Posted on 09/14/2001 7:02:19 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
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 seen some outrageous reporting in alternate newspapers, but these left wing papers get a pass on whatever they say and no advertisers pull away from them.
I'm quite sure a Conservative alternate newspaper wouldn't get the same treatment as a left wing paper. Print one column that "offends" liberals and the liberal double standard would kick in: Advertisers would be pressured to pull out, lawsuits would have to be paid for, and the paper racks would be vandelized.
The definition of "objective journalism" is self-referential.The objectivity of anyone who adheres to the "party line" that mainstream journalists are objective (including of course the mainstream journalists themselves) is never challenged by any (other) member of mainstream journalism. It would be against the rules of the Establishment which is mainstream journalism.
If a Bernard Goldberg does write a Bias, he does not cease being a journalist--he is an unperson who never was a journalist.
The least regulated form of publication is the Internet web site, and it is no accident that you are reading the above subversive description of reality on a web site and nowhere else. Even a newsletter would be subject to more hassles, as Noachian has noted. Broadcast TV is the most Establishment-regulated, followed by big newspapers (Washington Times the only maverick) and cable news (Fox News Channel the only maverick). Radio, where conservative-hosted shows are rife, is remarkably low-regulation, if you don't notice that even the most conservative hosts are interrupted by anticonservative news programs. Rush's EIB network is the greatest conservative address in publishing space currently extant.
My humble opinion is that FreeRepublic.com is superior to anything other than Rush, and Rush's superiority lies only in his great address which only requires a pocket radio to access. Great addresses are expensive, tho--and even your newsletter costs money. I vote for spending that spare change on advertising FreeRepublic.com to improve the value of its address.
How to start and publish an independent Newspaper
Free Republic ^ | 09/21/2003 | Chad Fairbanks
If you can paint your opponent as an extremist and yourself as sweet reason, you have won the debate. So "objectivity" is the high PR ground, and it is natural for journalists to use their PR power to claim it."That's a myth now. It's not trueThe easy way to success being to go along and get along, journalists have adopted a system for avoiding unnecessary contention for the status of "objective journalist." Adherence to this code by journalists means that it is sensible to speak of "journalism" as an entity, an Estatblishment.
It is of the nature of an Establishment that, like the mafia, it "doesn't exist"--but you'd better not cross it! The journalistic Establishment coheres in the following code:
The objectivity of anyone who adheres to the party line that journalists are objective is never challenged by any other member of journalism Establishment.If a Bernard Goldberg does write a Bias, he does not cease being a journalist--he is an unperson who never was a journalist.
Yeah, Helen. Right . . . </sarcasm>
A theme of this thread is the superficiality of journalism. Nothing illustrates that better than the "get along to go along" Establishment which journalists have created; that process suppresses intellectual competition among journalists and averts meritocracy. You don't have to be particularly bright or hardworking to mouth the party line.
I think that question hinges on the definition of "conservative." I am enamored of the book The Theme Is Freedom--Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition, by M. Stanton Evans. Evans points out that different countries have different themes--and that American conservatives conserve freedom. Freedom, ironically, to do things differently than others have done in the past. Freedom to kick up a little dust.Thus we see American "conservatives" taking pride in, and advocating, progress. Progress of, by, and for the people. The anticonservative, OTOH, calls himself "progressive." But "progressives" seek progress in more government spending, more government regulation, and more government taxation.
The mechanism of anticonservative progress--progress of, by, and for the government--is criticism. Criticism of power not in government control. Criticism of the use of liberty by we-the-people, and criticism of the government for not reducing the liberty of the people.
Free, competitive journalism finds negativity commercially useful because it is difficult for the people to ignore. And it is difficult to ignore precisely because it has the effect of calling ino question the beneficence and/or the adequacy of the institutions upon which we-the-people depend.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.".
~ Theodore Roosevelt ~
Conservatism is the preservation of freeom--of the potential for progress of, by and for we-the-people. But in contradistinction to the liberal fantasy of instant government-induced nirvana, conservatives are under no illusions that progress of and by the people as a whole is anything but a "four yards and a cloud of dust" proposition.The football analogy is apt. A team which never gains less than four yards on any play, and doesn't turn over the ball, inevitably will score unless the time runs out. And that is true even if on every third down only three yards are gained. Superficiality would suggest panic, though, whenever a play only gained three yards--even if the play was a second-and-four and the next down will be third and one. Focus on comparison of single 3-yard-gain play with the "four-yards and a cloud of dust" game-plan standard obscures the reality of the field position attained and the expectation that progress will not be interrupted. If taken too seriously, it suggests that the coach "do something" like throwing a long pass to get to the end zone in one play. An unconservative decision, and seldom a good decision for a conservative "four yards and a cloud of dust" offense to make.
Superficiality exaggerates the importance of either the negative or the positive--but in the case of journalism with its predispostion to negativity, superficiality tends to exaggerate negativity and thus to call conservatism into question.
". . . 46 percent believe the press has too much freedom, and 71 percent believe "it is important for the government to hold the media in check." Moreover, only 53 percent strongly agree that "newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of a story, and only 57 percent agree strongly that "newspapers should be allowed to criticize public officials." But this is the natural outgrowth and implication of the way journalism traditionally (since the 1830s) positions itself. Namely, journalism puts frank opinion in the ghetto called the editorial page and the op-ed page, and either implies or says that the rest of the paper is "objective." Journalism also makes a huge fuss over journalistic "ethics," and loudly declaims how terrible it would be if the power of the press were "biased".If you compare that with "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . ." you should realize that the spirit of "ethics of objectivity" is in direct conflict with the "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach mandated by the First Amendment.
Whoso pretends to be other than a fallible human, even (and perhaps especially) when writing a newspaper, is a self-righteous fraud. And we-the-people have been indoctrinated by such self-righteous fraudulence since memory of living man runneth not to the contrary.
We have been indoctrinated, that is, to believe that we are free to speak and publish whatever we believe--and yet that it is wrong to seriously question the perspective which claims special authority to the publisher of a high-circulation newspaper. Without such indoctrination, already well-developed by the 1930s, it would have been impossible to think that an arm of the Federal Government could be given the authority to judge whether individuals publishing in a then-novel forum were doing so "in the public interest."
Nothing the FCC does would be constitutional if applied to print. That the FCC is incompetent to judge "the public interest" is manifest by the egregiously erroneous reporting of false signals which was done in real time on election night 2000. It was only because of that the election was thrown into question for a month--yet the FCC seems not to have any intention to change its procedures--or discipline its licensees to significantly change theirs.
I admit that the NEA is big, but I submit that there is a more influential lobbying organization by far. An Establishment of unparalleled influence--"the press.""The press" belongs in quotes not because it does not have First Amendment protection (though some of it patently does not) nor because "the press" (by which is meant nothing other than journalism) is not the only printing business protected by the First Amendment. "The press" belongs in quotes because it is not supposed to be--but in a very real sense is--a single entity like the NBA.
The NBA consists of competitive divisions such as the Lakers, Spurs, and so forth. But in regulating that competition by such means as giving each division the exclusive right to place certain players on its roster, the NBA acts as a single competition-limiting entity. It does that openly and publicly, and has lost antitrust suits over that behavior.
Like any illicit entity, "the press" denies its own existence as an entity; examples of this are nauseatingly routine whenever a journalist submits to Q&A. But any establishment coheres around a "turf," and must "send a message" when its turf is violated. What is "the turf" of "the press?"
Victory in any debate makes and the winner's side seems moderate, fair, objective, and balanced--and makes the loser's position seem "extreme". The turf of "the press" is the appearance of objectivity. Actual objectivity is of course impossible--topic selection is a fingerprint of the ineluctable perspective of the writer--but "the press" manipulates the appearance by use of the excuse of the fog of breaking news.
"The press" coheres in the following code:
The objectivity of anyone who adheres to the party line that journalists are objective is never challenged by any other member of "the press".The PR sythesis of the appearance of objectivity by "the press" is so pervasive and so effective that it is actually possible, even easy, to use that imposture in the"liberal arts academic fields. History , for example--precisely the field which should filter appearances out and, at the price of the wait, reveal truth which current events conceal--can be guilty of producing only a second draft of journalism. Some "truths" of journalism persist by the citation of journalistic reports alone, without serious scholarship in primary source material. See for example, the many fatuous "proofs" of the "McCarthyism" canard.If a Bernard Goldberg does write a Bias, he does not cease being a journalist--he is an unperson who "never was a journalist."
It took guts for Mr. Ashcroft to hold his symposium because, unlike during the civil rights era, liberals now often view federal election oversight with hostility. Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights called efforts to fight voter fraud "a solution in search of a problem" and "a warmed-over plan for voter intimidation."Socialists ("liberals"?--same difference) patronize--speak in the name of, but disdain--society (a.k.a. We the people). Consequently socialists need the cover of democratic legitimacy but do not respect it (How could an acolyte of Public Relations--who thinks that a printing press or a broadcast license is a license to control the sheeple--respect voters?). And liberalism is simply the political expression of the prevailing propaganda wind produced by comercial short-deadline journalism.
The natural consequence of those facts is a Democratic Party which is systematically engaged in a plan of ballot-box stuffing. And a journalism which is utterly unconcerned with Democratic vote fraud.
Socialists ("liberals"?--same difference) disdain, and lust for the power to control, the people. But, lacking titles of nobility, socialists find democratic legitimacy necessary for their ambitions. This implies the need for the socialist to patronize--speak in the name of, even as he disdains--society (a.k.a. We the people).
While it is true that Liberal "bias" in "the press" is the political expression of the prevailing propaganda wind produced by comercial short-deadline journalism, the nexus between media and porlitical liberalism is not limited to that business interest. Those who lust for power are attracted both to liberal politics and to journalism and the acadamy. The revolving door between "the press" and liberal--but not conservative--politics inheres in that nexus.
Talk radio is a critique of society from a frankly conservative perspective. But the statement,
is a self-critique.
Therefore talk radio critiques society more broadly than "objective journalism" does.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.