Replies

The central ideas of Fair--and of MRC and its progenitor (I take it) AIM--are:

That journalism is or should be "unbiased".
That journalism dominates public opinion.
And that public opinion should be soverign all the time.

In fact of course,

The First Amendment tells the government NOT to attempt to enforce "unbiased" thought, speech, or printing.
The public knows or certainly should know that believing journalism is strictly a "caveat emptor" proposition.
And this is a republic in which the public is soverign only on Election Day.
And in order to exercise that soverignty on Election Day, public opinion should be isolated from attempts at coercion (i.e., should be exercised in a secret ballot) or attempts at undue influence via polling-place electioneering or via any form of Election-Day PR efforts. Especially broadcast journalism, and most especially broadcast predictions of election outcomes before the polls close.

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