies itself. The more contemporaneous claims of being "cowed" were published, the more plain it is that those actually "cowed into silence" were--no one at all.
And that the only one being unfairly persecuted in the whole operation was--Joe McCarthy.

One historian told Judis: "I wouldn't hire a red-baiter like Ron." Another said Radosh was "not a historian at all."

Journalists peck at any conservative in exactly the same "not a journalist" way.
Any Tom, Dick, or Harry can set up a printing press (you have a low-speed one hooked to your computer, probably--and you have the ability to post to a web site which is accessible world wide) and become a journalist to his heart's content. But if Harry is a conservative, Tom and Dick will wage a flame war on him for "pretending" to a title which they themselves have no official sanction for holding, never mind excluding others from.
I used to be annoyed at Rush Limbaugh for ceding the point unnecessarily. But I have concluded taht the logical viewpoint to take is to let them have the word, and ridicule "journalists" as a group. It at least gives us a convenient target . . .
This article covers material also seen in Treason, in which Ann makes the point that historians treat journalism as "the first draft of history." And that that is exactly how "McCarthyism" entered history--historians reading the newspapers rather than going to the primary sources for the real story.
"Historian" is therefore a term of contempt like "journalist"--anyone who figures out and publishes a liberty-affirming truth is "not a historian (or journalist) at all."

Journalists like to claim that journalism is "the first draft of history." And in the case of "the McCarthy era" in particular, Coulter indicates in Treason, historians do in fact promulgate a history which is nothing more than touched-up, glossed-over journalism.
It is however easy to show--see for example Slander and Treason--that journalism is as a matter of factual record heavily slanted toward liberalism.
Indeed liberalism can be viewed as a mere consequence of the natural tendency of free, competitive (but not to the extent of being willing to engage in flame wars to defend truth against a distortion of truth which makes a better story) journalism. IMHO liberalism is simply whatever makes a "good story", and political liberals operate on no other principle than to exploit the prevailing propaganda wind which that fact implies.
In no meaningful sense can you edit CNN's coverage of the Saddam Hussain regime into useful truth. Henry Ford famously said that "History is Bunk"; any history which is merely a second draft of journalism fits that description quite nicely.

A founding-era British critic of the U.S. Constitution characterized it as "All sheet and no anchor"--and certainly our ability to move with the times threatens our ability to stand fast to a policy once we have arrived at it. Ours is a peculiar form of "conservatism" which clings to freedom as promulgated in the First Amendment--and freedom implies the ability to change, to do things differently than in the past.

But the conservative insists on two things: the process of change should meet unchanging standards (e.g., we want the the Congress and not the courts to make our laws), and changes must stand or fall on their own merits (a business can do things in new ways, but it must make a profit or eventually fail).

The problem of ABC News was never the citizenship of a particular star of a particular show. The problem is the fact that the government has created the monster known as broadcasting. Marconi developed radio, but only the government could enact and enforce the FCC regulations without which broadcasting could not exist. It's not difficult to understand how the government might have in good faith considered the FCC to be a good idea. Even today many conservative Freepers will be offended at the idea that broadcasting is per se the problem.

Broadcasting--the reserving of portions of the electromagnetic spectrum to the use of specific people to the exclusion of others--would be an absurdity if applied to print, patently unconstitutional. Yet only the assumption of scarcity of paper (analogous to the presumed scarcity of spectrum) prevents the broadcast and print media from being analogous. And we know that it only wants an "innocent" regulation limiting the price of paper "to make communication easier" to produce a shortage of paper.

We all know that it doesn't take foreign citizenship to make someone anticonservative of the Constitution.

The opinion of the press corps tends toward consensus because of an astonishing uniformity of viewpoint. Certain types of people want to become journalists, and they carry certain political and cultural opinions. This self-selection is hardened by peer group pressure. No conspiracy is necessary; journalists quite spontaneously think alike. The problem comes because this group-think is by now divorced from the thoughts and attitudes of readers. To take politics as a test, in 1992, a sample of top Washington reporters and editors voted 89% to 7% for Bill Clinton over George H.W. Bush.

This is a Deux ex Machina argument--all journalists have the same politics, because they were born that way. Sorry, but more explanation is needed. And forthcoming from your interpid commentator, as follows:
The businesses which make money in journalism do so by following the rules of the business. People who don't want to follow those rules don't decide to become journalists--or go to work for newspapers which fail because they do not attract enough attention. The ones that attract enough attention to be able to charge enough advertising rate to be able to survive, do so by following the rules.
The joker is that the rules:
No news is good news, because good news isn't news, and
Man Bites Dog makes a better story than Dog Bites Man
mean that the news is atypical of reality in general, and is predominantly about things which call into question the institutions upon which we depend. The news as defined by commercial viability is inherently slanted to the idea of the need for change. People who like the job of writing such stories are--surprise!--opposed to conservatism.
The Press: Time for a New Era?

Journalists vaunt their objectivity, but the dirty little secret is that

A certain perspective is embedded

in journalism's very definition.
Commercial, free, competitive journalism is in fact one of the complaining professions, just as much as plaintiff lawyering or liberal politicing is.
"Any fool can criticize, and most fools do."
The conceit that "it's (always) patriotic to criticize the government" can only seem sensible to someone who presumes that he is wise, and the status quo was created by a fool. In fact of course the status quo was created by many people, most of them far wiser than those who blythely accept the job of criticizing their betters--and on short deadline, at that.

Instead of programs that reflected old-fashioned British virtues (like common sense), the World Service adopted an all-news-and-analysis format meant to reflect modern British values — things like "oneness" and tolerance and, lately, a disdain for all things formerly British, like an instinctive trust in the Atlantic alliance.
Normally, news-oriented programming at a time when British and Americans are involved in a war would be welcome. But the World Service's revision of focus also coincided unhappily with a key decision announced early in March, as events in Iraq grew hot, by the BBC's controller of editorial policy, Stephen Whittle. It was Whittle's wish that corporation broadcasts specifically reflect antiwar opinion. Imposing a point of view on events before they unfold is a bit audacious. But it was done, and as a result, the Whittle Rule had far-reaching, although not perhaps unintended, consequences.

Notes from the Previous War: Bizarro Broadcasting Company [BBC].

But of course the truth is that journalism's superficial complaining is exactly such a point of view, systematically imposed on the reporting of events.
Imposing a point of view on events before they unfold is "a bit audacious" only in the sense thay you are likely to look foolish if the blinkered reporting that results iscompared retrospecitvely with the actual flow of events. Consequently it is the general policy of the journalist never to engage in a discussion which threatens to make that comparison too directly and too publicly.

Journalists vaunt their objectivity, but the dirty little secret is that

A certain perspective is embedded

in journalism's very definition.
Commercial, free, competitive journalism is in fact one of the complaining professions, just as much as plaintiff lawyering or liberal politicing is.
"Any fool can criticize, and most fools do."
The conceit that "it's (always) patriotic to criticize the government" can only seem sensible to someone who presumes that he is wise, and the status quo was created by a fool. In fact of course the status quo was created by many people, most of them far wiser than those who blythely accept the job of criticizing their betters--and on short deadline, at that.

Why does not the New York Times headline, each morning, “Man Killed In Car Accident In Iowa”? Presumably because such a death, while undoubtedly tragic for the man’s family, has no broader significance. But why is that so different from the death of a single soldier in Iraq, which has no strategic significance whatsoever? One could argue that every highway fatality is newsworthy because it casts doubt on the success of America’s effort to promote highway safety. But our newspapers have no interest in promoting such a theory

. . . whereas journalism wants "another Vietnam" so bad it can taste it.
Saddam wants the same thing. That doesn't mean that journalists are pro-Saddam.
Democratic politicians want "another Vietnam" so bad they can taste it, too--but that doesn't mean that they love Saddam.
In both cases it is in the interest of their own professional advancement. So much so that they cannot truely hate the man. The journalists and the other Democrats give not a fig for his victims, only for their own advancement.
Overdone Press Coverage of Iraq Casualties

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