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.
There isn’t. I don’t trust any journalist that claims to be unbiased. It’s a lie, and that lie destroys their credibility. I would rather that the reporter be up front and honest with their point of view so I know the filter through which to read the story. Then I can seek out reports from other points of view, and between them I’ll have a much more accurate picture of the real story.
Bias is not merely on how to report, but perhaps more importantly there is bias in ~what~ to report. For every newsworthy thing that gets reported, there are probably dozens of things that go unreported. Picking the most “valuable” is inescapably the product of the values and biases of the reporters and editors.
The profession of journalism could benifit greatly from a careful de-construction and analysis of the reporting on the war in Iraq. From the beginning, the poison was planted.
IMHO Woodward and Berstein badly damaged the practice of journalism. Now everybody wants to be them, and every story is watergate including the ones that aren’t and nobody seems to know the difference.
22 posted on 10/03/2007 12:28:44 AM EDT by Ramius
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1905682/posts?page=22#22
Excellent points, which are less related to Swordmaker's ping list than to this thread on what is conventionally called "bias in the media" but which I prefer to style "the perspective of journalism."
BTTT
Back during the Carter Administration, I subscribed to the Accuracy in Media (AIM) Report. It documented journalistic bias, and was able to do so ad nauseum.I learned that the bias exists - a fact which I am now almost astonished to learn that I ever didn't know - but quickly became bored by the interminable telling of examples of the self-same phenomenon. The question quickly became not is there "bias in the media" but why is there "bias in the media?" I allowed my AIM Report subscription to lapse, and have spent the succeeding generation of time analyzing the latter question.
Shortly after 9/11 I started this thread to document my findings. And I have continuously updated that thread ever since. The short answer to the question why is there "bias in the media" is a couple of other questions - "what is "the media," and why do people think it should not be "biased?"
"The media" is a generality to include journalism (topical nonfiction) and movies and TV shows (fiction). I stipulate that movies and TV shows do have socialist tendencies embedded in them, but IMHO it's ridiculous to call that "bias" because there is actually no even colorable argument that the writers of those entertainments have any obligation to avoid expressing their own viewpoint. What would be the point in fiction which had no POV?
So the burr under our saddle is not so much fiction as it is journalism. But there are local freebie newspapers today which don't feature news at all. They are mostly vehicles for local advertising, and their articles are not written to inform about distant matters but about what is happening in the county in which they operate. They are mostly weeklies. They operate on a human scale, and their operators are accessible. And that is the way all newspapers were in the founding era. Some of those newspapers did not even have deadlines at all; they were printed when the printer was good and ready.
So the founding era newspapers were far more accessible, far more humble affairs than the big-market papers we are accustomed to today. Hamilton and Jefferson sponsored competing newspapers in which to wage their partisan battles, and neither pretended to be anything but the opinion of human beings. Printers of newspapers generally didn't have access to news from Washington, New York, or Europe any faster than the local shopkeeper did.
The difference between Founding Era journalism and modern Big Journalism is "the wire." The difference is the telegraph and the Associated Press. That is what accounts for the homogeneous nature of modern journalism, and that is what accounts for journalism's self-proclaimed "objectivity." Journalism's self-proclaimed objectivity was developed to answer the concerns which naturally were aroused by the advent and aggressive expansion of the AP. Because the dangers of monopoly news reporting were patent when that AP reporting was transmitted via individually edited newspapers, no less so than when it is transmitted by government-licensed broadcasters.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the AP was able to monopolize the rapid and efficient transmission of journalism reports. Before the telegraph, that was utterly impossible; with the telegraph rapid transmission was possible but expensive, and efficiency was paramount. With the advent of the Internet, efficiency is no longer an issue; a blogger or FReeper anywhere in the world can report to the entire world at large.
So in logic, the AP is a dead man walking - a gatekeeper when the walls are down. It is taking time for the word to get out, and for habits of thought to change, but eventually the conceit that it is necessary to defer to the superior "objectivity" of someone just because they have access to "the wire" will be seen for the patent fraud that it always was. FreeRepublic is a "wire" unto itself, accessible to all, and willing to carry the reports of all who do not claim that journalism is objective, and are therefore evil (in the sight of the AP) "conservatives."
For a Trusty Voting Bloc, a Faith Shaken
The New York Times ^ | October 7, 2007 | Laurie Goodstein
Bump for later reading.
PING
"All restrictions on free speech are a bad idea and should be repealed."I'll take the First Amendment please.
I'll have the same - with the caveat that I want the government out of the business of promoting "objectivity" which is nothing more than promoting a self-serving concensus among journalists. And I want a civil suit, if not a RICO suit for triple damages, filed against the MSM for collusion in restraint of the trade in ideas.Rather than naming a vague "Mainstream Media," I would name the Associated Press as defendant in that action. I will not say that I'm sorry it happened, but it is historical fact that the Lincoln Administration hindered rivals of the AP, and the AP self-censored to retain government support. So the AP was a tendentious organization within a dozen years of its 1848 founding.
You are a stone's throw from Durham, the site of the Michael Nifong crusade to keep his job long enough to get the maximum pension by railroading three Duke U. students into prison for a generation.That is relevant to the issue of "ethical restrictions and the mainstream media" because I just finished reading the book Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case by Stuart Taylor, KC Johnson. A major conclusion of which is that the coverage of the case by the MSM in general, and The New York Times in particular, was (and is) absolutely without ethical restraint.
To go by the MSM coverage you would think, according to Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, that Roy Cooper had found the Duke boys guilty rather than exonerating them.
Government and new media (Bloggers scaring the MSM) News and Record ^ | 1/1/07 | John Robinson
I have a Mac, and links to Wikipedia are built into the OS. That's not likely to gull me into taking Wiki for gospel, but the serious point is that de facto Wiki is apparently a new member of the MSM. Things stated as fact that just ain't so, mixed into a credible-appearing framework.I considered logging onto Conservapedia to help build it, but it just seemed a bit much and I never actually did anything with it. But certainly the singular important thing which should be done is to make a port to Wiki which would be designed as a filter and which would simply pass you on to Wiki on the mundane stuff, but would provide a "conservative" (we are, as F A Hayek pointed out, not actually conservative but true liberals) take on issues which Wiki treats as the MSM would. I would start with a discussion of the Associated Press, and the First Amendment.
But whereas I can discuss those topics at length on FR, that is a different thing from shoehorning my opinions into the encyclopedia format exemplified by Wikipedia. And I am not sure that that is an accident; it is entirely possible that a case can be made that that format, in and of itself, constrains the expression of opinion away from conservatism. Just as the nature of journalism inherently drives people who are conservative away from being reporters, and attracts liberals.
It is time to stop sourcing Wikipedia - List of Liberal bias and misinformation
“The Founders saw it as so painfully obvious that there was no need to write it into the Constitution.”Like the right to privacy and the Public’s Need To Know, I see.
FRiends, I suggest that this conversation be continued in this venue. If you peruse this thread I'm confident that the reason for your disagreement, such as it is, will be resolved.
For the top Democratic candidates, the difference was even more striking: Barack Obama received coverage that was 70 percent positive and 9 percent negative, and Hillary Clinton's was 61 percent positive and 13 percent negative. On the other hand, only 26 percent of the stories on Republican candidates were positive and 40 percent negative.
You can cite statistics like that until the cows come home, but it goes right over people's heads because we have all been brainwashed with the propaganda that journalism is objective - and people just don't see why journalism should be slanted, or why journalism should be all slanting the same way.There are reasons, actually pretty simple reasons, why this is the case. First, "Why would the various newspapers and broadcast networks be unified?" The answer to that is that newspapers in the founding era were diverse, and they did not have efficient means of gathering news which the rest of the population did not hear first from other sources. That changed with "the wire" - the (1848) advent of the Associated Press. The AP succeeded in monopolizing the transmission of news by telegraph - and when its monopoly was questioned on the grounds that it produced a concentration of propaganda power, the AP sold the story that the AP was "objective."
The AP transformed the newspaper business into a true news business delivering information which was not otherwise available to the general public. But, all protestations of objectivity notwithstanding, the Associated Press has one inherent bias: that the news - simply because it is new and known first by the AP - is important. What if the news wasn't important?
The reality is that on a typical day you probably cannot remember anything in the newspaper from exactly 5 years ago. There is only so much going on that is actually important, and reported daily developments ordinarily are of no enduring significance. And that means that the Associated Press in general, and the journalistic outlets which it supplies in particular, are inherently superficial. They are also generally negative, because the most dramatic changes are typically negative changes - simply because it is more dramatic to realize that a house burned down in less than a day than it is to understand that the nation's building contractors finish new houses every day, too. But there is less drama in the completion of ten months-long house construction projects than there is in the surprise demolition of the fruits of one such project.
In addition, since journalism is simply talk, journalism has an inherent tendency to promote criticism at the expense of action - to denigrate and second guess the businessman, the policeman, and the soldier. And to puff up the teacher, the plaintiff lawyer, the union leader, and the second-guessing politician by assigning them the favorable label of "progressive."
This thread is linked in FReeper thulldud’s OUTSTANDING home page. A FReeper that wise deserves a ping, a thread this good deserves a BUMP!
I thank you both.thulldud, have you seen The Market for Conservative-Based News, and
That is the continuation of Why Broadcast Journalism is Unnecessary and Illegitimate.
IMHO "The Right to Know" is a pretty strong case, and some others agree.
Actually, I hadn't. Found this article linked on some other thread, read it through once and couldn't let it pass without linking it meself. It struck the same chord that was sounded by the late, great Neil Postman of NYU, concerning the effect that journalism has on our picture of reality.
If TRTK is intended as a continuation, I guess I should link it also. (Although I note that Bernie Sanders was in the House, not the Senate. Meh. The point was well taken all the same.)
Bernard "Bernie" Sanders (born September 8, 1941) is the current junior United States Senator from Vermont. Sanders was elected on November 7, 2006 (Wikipedia)
Elected to Senate in 2006, replacing “Jumpin’ Jim.” I still got him mentally filed as a Representative. Update time.
“Yet we-the-people allow the government—in the form of the FCC—to tell us which of our countrymen speak over the government-created airwaves “in the public interest.”
Here, I must insist on inserting a technical issue which mandates gooberment allocation of available frequencies.
Were such allocation not enforced, those frequencies would become a mere babble as all who wished broadcast as they wished in that most undesirable of ‘commons’.
Lest you think I am making a reductio ad absurdum argument, consider that the electronic joke called “Chicken Band”, A.K.A. CB Radio, has become in all too many areas.
Fortunately, radio and TV frequencies can now be split into many more bands, thanks to digital equipment.
And, most importantly, the Internet allows freedom of communication to any who wish to avail themselves of this medium.
When Americans learn to use the Internet, there will be “Truth & Accountability”, to use the favorite phrase of one Walter D. Pine. Between cell phone audio, photo, and video communication capabilities, all will have to regulate their own behavior.
Why? ‘Cause they no longer have the expectation of privacy. Not a problem for the “good” - a living H*ll for the “bad guy”.
Fortunately, radio and TV frequencies can now be split into many more bands, thanks to digital equipment
. . . and the issue is the extent to which the FCC wants to empower the public or whether, in fact, it is motivated by a desire to maximize the value of its licenses and thereby maximize the power inherent in its authority to grant or withhold a license. What I have read suggests that the latter bureaucratic imperative has always been the FCC's predominant motivation.
News organizations have a right to adopt whatever editorial positions they want, but NPR receives a chunk of its budget from the federal government, and more importantly wields the imprimatur of being an essential public resource, which anchors its other fundraising efforts.It is true of NPR, and it is true of all broadcast licensees.All of broadcast journalism is illegitimate because journalism as we have always known it actually makes no substantive effort at objectivity. They put on a show of it, but in the real world the very first thing you must do to attempt objectivity is to declare up front all the reasons you know of that you might not be objective. Journalism does in fact have interests other than the public interest; it is only necessary to allude to the fact that bad news - such as a war, for example - makes "great copy" and is good for journalism. So the interests of journalism and the public interest are not inherently aligned.
Yet journalism as we know it consists of multiple outlets (including NPR, The New York Times, and so forth which are unified by their interest in the credulity of the public for all of journalism. Journalists do not compete on "objectivity," instead they are in full "go along and get along" mode. That is the natural result of their dependence on wire services as news sources; they all have the same sources and they all need the public to trust those sources.
It is worth pondering Adam Smith's perspective on that:
Credulousness in the public is inimical to the public interest.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.So journalism as such has interests different than the public interest - and yet no journalism outlet ever declares any reason why it might not be objective. To the contrary, all journalists claim that all journalists are objective - and that is the very opposite of declaring its interests. So journalism makes no effort to attempt actual objectivity, relying instead on journalism's unified propaganda power to prevent the public from actually thinking about the limits of the credibility of its information.
Remember that, Benjamin Franklin put it, "Half the truth is often a great lie." It is not necessary for a journalist to actually lie in order to mislead the public. There is no justice in having the government license, let alone own, broadcast journalism outlets. It is blatantly unconstitutional.Why Broadcast Journalism is Unnecessary and Illegitimate
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