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.

The coverage actually cost lives. Helicopters were grounded for 24 hours in response to media reports of sniper attacks. At least two patients died waiting to be evacuated.

The more you know about a subject the less likely you are to respect the media after you see something they've reported on that subject.

The Constitution was crafted to work in the absence of instantaneous communication, and did so for generations before the development of broadcasting. Broadcast journalism cannot therefore be considered necessary. And although journalism works systematically to distract us from making retrospective comparisons between what we were told was "breaking news" and what we ultimately learn was the truth, it is not difficult at all to make those retrospective comparisons after the fact. And the results are seldom pretty:

in the aftermath of the 2000 election, journalism declared that the issue du jour was why Fox News Channel reported that Bush had defeated Gore in Florida - and therefore in the Electoral College. Years of post hoc ballot counting concluded that Bush had indeed won, and the only real issue was why broadcast journalism reported that Gore had won Florida while voters were still on the way to the polls or standing in line waiting to vote (or perhaps decide to go home).

In October of 2004, CBS decided (following the lead of Democratic nominee John Kerry who "reported for duty") that not only were three-decade-old war records salinet in 2004 but that crude forgeries were indisputable evidence that Bush had gotten favorable treatment by the Texas Air National Guard. No other broadcast journalism pointed out that the CBS story was bogus.

The Katrina coverage did not save lives, it cost lives with its inaccuacy and sensationalism.

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Broadcast journalism with its immediacy is far more of threat to the deliberate judgement of our official even than the newspapers. Broadcast journalism, especially in the "breaking news" mode, has extremely short deadlines and has very poor accuracy track record. Not only so, but broadcast journalism - all broadcasting - depends on government favoritism for its very existence. Broadcasting depends on government censorship of all competitors at any given frequency/location; there is no way you can read the First Amendment and think the framers of the Constitution intended the government to decide who could communicate and who had to shut up.
Broadcast journalism is not only unnecessary but illegitimate.
Katrina tales: Media's imperfect storm [biggest-ever media scandal?]
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ^ | Sunday, June 4, 2006 | Jonah Goldberg

In all fairness, as news goes that's strictly dog-bites-man.

The actual issue, IMHO, is the extent to which "'Man Bites Dog' not 'Dog Bites Man'" and other rules of journalism - "If it bleeds, it leads," and "There's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper" - have political implications.
I hold that in fact they do, and those political implications are anticonservative - radical. It is easy to see that bad news sells newspapers, but if you accept that as a criterion for what is good for the country, you have stipulated that journalism is the establishment. Journalism certainly would object if any other industry were said to define the public good; why should we accept that what is good for journalism defines the public good?
When you reflect on the fact that bad news is, after all, just that - bad for the country - the fact that "if-it-bleeds-it-leads" journalism depends on bad news is iron-clad proof that journalism is a special interest.
Why Do Republican Crooks Get More Ink than Democrat Crooks?
Newsbusters ^ | John Armor

persuasion with a baseball bat. It's obvious which side each of us, and Ms. Coulter, is on.

Why do you choose to use a hyperbolic baseball bat?
Ann Coulter uses no such thing as a baseball bat, she uses rhetoric. Her rhetoric has a sting to it, but it is only rhetoric. And the people she uses her rhetoric on are far from innocents in the use of rhetoric with a sting to it.
The actual targets of her rhetoric are not the thousands of widowed spouses of 911 sneak-attack victims but the liberal Establishment consisting of not only the Democratic Party of the "Wellstone Memorial" but the "objective journalism" establishment which selects out from among those thousands of widows four liberal activist women and anoints them the "Jersey Girls." And, of course, selects the liberal activist Cindy Sheehan out of all the thousands of bereaved mothers of fallen troops and announces her - and only her - "absolute moral authority."
Ann's stinging rhetoric falls directly on the Jersey Girls and Mother Sheehan, but only because they are the adopted human shields behind which arrogant "objective" journalism presumes to protect its self-serving political agenda. A role for which they themselves volunteered. And Ann has likewise volunteered to be the skunk at that garden party, making herself "COULTER THE CRUEL" as the front page of yesterday's NY Daily News had it. Armed with her stinging rhetoric, and only that, she has launched a one-person Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign.
Ann must be part Mexican, because she has volunteered to do a job American men won't do. The truth is that the Republican Party has been in desperate need of vice presidential candidates with that sort of elan. Jack Kemp, for example, took exactly the opposite demeanor into the 1996 debate with VP Gore - and got his head handed to him. Kemp redefined the Republican Party with his Kemp-Roth bill, and on that basis should have had the presidential nomination in '96. But if he will not defend the (white, male dominated) middle class which is the base of the Republican Party, he is nonetheless disqualified for national office.
Coulter calls 9/11 widows "witches" (Lying Headline from Reuters)
Reuters via Yahoo! News ^ | June 7, 2006 | Claudia Parsons

Most papers are simply political organizations masquerading as journalists.

Say rather, partisan journalists arrogantly assuming and asserting that they are objective.
They are journalists, all right - but they promote the importance of journalism out of all proportion to reality. We're told that "The First Amendment allows journalists to tell the truth about the government." Well, yes - but it also allows journalists to lie about the government.

There isn't much reason to take them seriously once you realize they are just DNC flacks.

That is the opposite of liberal opinion. The idea around which liberalism coheres is that NOTHING actually matters except PR. That is, journalists believe that their work is the public interest. That they are, and by right ought to be, the establishment.
Many Iraqis Dismiss Bush Visit As Stunt ~ Patrick Quinn spins for the Leftist MSM again
Las Vegas Sun | June 13, 2006 at 16:26:3 PDT | PATRICK QUINN ASSOCIATED PRESS

America was also premised on the idea that the nation would fair well with an open~~, honest~~ and unfettered Press.

The "honest" part is journalistic propaganda having no basis in the First Amendment. Nothing in the First Amendment gives any basis for the belief that journalism would be honest, and Jefferson and Hamilton sponsored newspapers in which to wage their partisan battles. That is the model for freedom of the press.
The problem is not tendentiousness in journalism; that was old in Jefferson's time. The problem is the naivete of the public which buys into the con that journalism is objective because journalism says it is objective. The other problem of journalism is government-licensed (obviously therefore unconstitutional) journalism. I have reference of course to broadcasting, which could not exist without censorship to enable licensees to be heard over long distances.
Journalism has been seized upon by broadcast licensees as an excuse for their existence as government-licensed, government-favored entities. The trouble was, of course, that objectivity is not readily defined (except in a retrospective view in the light of history). So what could broadcast journalism do but mimic unlicensed journalism? Hence we see broadcast journalism parroting The New York Times.
The conceit of journalistic "objectivity" is sustained not only by the need of broadcasting to propagandize about the "need" for "objectivity" which they provide (or at least make a pretense of providing while merely mimicking The Times) but by the willingness of journalists to go along and get along instead of competing for the respect of the public. If all go along, all get along and all are putatively "objective;" the alternative would be for persistent flame wars. Thus we see flame wars only between the institutions of "objective journalism" on the one hand and of "conservative talk radio" on the other.
Since objectivity is a virtue and it is arrogant to argue from the assumption that you have a virtue, frankly "conservative" commentators actually have the moral high ground in their positioning. For anyone who understands the difference between philosophy and sophistry, that is . . .
The Separation of Press and State
1440 KEYS AM Radio ^ | June 23, 2006 | Jenni Vinson Trejo

On the 25th of June last, just after 1200 noon, Wolf Blitzer of CNN "interviewed" President Hamid Karzai. I was prepared for some direct and testing questioning by Blitzer.

What followed, was an outpouring of negative quotes about the state of Afghanistan. So far so good. Blitzer would not give much of a breathing space to President Karzai. He then quoted "NewsWeek". The old cliches of "open sewage" and "lack of electricity" were directed at the President.

President Karzai was obviously under pressure. He then reminded Mr Blitzer that "NewsWeek" people only "came for a day". The President observed, "then they leave us with the consequences". The President informed a reluctant Blitzer, that there is now democracy in his country. He mentioned the doubling of the gross annual income.

Wolf seems not to have heard of the vile, brutal Taliban. After all, what Afghanistan suffers today, must be small potatoes, compared with the reign of the Taliban.

On my way for morning coffee, it suddenly dawned on me (surprise, surprise) what Blitzer was all about. I was reminded of the attitude of an employer. The one who got up Monday morning disgruntled. He hauls in an employee. He has to observed civilize niceties though. Yet, he can scarcely restrain his ire.

Many of us have been that employee. I have it.

Blitzer talked down to the President in this fashion. The utter arrogance of the man, the absolute lack of professionalism. Now,sadly taken for "solid journalism".

As these events transpired, the left and their media minions began a campaign to convince Americans that the midterm elections were all but over

It seems perhaps like a distinction without a difference, but I find it much more expanatory to place the openly political left as the sycophants of of the hyperpolitical so-called "objective" journalists.
There is no more tendentious political claim possible than to argue from a claim to superior virtue.
"Philosophy" is simply the humble admission that truth and wisdom exist but that the philosopher makes no claim that his arguments have to be right because of any innate superiority of his own. The philosopher assays to restrict his arguments to facts and logic.
In contrast the "sophist" claims superior virtue - the root of the word means wisdom whereas the root of "philosophy" meas love of wisdom. Thus the sophist uses superior power of some sort to enable him to dominate a debate with arrogance rather than facts and logic. Clearly sophistry deserves the bad reputation it has, and the modern sophist obviously does not openly admit to being a sophist.
But journalists claim to be objective, and unless there is such a thing as unwise objectivity they are claiming wisdom as well, without being willing to say so publicly. But either way, their claim of objectivity is a claim that what they say is not subject to criticism. It is arrogant. And where does the modern sophist get the power advantage which enables him to lord it over mere mortals who disagree with him? Clearly it is the fact that "objective journalism" functions as a cabal, an "establishment" operating in plain sight. The rules of journalism include the rules which make journalism interesting and therefore profitable and influential:

if it bleeds, it leads,
always meet your deadline; there's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper, and
"Man Bites Dog" rather than "Dog Bites Man."
But they also include an unspoken but inviolable rule:

Thou shalt not question the objectivity of a fellow journalist.
Those rules have less than nothing to do with the public interest; they have everything to do with interesting the public. Interesting the public, and maximizing the influence of journalists.
The First Amendment means only one thing: No one is entitled to have superior influence. You have as much right to to speak or print as anyone, but if you are to influence people you have to interest them and convince them that what you say is significant.
The Tides Turn in Favor of Bush and the GOP
The American Thinker ^ | July 5, 2006 | Noel Sheppard

we need a news gathering agency with different focus and serving different interests. Currently we only see what politicians and entertainers are doing. that is just a small slice of America. AP wire collects news and everyone comments on it.

Supppose we had a news wire that covered the rest of the society so the news would look like America for a change.

Yes, but the trouble is that it would be boooriinnng!

You see, what America really looks like - 95% of people who want to have jobs and are healthy and remarkably prosperous by historical standards - is taken for granted. And that is just human nature; there's nothing for it but to have occasions like Memorial Day and other holidays in order to encourage people to reflect on the donut rather than on the hole. Actually, an "occasion like Memorial Day" is every Sunday morning and whenever Christians expect to go to church (etc).

So in reality the negative, superficial, and arrogant perspective of journalist reporting "The News" is in competition with the positive, unchanging, and humble perspective of the preacher of "The Good News" - the gospel. Which is why the market for preachers who preach The New York Times from the pulpit is so weak . . . to get that, you can stay home and listen to the TV.

The First Amendment does not entrust control of the public discourse only to mullahs or priests or preachers, but it also does not entrust the public discouse only to journalists. The public discourse is in the hands of the people, of all of us. Whether we only listen and read, whether we speak in person or post on web sites, whether we write books or make movies or audio recordings, or whether we write newspapers and presume to claim to be objective. Each is entitled to give his attention to or withhold his attention from each of the rest of us.

You will note that government-licensed broadcasters do not make my list of constitutionally protected forms of "speech." But I think that technology is making bandwidth plentiful, and that technology ultimately will obsolete the FCC's censorship model of broadcasting.

The theory that reporters are objective is something we took in with our mothers' milk. I'm ashamed to have to admit that it took me over fifty years to even begin figure out just how much of a fraud that "theory" is.
The rules of journalism - "If it Bleeds, it leads," "'Man Bites Dog' rather than 'Dog Bites Man,'" "Always make your deadline," and the most closely observed but least spoken of, "Thou shalt not question the objectivity of a fellow journalist" - are rules for maximizing the profitability and influence of journalism.
The rules of journalism promote journalism and tear down the reputation of all competitive institutions. Competitive institutions are those which actually do things - such as providing food, water, shelter, clothing, etc - and therefore are subject to second-guessing. Journalism cooperates with other complaining institutions such as labor unions, the plaintiff bar, and liberal politicians.

Employers pay the employees, unions complain that they don't pay more, and journalism promotes the union position for its own profit.

Industry makes the silicone breast implants, apples optimized by Alar, trucks and automobiles, cigarettes, asbestos, etc. The plaintiff bar sues the industries, and journalism promotes the complaints for its own profit.

Police apprehend criminals and soldiers and Marines kill or capture foreign enemies. Liberal politicians complain if they do not succeed - or if they do succeed, complain that they were excessively violent. And journalism promotes the liberal position for its own profit.

Liberal politicians promote and enact laws based on the complaints of unionists, trial lawyers, and minorities - and criminals and enemies foreign and domestic - and journalism promotes those complaints and those laws for its own profit.
The case for the "objectivity" of journalism consists entirely in the fact that journalism ruthlessly suppresses internal criticism of journalism. CBS promoted fraudulent "TANG memos," and was caught red handed in all sorts of internal inconsistencies proving that the documents were not made at the time, nor by the person, claimed. Yet CBS could put up its own internal investigation exonerating itself of bias and agnostic as to whether the documents were real or fraudulent - and no other organ of "objective" journalism said a critical word.

So First Amendment journalism is a mixed blessing: we have to have it, but we are fools if we take it at face value. We have to have it, but we know that it will unfairly criticize exactly the people who are getting things done in society - whether they be business or professional people or law enforcement or military.

You need to go read the First Amendment...again, hopefully...and consider what it does and does not do. Why do you assume the only action that can be taken against inferior journalism is a law, or some other action by the government?

The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law... which has nothing to do with any criticism that may come their way.

Let's review:

I said that journalism is protected from any requirement that it be fair, balanced, objective, or any such thing. And the fact that they hypocritically claim to be objective does not change that fact.

I said that we know that it is the nature of journalism with that sort of protection to coalesce into a cabal of nominally competitive entities which do not compete on the basis of objectivity. They all claim to be objective - and far from ever challenging the objectivity of any of the others, they protect one another from criticism of the obvious fact that, all claims to the contrary notwithstanding, none are remotely close to being objective.

And I identified the reason that all of them are systematically remote from objectivity - their desire to seem important drives them to lust after proof of corruption, malfeasance, or nonfeasance on the part of the entrepreneurs, professionals, and just plain workers who make the country work. And that emphatically includes police and military personnel. Ultimately whatDemocrats hate about Republicans is the way Republicans insist that producing food and shipping it to us is more important than criticizing orchardists for using Alar to give us good apples.

Journalists have a systemic bias against people and institutions that we must rely on - people who get necessary things done. People who actually do things are always good targets for second guessing; their very successes point the way to how things could have been done even better.
And make no mistake, advocating socialism is nothing more than second guessing. Ownership is a form of credit; if you build a car you own the car because you get credit for its existence. Socialism proposes that the people who build factories do not deserve the credit in the form of ownership; socialists ("govermentists" is a more accurate term) seek to aggrandize the credit to themselves by delegitimating traditional ownership and assigning ownership of "the means of production" to the government. That obviously eviscerates the incentive to create new "means of production," but - since in invention is useless without the ability to produce it - it also eviscerates the incentive to create new products at the same time. Hence socialism delegitimates innovation, and socialism is economic stagnation (that is not perfectly true, of course - socialism can increase scale. Make more of a good, far beyond the point of negative returns - or make a bigger version of something).
There. Are you satisfied that I think that journalism can be criticized? I have admitted that we must have First Amendment journalism but I have shown that credulous reading of journalism is inherently pernicious.
Biased Reporting (Thomas Sowell)
Townhall.com ^ | July 12, 2006 | Thomas Sowell
There seems to be in young children an instinctive disposition to believe whatever they are told. Nature seems to have judged it necessary for their preservation that they should, for some time at least, put implicit confidence in those to whom the care of their childhood, and of the earliest and most necessary parts of their education, is intrusted. Their credulity, accordingly, is excessive, and it requires long and much experience of the falsehood of mankind to reduce them to a reasonable degree of diffidence and distrust. In grown-up people the degrees of credulity are, no doubt, very different. The wisest and most experienced are generally the least credulous. But the man scarce lives who is not more credulous than he ought to be, and who does not, upon many occasions, give credit to tales, which not only turn out to be perfectly false, but which a very moderate degree of reflection and attention might have taught him could not well be true. The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing.
Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith

To me, the point is that everything I've said in this thread has been in plain sight since before I was born, and it took me half a lifetime to even begin to understand the predicate fact that journalism is not objective.
I read Reed Irvine's Accuracy In Media Report for a year or two, and then stopped because I was convinced. I no longer needed proof to know that journalism slanted to the left. But then, I was always conservative, so I didn't have an ox that would be gored by understanding that in fact journalism was tendentious against my philosophical predilections.
If it takes half a lifetime for a putatively intelligent person to grasp a fact that is congenial to his worldview, why would you think that it would be easy for someone to whose worldview that fact was not congenial to absorb it??? It is practically impossible for such a person to absorb the fact that their worldview is supported primarily by propaganda. The only hope IMO is to inject "minor" dissonances into their worldview and have them grow. But since people readily sense the implications of dissonant facts, and since people hate cognitive dissonance, it is quite difficult to get them to look at dissonant facts at all.
To me the salient dissonant fact of recent times was the Burkett/CBS "TANG Memo" affair. Everything about those "memos" fairly screamed "Fraud!" They purported to be copies of memos which were very closely held - yet the quality of the copies was not that of a copy of an original or of a direct copy of an original, but of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. IOW, the quality of the "memos" was inconsistent with their having been closely held and consistent with intentional obfuscation of the fact that they were not made from valid originals. And that is on top of the anachronisms induced by the fact that they were carelessly made by technology which didn't exist in the 1970s, and on top of errors in the composition of the "memos."
So anyone who looked at the "TANG Memo" evidence critically would conclude that

The "memos" were crude forgeries, and
CBS should have known that, and
CBS had to know that after they were called on it, and
CBS' "independent investigation" which was agnostic about whether the memos were fraudulent was as fraudulent as the "memos" themselves, and
All of journalism knew all of that, within days if not hours of the original Buckhead call of "BS!"
All of journalism had a huge story in the fact that GW Bush had been smeared by CBS - and all of journalism turned a blind eye to that story, taking the same "see no evil" approach that CBS' "independent" investigation took.
The only possible conclusion is that "objective" journalism was anything but objective in that case. And if anyone doubts item (6), you could ask them why they didn't previously know items 1 - 5.

the news business was dominated by three powerful television networks and a handful of important newspapers . . . Then, poof, in what felt like an instant (though it was more like a decade), they were gone.

From the time I read Reed Irvine's AIM Report back during the Carter Administration, I realized that journalism was tendetiously anticonservative. It took until a decade ago for me to see how the rules which make journalism profitable inherently produce radical propaganda, and we on FR are still struggling with the issue. So what feels to the writer like "an instant" has been at least a generation, and has felt longer than that to conservatives.
The general claim of journalism is that journalism is important. Specifically, journalism claims that journalism is objective, and that the rules by which journalists select and determine the emphasis of stories produce wisdom. In fact of course, the rationale of those rules:

"If it bleeds, it leads,"
"'Man Bites Dog' rather than "Dog Bites Man,'"
"Always make your deadline," and
"Real journalists do not criticize other journalists"
has nothing to do with wisdom and everything to do with the self-interest of journalism.
The prohibition against criticism of other journalists (journalism's version of Reagan's "Eleventh Commandment") is particularly cynical since it is only that which supports journalism's claim of "objectivity."
Journalism is cynical, and journalism is sophisticated, and journalism is constitutionally protected. That is a situation with only one, painfully limited, remedy:
The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . . It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith

Breaking news
LA Times ^ | 7/16/06 | William Powers

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