Congressional control of election speech is outrageous. But government control of political discourse was an accomplished fact before most of us were born. That genie has been out of the bottle since the government claimed the authority to restrict radio transmissions from you and me but to grant "broadcast" licenses to a relative handful of favored individuals.
That makes the holders of those licenses super "speakers" who have the right to be hearable by all sheeple. At least, those licensees are "superspeakers" as long as the FCC doesn't revoke their licenses. Just as Sean Hannity was saying on the radio yesterday, no broadcaster will support a test case of violating this new "campaign finance" law by accepting a proscribed political ad, because the broadcast licensee has too much to lose and is too easily punished.
On face value, these "superspeakers" merely add to the national discourse. But from the point of view of the publisher, the attention of the public is the scarce resource--and by all accounts regulated broadcasting has sucked much of that oxygen out of the air of the (unregulated) print publications.
The unregulated Internet may perhaps suck some oxygen away from unregulated print media. But in contrast with high-entry-threshold broadcasting, the Internet makes addresses available to everyone with little if any discrimination. First come, first served. The main problem of publishing on the internet is the inevitable one of burning through the competiton and attracting eyeballs to your site under conditions of nearly perfect competition. In addition, those eyeballs see the site not via a $70 TV and rabbit ears but via PC, phone line/cable, and ISP. All viewers and publishers on the Internet face that financial hurdle, but beyond that the cost of publishing on the 'net (and to a potentially global audience) is remarkably small.
The Internet is freedom of speech, press, and assembly grown up, whereas broadcast is the centralizing PR borg of mass-market newspapers metastasized. The thing which the First Amendment told us not to accept was government judgement of what was objective--and by the time most of us were born, the FCC retaining in principle the right to do that was an unquestioned fact of life.
Note that although the FCC does retain that right in principle, in practice the FCC defers to journalism to define objectivity. Thus, broadcast journalism can tamper with the 2000 election by announcing the "result" of FL while the issue was in doubt, then follow up the next day by launching an assault on the one analyst most responsible for getting FL right, after the polls were closed but before Mr. Gore's minions had had a chance to launch a propaganda canpaign against the rules which ultimately prevented the overturning of the result at the ballot. After all of which the FCC makes not a whimper. Thomas Jefferson once said, "If I had to choose between government and no newspapers on the one hand, and newspapers and no government on the other, I should unhesitatingly choose the latter." Through the miracles of modern PR science, we are perilously close to a government of journalism.
The First Amendment crisis we face is over the definition of objectivity, a word which journalism has been coopting for a century. And over the definition of journalism. In First Amendment principle, journalism can say pretty much what it wants, including the claim that it is objective. Ironically, an appeal to the First Amendment is a claim of the right to print or speak notwithstanding a government claim (whether spurious or well-founded) that the speaker/printer was not objective.
The other irony of the "objectivity" issue is the fact that It is the commentator who accepts the fact that others may legitimately disagree, who therefore accepts a label such as "conservative" as a self-critique, who is least subjective. And anyone who believes in their own objectivity is--however strongly supported by the agreement of the powerful--hopelessly subjective. Self-described "objective journalism" is such an obvious fraud as to be risible.
But can "journalism" really be spoken of as a single entity? IMHO, certainly--for the simple reason that commercial self-interest has culled out any significant tendency for major journalistic enterprises to compete on perspective. Yes I know about the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, but the body of all major journalism outlets is ruled by the same principles, defining what is a lead and what is not news. The simple fact is that it is impossible to tell "the whole truth," and if you restrict your attention to what is "new" you take off your radar screen some things which are far more important than what remains on it.
For example the ben Laden problem was knowable long before 911, and no claim of "old news" justifies any other headline taking precendence over it once that was known. Except of course for the commercial interest of the journalistic outlet, which needed to entertain potential readers with new and interesting material every day. It is the emphasis on entertaining the audience, IMHO, which is the "bias" in journalism. It is a bias against conservatism.
At one and the same time, journalism is an unstoppable steamroller, and individual journalists are powerless to control it. That is because journalism is institutionalized go-along-and get-along behavior--and deviation from that behavior means retroactive banishment from acknowledged status as a journalist.
But why does journalism line up with political liberalism? That is the wrong question; it must be turned around. For to ask the question of why so many politicians align themselves with the predelictions of journalism is to answer it. And this phenomenon gives journalists plausible (to themselves) deniability; journalists can't help it if some politicians are right (i.e., left) and others are wrong (i.e., right). In their minds, Ted Kennedy joined them.
And in a chicken-and-egg situation like that, who knows? And indeed, why should anyone care? Except that the Supreme Court of the United States seems to suppose that it matters.
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/focus/f-news/1038450/postsThe egregious mischief of "campaign finance reform" lies, IMHO, in its extension of the preexisting government policy toward public communication--that is, the fatuous notion that when the Constitution mentions "the press" it refers specifically to the genre of nonfiction entertainment which is produced and sold on short deadline--the publishing genre known as journalism. I style that notion fatuous--Supreme Court decisions to the contrary notwithstanding--because although the idea is relentlessly promoted by patently self-interested journalists I await the first suggestion of a realistic demonstration of why that was the intent of the Framers or why it ought to be so in logic or in any stripe of religious tradition.
The truth is that mass-market journalism is unprofitable unless it is competitive in the particular traditions of journalism. And that although those traditions emphatically include claiming to be objective, belief in your own objectivity is the essence of subjectivity. And that all the rest of the traditions of competitive, profitable journalism tend to produce a tendency in story selection and in fact emphasis within stories. And that politicians can and do align themselves with that tendency, making that tendency into a political issue.
And that that tendency is known as "liberalism." Any occasion in which a journalist attacks liberalism is a "friendly fire" incident.