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When you are up against emotional dismissals of rationality, your only hope of a rational hearing is in court. The principle I advocate is that it is folly to try to take on the small fry, you have to go after the big dog. And the big dog, with all due respect to the damage and danger of having a POTUS who is hostile to you, is journalism.
People hear that, and instantly think that the First Amendment is an obstacle to any attack on journalism. But there are limits, some well-recognized, on the problem which the First Amendment presents to addressing libel. And that is what we are all experiencing, systematic libel. Libel of an entire class, and an entire political party. And not libel by a single newspaper, but of effectively all national newspapers, and broadcast radio news and TV news - as well as most cable TV channels.
First, just putting the name “libel” on it shows that it is possible to formulate a court case against it. Second, while the First Amendment codifies deference to “the freedom of . . . the press,” it does not create a class distinction amongst the people. Freedom of the press is a right of the people, not of a class of people. It belongs to you, and it belongs to me. Freedom of the press implies freedom to read journalism as well as the right to write it. It also implies the right to transmit and receive journalism with technologies which represent the fruits of “the progress of science and useful arts,” the promotion of which the Constitution explicitly cites as a part of the Framers' mission.
In addition to the laws of libel, two other laws can impinge on the freedom of journalists - the Sherman Antitrust Act and the law creating the FCC. I have seen the claim on a seemingly serious web site that the Associated Press lost a suit before SCOTUS in 1945 under the Sherman Antitrust Act. On its very face, the AP is an organization to tell all major journalism outlets what the news is.
There is a robust tradition of cooperation among newspapers tracing back to the founding era, when it was quite difficult to transmit the news expeditiously (as we would now consider “expeditiously,” it was impossible), and cooperation and sharing was the norm. But the AP raises that to an entirely different level, and not only solves the “expeditiousness” problem but creates a “Style Guide” for the composition of articles to be carried by the AP. Some of that “style” actually has merit in encouraging more informative and less florid composition. But part of that “style” homogenizes what can be said in an AP story.
It is painfully obvious that journalists have interests which conflict with the public interest. TV cameras love fires, and any sort of destruction because the public cannot but be interested by it. But while it interests people, destruction is patently inimical to the public interest. And yet we are informed - by teachers in school as well as by journalists themselves - that journalists are objective. This is patent nonsense. The claim of “journalistic objectivity” is most similar to claims of papal infallibility applied to secular matters. A newspaper article is composed and printed by people who are not even under oath, and therefore a newspaper article cannot without supporting testimony be dispositive in court.
And even if an article be true, it inevitably must be less than the whole truth. And as with all partial tellings, even of truth, “Half the truth is often a great lie.” The usual problem with journalism is what is not said. But what is said is sometimes excruciatingly destructive. The Zimmerman case is an egregious example; NBC synthesized a lie by broadcasting an edited version of Zimmerman’s discussion with a police dispatcher in which an answer and then a question were excised. Blatant dishonesty. But it has to be brought to court properly.
The Zimmerman case is part of an obvious pattern, which now includes the officer Darren Wilson case and the Duke Lacrosse case and - going back a ways - the T’wanna Brawley case, and undoubtedly others which don’t immediately come to mind. Those are nominally - but only nominally - apolitical. For in all such cases, the actual target is much larger than the individual(s) involved. There are also the explicitly political cases - the “Texas Air National Guard Memos” - scare quotes denoting that the documents involved were forgeries - case, the arbitrary transmogrification of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth organization from a group of the people most knowledgeable about the naval experience of John Kerry into “swiftboating” as an unquestionably false narrative, without the intermediate step of actually demonstrating that any of the claims of the organization or its members were false.
Establishment journalism as we know it is a single entity, easily shown to tend to violate the Sherman Antitrust Act, and it manifests a systematic slant against the rank-and-file Republican, and especially the Republican wing of the Republican Party known as the “TEA party.” That animus can be demonstrated. So what? So, the Federal Communications Commission has no right to promote journalism as being objective, or being anything other than a mouthpiece for special interests which profit at the expense of the public interest. There is no need to ask a court to declare conservative voices to be objective, but any court should recognize that the perspective of journalism is not inherently the public interest. Only the Constitution, and laws which are consistent with the Constitution, define the public interest.
The FCC has no right to even consider censoring or “balancing” so-called “conservative” (actually truly liberal) expressions such as the Rush Limbaugh show, et. al. As for the “Federal Elections Commission,” there is no public interest served by it, it is counter to the First Amendment, and all “Campaign Finance Reform” laws should be abolished by SCOTUS and/or Congress. Anyone who opposes the abolition of the FEC or the curtailment of the FCC’s political influence is a Grubercat. An apparatchik.