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.

I've mislaid today's Wall Street Journal but it has a letter to the editor from the BBC. The burden of the letter was that the BBC is no more anti-Republican than the British population at large, and slightly more likely than the rest of journalism to take the government at its word.

Well, what does that buy the listener if a lot of British citizens are WRONG? To that question we would expect to hear the Pontius Pilate challenge, "What is truth?"

That is all very well, in the fog of current events--but we can look back and critique journalism with hindsight. In retrospect, the dreadful sandstorm "bogged down" the coalition not at all. It simply gave the Iraqi army the illusion of safety, under "cover" of which they moved their forces. They thus revealed their locations to our radar and subjected themselves to uttter devastation by aerial assault.

Peter Arnet had the same defense; he claimed that his description of the "difficulties" our forces were faced with was simply the consensus of what journalists in Baghdad were saying. And that was a slightly less negative perspective of coalition progress than "Comical Ali" was promulgating on Iraqi TV. BUT IT DID NOT CORRESPOND TO REALITY ON THE GROUND. Anyone who didn't know that then has been in denial for a long time if they don't know it now.

Journalism systematically averts its gaze from the trail of fatuous errors it has made by systematically discounting what conservative people (e.g., military commanders) have told them. Journalism is the establishment in America, to the extent that it is able to systematically divert our attention from its errors.

Many closed-minded people take for granted that journalism is the pursuit of truth; it is not. Journalism is the pursuit of ratings via nonfiction entertainment. And that makes journalism essentially as superficial and self-important as the rest of the entertainment industry.

Urban legends are circulated on the Internet by people who find the stories too good to be passed up--but the same mechanism exists among journalists. The fact that those same stories are too good to be true is, in their thinking, beside the point. Apparently the "McCarthy era" myth fits that bill precisely; the story of the fearless journalists facing down the ruthless right-wing crackpot is so flattering to journalism that no journalist can resist it.

It seems to strike most historians the same way. But, according to Ann Coulter, all historical accounts of "McCarthyism" rely on the same "secondary sources" as the original journalism did. In other words, the whole thing is an urban legend.

murdered British Army Captain Dai Jones . . . was killed when the ambulance he was in was struck by a remote-controlled explosion.

He was ferrying a heatstroke victim to the British Army Field Hospital at Shaibah.

He was not a casualty of war but the victim of politically motivated murder. As the article rightly states.
Reporting of such vile incidents in any other terms constitutes the only incentive (the militiary effect being insignificant) to the commission of these attrocities. Shame to any journalist/editor who desires to profit by such.
So much for the theory that your contribution to a party or a candidate is dirty and properly subject to regulation, while the revenue of the journalist is clean.

Devoted ... Isobel with murdered British Army Captain Dai Jones

On Thursday, August 7 at the end of a column of miscellaneous corrections, the New York Times published this small bombshell:

Editors' Note An article on Sunday about attacks on the American military in Iraq over the previous two days, attributed to military officials, included an erroneous account that quoted Pfc. Jose Belen of the First Armored Division. Private Belen, who is not a spokesman for the division, said that a homemade bomb exploded under a convoy on Saturday morning on the outskirts of Baghdad and killed two American soldiers and their interpreter. The American military's central command, which releases information on all American casualties in Iraq, said before the article was published that it could not confirm Private Belen's account. Later it said that no such attack had taken place and that no American soldiers were killed on Saturday. Repeated efforts by The Times to reach Private Belen this week have been unsuccessful. The Times should not have attributed the account to "military officials," and should have reported that the command had not verified the attack.

Please note that the Times calls this an "erroneous account." Does the Times mean by this to call into question the existence of the single source it identifies, one Pfc. Jose Belen of the 1st Armored Division? Is the Times suggesting that Pfc. Belen made up this erroneous story? Or did its reporter create Pfc. Belen and the story?

A week has gone by since this Editor's Note was published. I've checked the Times assiduously since then but I have found no further mention of the elusive Pfc. Belen, so I conclude that all the vast resources of the Times have been unequal to the task of finding him.

The Times article was--considering that the established order in Iraq cannot be affected by the death of three people more or less--exactly the sort of thing that the thugs of Saddam Hussain have been killing for.
Either the Times desires to publish such stories to boost its circulation, or it desires to publish such stories to boost the fortunes of the Democratic Party at the expense of the present government of the U.S. Although the latter might be legal, at some point the question arises as to whether laws regulating political contributions are meaningful if a business such as the Times can make this sort of in-kind contribution. And the former explanation certainly is no brief for the idea that revenue obtained in such fashion and spent on NY Times editorials is pure as the driven snow, while your political contributions are filthy lucre to be regulated.

The New York Times Is Still Dead
Condign punishment for this would be that the Times be required to announce--as prominently as the original death announcement--that the three "casualties" had been ressurected.

I complimented your homepage before Op Iraq Freedom--
but it's better now than then.
Journalism is so busy criticizing America for profit that it creates a special political niche just for politicians who will get along and go along with it. Journalism calls that political niche "liberalism."

"Any fool can criticize--
and most fools do."
That leaves the field wide open for anyone with the courage to believe their own eyes rather than the professional caterwaulers. You are able to tell more truth than any journalist, simply by understanding that journalists are not truthtellers but naysayers. When you are subject to that relentless negativism called journalism, it's nearly impossible to be overoptimistic, and hard even to be positive as the situation warrants.
But it can also be vitally important to be positive. As witness the last 600 conservatives to vote in the Florida Panhandle--after the naysayers had already announced that the state had already gone against Bush and the Constitution . . .

"With the American media gazing enviously across the Atlantic at Tony Blair struggling for his political life, and with the 2004 election approaching, this is unlikely to go away. It is therefore incumbent upon the American people to not only follow the news, but also to recognize that it is oftentimes manufactured to serve a partisan purpose. In this day and age, it is a lot to expect. And that is exactly what the Washington Post is counting on."

How To Read The Washington Post 101

And what the Washington Post is counting on is what "the American media gazing enviously across the Atlantic" is counting on--and exactly what the Democratic Party is counting on.

And that is the 800 pound gorilla in the room with all campaign finance "reform" legislation.

under this law the Democrats have lost more money than the republicans. This reform law has been to republican advantage, there never was a reason to veto it.

"Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.
There are two clauses of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion; there is not only a "free exercise" clause but a an "Establishment" clause. The courts have indeed evinced an unfortunate tendency to read the "Establishment" clause expansively as to threaten to extinguish the "free exercise" clause. By the internal logic of the Constitution, "freedom of speech, and of the press" likewise implies freedom from an Establishment as well as freedom from censorship, even if the framers did not trouble to make the two aspects of freedom explicit.
But although we-the-people are vigilant that the goverrnment shall not act in judgement upon the press by censoring the press, we are almost entirely oblivious to the opposite abuse, government Establishment. There are officially objective bodies empanneled by the American legal system--they're called juries, and no other body is constitutionally authorized to the claim of "truth" with government sanction. Yet all "campaign finance reform" legislation essentially Establishes the commercial press by banning "political speech" by we-the-people within a certain time before an election while excuding establishment journalism from the definition of political speech.
The same is in fact true the year around, when it comes to broadcasting; the selection of the few to be allowed to speak is accomplished at the expense of the equality of we-the-people who do not have government license to speak.
Although admittedly the framers hoped to avoid political parties ("faction"), the logic of the Constitution has driven American politics into an essentially stable "2-major-party, multiple-minor-party" configuration. The prototypes of the modern American political parties were newspapers--essentially, house organs for the Jefferson/Hamilton factions.
The propaganda "PR" of the modern pseudo-objective liberal newspaper claims that those house organs were somehow scandalous, but that point completely escaped the notice of the founders who had no illusion that newspapers were, should be, or even could be "objective." "Freedom of the press" implies judgement of the truth/significance of journalism (and indeed of all printed matter) by we-the-people individually and not by the government.
Everyone who voted for McCain-Feingold, and the president who signed it, is guilty of malfeasance because the "law" so patently intends what the First Amendment forbids.

McCain-Feingold Will Wreck Politics
-Campaign finance reform has failed.
(Kenneth Starr)

The spirit of the First Amendment is freedom of thought, freedom of belief, freedom of speech, and freedom to spend money to make your thoughts accessible to others who may choose to attend to them--and freedom not to support the propagation of others' beliefs involuntarily.

Thus, the Establishment clause. But although "establishment of religion" as the framers knew it was not the existence of a cross on public property--but an actual church sustained by government payments to ministers, etc.--the establishment clause is routinely read so expansively as to threaten to moot the "free exercise" clause.

Today the government gives monopolies to the few over transmissions by radio and TV--monopolies with very substantial value--to enable its licensees to make their thoughts accessible to the general public in a uniquely efficient manner. And although the Constitution was designed to work without this recent innovation, the courts wink at fatuous claims of a "public interest" being served by the preferential propagation of the thoughts of those government-favored few.

FCC licensing (not to mention "Campaign Finance Reform") puts the government in the business of deciding what thought expressions are "in the public interest," and that is something the First Amendment patently was crafted to prohibit. That is quite a camel for the courts to swallow, while they are straining at the gnat of an expression of traditional moral sense in a state courthouse.

Moore's Audacious Attorney

Walter Cronkite, once called America's most trusted man, once disagreed with me when I called most journalists "liberal." "If by liberal," he told me, "you mean open-minded, then, yes. This is true."

Cronkite, no longer constrained by the journalistic creed of non-partisanship, now writes a weekly column. About liberal reporters, he now pleads guilty: "I believe that most of us reporters are liberal, but not because we consciously have chosen that particular color in the political spectrum. More likely it is because most of us served our journalistic apprenticeships as reporters covering the seamier sides of our cities -- the crimes, the tenement fires, the homeless and the hungry, the underclothed and undereducated."

Last week, I interviewed Mr. Cronkite and questioned him about his rationale behind journalists' liberalism. If, I asked, journalists become liberal because they see the underbelly, the downtrodden, the miscast, how do you explain the conservatism of police officers, who, after all, see exactly the same things? Cronkite, apparently uncomfortable with the question, simply said, "Why should I?"

Journalists' liberal bias: Why it matters, how it hurts TownHall.com ^ | 9/04/03 | larry Elder

This is a reply to Thomas Sowell's point above, that journalists either complain that the police "let the situation get out of hand," or that they "overreacted."

You think the politically undecided will be confused and vote for Hillary Clinton thinking she's a conservative?

Many people think that they understand politics as well as anyone else, without actually knowing what conservatives think--or even that conservatives do think.
Consider the fact that journalists routinely label Republican presidential candidates "dumb" and Democratic ones "smart." Do they do it because
a) It's true.
b) it's false.
c) they are Democrats and they are preaching to the choir, or
d) they are Democrats and they are hoping to gull the naive into believing it.
They did it with Reagan, and it turns out that the man was a genius--as indicated not only by the fact that he has the largest body of writing in his own hand of just about any president, but by the fact that he got the country going again, whipped inflation, ended the energy crisis, and transcended Communism.
And they did it with GWB, notwithstanding that he has a Harvard MBA and his opponent had only a BA degree.
As a libertarian you will understand that the First Amendment gives you the right to be wrong at the top of your voice without legal consequence; as an FR poster/lurker you can scarcely be ignorant of the consistent anticonservative tendency of journalism. That tendency inheres in so-called "objective" journalism as a genre of nonfiction and--so far as journalism is co-extensive with "the press"--is immune from government intervention if not from public criticism.
As a libertarian you will however understand that the prosecution of violations of the regulations of the FCC constitutes pure-and-simple unconstitutional censorship. The implication of which is that the FCC is in the business of determining what so-called "speech" is "in the public interest"--and the simple fact is that the FCC allows patent--and politically significant--falsehood to be broadcast by its licensees without consequence. The misleading "Gore Wins Florida" message contrasts with the spirit of secret-ballot restrictions on undue influence on voters in areas where the polls were still open. That spirit would indeed suggest that there should be no reporting of election results from unofficial sources, so that we-the-people, nationwide, would vote for the electors of our states without undue influence of the opinions, right or wrong, as to what decisions the voters of Eastern Time Zone states may (or may not) have made.
But FCC licensees, apparently for excellent cause, evince no concern that the FCC might sanction them for such blatant efforts to influence the voters on election day. Instead of playing only neutral classical music when the people are expressing their sovereignty on election day--as the media of the USSR did when the dictator had died and a new dictator was not yet in charge--FCC licensees declare states for the Democratic candidate in unseemly haste, and declare states for the Republican candidate in stately dignity, reluctantly. And while doing so they explicitly claim that the difference between the relative speed of their announcements for the two candidates reflects the relative strength of those candidates. That would be questionable on secret-ballot undue-influence grounds even if the perpetrators did not depend on government licenses for the capability to broadcast those claims. In short,
Journalists' liberal bias: Why it matters, how it hurts

But let us know forget that asymmetric warfare works both ways. In Somalia, the Somalis took over 30 casualties for every American killed or wounded. That was done through the use of superior American training, firepower (on the ground, and in helicopters overhead) and situational awareness (helicopters and more radios.) The battle in Mogadishu is only considered an American defeat because the American government considered 18 dead G.I.’s a defeat, even if over 500 Somali fighters died as well. At the time, the Somalis considered themselves defeated, and feared the return of the Army Rangers the next day to finish off the Somali militia that was terrorizing Mogadishu. The media declared the battle an American defeat, and that’s how it became known. Asymmetric warfare includes having the media in your corner, for that can easily turn a military defeat into a media victory.

American soldiers are dying in Iraq because of the hope Islamofascists have that "the referee" (as Goldwater styled journalism after the 1964 election) might award them victory on style points.
The truth is that journalism was politics when Jefferson and Hamilton sponsored competing journals in which to wage their partisan battles and that--all pious protestations to the contrary notwithstanding--journalism has never stopped being politics. The conceit that journalism is not politics is an unprovable negative, which the First Amendment protects us (in principle at least) from governmental attempts to finesse. All campaign regulation, and all government licensing of the broadcasting of politics, is illegitimate under the First Amendment.
And eventually someone is going to haul the FCC into court and ask it to justify giving certain people monopoly speech rights in the form of broadcast licenses which empower the likes of CBS or indeed PBS to propagandise opposition to Republican governance in general and deadly opposition the U.S. military in particular. I would think a class-action lawsuit by Americans in harm's way in Iraq--or their relatives at home--would lie.
Note that this would not threaten freedom of the (literal) press, nor should it threaten the Internet. Only the Establishment which is the FCC and its licensees is called into question.

Do media victories mean anything (how America's enemies manipulate our media) Stategy Page ^ | Sept 9, 2003 | James Dunnigan

The president is both head of state (the role in other polities of a king or premier) and head of government (the role of prime minister in a parlimentary system). The powers of incumbency work strongly to the advantage of the head of government seeking reelection, but there is something creepy about seeing the head of state stooping to debate a challenger, especially if things get at all personal.
Indeed that is IMHO why it was, in times past, considered gauche for a presidential candidate to campaign at all. Shameless x42 is of course a special case, but incumbency seems to work to the president's disadvantage during debates. And in the "traditional" case of "objective journalist" moderated debates, the Republican has the additional burden of finessing the fact that he is alone with not one but as many as 5 Democrats assaying to position his challenger as the reasonable centrist and himself as a "right wing extremist."
Consequently even Reagan had trouble in the first debate with Mondale in 1984, and GHW Bush looked at his watch in 1992. I suspect that there were no debates when Nixon ran as an incumbent in 1972, and that only Reagan and x42 were reelected after submitting to debates. Certainly the debates of 1980 were critically helpful in turning the election against Carter, as those of 1976 were disasterous to Ford.
If you wanted to produce the most light you would stick with vice presidential debates, and would conduct them on the radio where it would be possible to run them for three hours at a time, and multiple times. They would be moderated only by a chess-timer controling the microphones to equalize the speaking time of the two contenders, and no notes or other aids--even aides--would be barred; even recorded sound bites would be permitted provided that they were sourced, valid, and in context.
The role of "objective journalist" to moderate the debates is presumptuous in the extreme since it positions the journalist above the country's most distinguished officials. Perhaps the most effective way to fend off journalism's demand for a role "refereeing" the contest would be a sarcastic proposal that the ideal neutral moderator might be Walter
Journalists' liberal bias: Why it matters, how it hurts TownHall.com ^ | 9/04/03 | larry Elder
Walter Cronkite, once called America's most trusted man, once disagreed with me when I called most journalists "liberal." "If by liberal," he told me, "you mean open-minded, then, yes. This is true."
Cronkite, no longer constrained by the journalistic creed of non-partisanship, now writes a weekly column. About liberal reporters, he now pleads guilty: "I believe that most of us reporters are liberal, but not because we consciously have chosen that particular color in the political spectrum. More likely it is because most of us served our journalistic apprenticeships as reporters covering the seamier sides of our cities -- the crimes, the tenement fires, the homeless and the hungry, the underclothed and undereducated."
Last week, I interviewed Mr. Cronkite and questioned him about his rationale behind journalists' liberalism. If, I asked, journalists become liberal because they see the underbelly, the downtrodden, the miscast, how do you explain the conservatism of police officers, who, after all, see exactly the same things? Cronkite, apparently uncomfortable with the question, simply said, "Why should I?"
Cronkite.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Even though shock jock Howard Stern's radio and television show features scantily clad women and raunchy chatter, regulators on Tuesday ruled it a news program, exempting it from equal time rules on political coverage.

The staff decision by the Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) opens the way for the show to book two of the sexier candidates for California governor: Hollywood he-man Arnold Schwarzenegger (news) and porn-star Mary Carey.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In other words, the Federal Government is not allowed to control your opinion, or your expression of it. If you want to buy a press--you probably have a printer hooked to your computer--and publish a newspaper you do not apply to the government for a license which the government is forbidden to require. Whether or not I or anyone else thinks you are "operating in the public interest."

The FCC--disposing governmental powers--was created to determine what use of electromagnetic spectrum is "in the public interest." It decided that you aren't allowed to transmit on almost any frequency, but that certain of its favored elite are awarded a title of nobility called a broadcast license--and everyone else is entitled to shut up and listen.

Your "right to know" is beautiful clothing for the presumption of the objectivity of journalism. But if I disagree with you, one or the other of us is wrong--and if we both have a right to talk, no one has the right to hear only the truth.

Even people who buy ink by the barrel are deterred at the prospect of arguing with other people who buy ink by the barrel. Thus the true nature of journalism is not truth but consensus; what you are told--on the Internet or in print or on the air--may be the truth, or simply an urban ledgend which somehow flatters the teller of it.

Nothing the FCC does would be constitutional if applied to print or to in-person speech. Everything the FCC does should therefore be subject to "strict scrutiny" of the courts.

The "objectivity" of journalism is a naked emperor, and the FCC should be sued and forced to bring its tendentious licensees under control. As interested as you may be in the results of voting on election day, for example, it is not in the interest of the proper conduct of elections that government-licensed broadcasters put their--and thus the government's--imprimatur on guesses or even factual truth about how other people have voted.

There is time enough, when the responsible officials have made their tallies, to report the facts after the polls are closed nationwide. Had that rule been followed on Election Day 2000 we would have known the result a month sooner than was in fact the case.

FCC Says Shock-Jock Stern Qualifies as Newsman

Republicans love to complain that they don't get a fair shake from the elites running the nation's airwaves and newspapers. Which has us wondering why they're helping their political opponents muzzle the likes of Rush Limbaugh.

The Stop Rush [Limbaugh] Campaign
Wall Street Journal ^ | Sept 12, 2003 | Editorial

Under the First Amendment the government isn't supposed to presume to tell us what we have to think is important. We have to sort that out for ourselves.

Trouble is, by and large the people are lazy enough to let a Walter Cronkite do that for them. And a Walter Cronkite only exists when the government suppresses his competition. The FCC created broadcasting by suppressing competition from all but a few licensees, and by a "fairness doctrine" which in fact transferred the "establishment" nature of NY Times journalism to broadcasting, magnifying it with the imprimatur of the government.

If you sued the FCC over the issue of broadcast journalism's leftist bias, journalism would fight a PR war against you. And most judges--most Supreme Court justices--would be tempted to truckle to journalism for fear of negative, and hope of positive, "ink." But on the merits, the fact that broadcast journalism agrees with print journalism is no defense against a charge of bias--the First Amendment protection of the press makes the press presumptively irresponsible. If you can't be forbidden to say what you think, what you say can be wrong.

But since the FCC does have the obligation to apply "public interest" criteria to its licensees, there will aways be the temptation to discriminate against the speech of the honest--who lay out their perspective openly, announcing that they are conservative--and in favor of the arrogant and sneaky, who insinuate (and may be foolish enough to believe) that they are "middle of the road."

And why does the FCC have the obligation to judge what is broadcast? Simply because it engages in unconstitutional censorship in order to create the centralized broadcasting stations which you have the right to shut up and listen to, but no right (in unconstitutional FCC law) to compete with. In constitutional principle, then, the FCC should be abolished or, failing that, subjected to strict scrutiny to assure equality of access to government assistance in publishing speech. An obligation which, if enforced, would presumably look like a C-Span open phones session without rationing of conservative calls. That is, conservative speech would predominate.

Given the left-wing disposition of print journalism, the judges who enforced any such regimen would be subject to the sort of calumny that only Clarence Thomas has heretofore endured. The issue is whether the court could craft and enforce a remedy which would insulate it from the resulting undue influence . . .

Now for my opinion of who really controls the news - Advertisers. Consider the differences in advertisers on each network - how long will it be before more liberal companies begin to advertise on FOX to increase market share. And will FOX then bow to the demands (to change it's bias) placed upon it by those advertisers?
The media will continue to report/distort the major stories, but will still slant their reporting to "follow the money". The truth is not accorded a place in modern broadcast journalism.
From Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2003 (Front page headline)

Show of Strength

How Media Giants Are Reassembling the Old Oligarchy
Mix of Broadcast and Cable Proves Lucrative in Driving Bargains, Promoting Shows.
Playing Hardball With Barbie
Two years ago, Matell Inc. gave CBS a choice. The network had refused to broadcast the toymaker's movie "Barbie in the Nutcracker" in prime time. So Mattel threatened to pull millions of dollars of advertising from the Nickelodeon cable channel--owned by CBS parent Viacom Inc.
Viacom, which had spent a decade bulking up with acquisitions, now wielded its new clout, according to people familiar with the situation. If Mattel made good on its threat, Viacom said, it would be blacklisted from advertising on any Viacom property--a wide swath of media turf that also includes MTV, VH-1, BET, a radio broadcasting empire and even billboards. Mattel backed down, and the Barbie movie ended up running during a less-desirable daytime period.
Neither company will comment on the scrape, but Vacom says Mattel remains a "valued advertising partner." More generally, President Mel Karmazin in an interview is blunt about his company's strategy: "You find it very difficult to go to war with one piece of Viacom without going to war with all of Viacom."

This IMHO shows the power, and the danger, of centralized media. The intention if not the reality of such centralization is to moot the free will of we-the-people, convert us to sheeple to be lead as it suits our "betters."

Note, BTW, that Benito Mussolini got to be the dictator of Italy by first becoming its most influential journalist. His acquisition of power was a media event staged for the photographers, just as some of the "big protests" were staged for TV during the Vietnam era. Mussolin remained in control of Italy by becoming de facto editor-in-chief of all Italian journalism from then on . . .

So the idea that the advertisers control the PR media is questionable. In this case it looks like Barbie found herself paying protection money . . . and I think that is the general case with advertisers and journalism.

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