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.
But you know, it is illegal for broadcasting to be slanted. Just like it was illegal for Gore to use the government's phone to solicit political donations, and for Clinton to coordinate soft-money ads with hard-money ads . . . and the entire problem is belling the cat.You see there are just so many ignorant people out there.
Common Tator is fond of pointing out that a third of the voters are conservative, a third are "liberal" (anticonservative) and a third can go either way. You nor I can readily identify with those that are liberal, or even with those who (as one guy told me) always voted for the candidate who won.The media and the public school system are the two top reasons for the amount of liberals in the world. In fact the ONLY reason why I was not caught up in all the liberal BS out there is because of my religion . . . and naturally religion is banned in schools.CT models them as people who want change when things make them unhappy, and gridlock when things are going OK. Political manic depressives. Thus FDR won 4 elections by his "all motion is progress" strategy during the depression and WWII. Without ever solving an important problem. Depressing, isn't it . . .
Pessimism never won any battles.--Dwight Eisenhower
60 posted on 8/28/02 10:19 PM Eastern by Ragtime Cowgirl
RG, Somehow this post piqued my curiosity, and I checked out your homepage. I like the cut of your jib! The Coyboy Bush" and Ashcroft pieces are inspiring.I've been studying the question of the "one-way trip" the Democrats have been making; you made me wonder if it might not be cast in psychological terms as depression. Conservatives
see beyond the yearsOTOH Journalists, by focusing on the moment, see mostly negative things with which to surprise and interest (entertain) the public. I see "Liberal" politicians as simply the political expression of the short-term, paranoid perspective of journalism. It's demagogery based on following and exacerbating the prevailing ideological wind of journalism.
thine alabaster cities gleam
undimmed by human tears.Doesn't that tie in with the Eisenhower quote? Journalists (liberals in general) focus so closely on the dire consequences of the battle that they cannot see victory at its end. In that respect WWII was anomalous because FDR, precisely like x42, was sympatico with the ethos of journalism. FDR was after all allied with Joseph Stalin.
Thank you for the kind comments, C_i_C.
I'm not sure that I'd describe the collective emotional/mental state of today's Democratic party as "depressed"....despairing, maybe....as a spoiled child despairs when he discovers he can't get everything he wants; or as a parent who makes careless promises to his children and finds that not only do the kids expect the promises to be kept, but they keep demanding more...or, even more frustrating for the party who sold it's soul more times than "The Producers" sold tickets to their show...the Dem. leadership is now stuck with appeasing an ever-increasingly vocal collection of motley groups who do the DNC dirty work (voter fraud in the inner cities, various rent-a-mob events, etc.)- groups who are now shaking hands with Arafat, condemning our CiC and are being exposed by their own actions to the rest of the American voters....voters who love God, family and country, their local police, McDonalds, NASCAR, SUVs, traditional marriages, freedom and truth. Tough for the party of fearmongering and global governance, victimhood and B.S. disguised as wisdom on the daily Tom Brokaw/Rosie Show (imho,(^:).
Go for a walk, THEN write the thesis.Then ping me.
It's not just young people, my dear. Most adults, I fear, are precisely that way.Think of how many people inhale when journalists (self-marketing journalism) tell them that "objectivity" is just a dial-click away. The mercy is that most of them, most of the time, don't trouble to vote the convictions of the journalists.
If you're in doubt of that, just ask how many journalists disagree with the notion that journalism exists to "comfort the afflicted--and afflict the comfortable." Hardly any would strongly object to that. But then, how do they hope to accomplish that if not by influencing politics? And just what political influence would trying to get the government to "comfort the afflicted--and afflict the comfortable" be?
In the mouth of a journalist, "objectivity" is a codeword for socialism.
SY, I pinged you to this thread at the time I started it about a year ago. I was hoping you would enjoy it . . .
Journalists wield real political power in every sense of the word, yet are not held accountable to the electorate.
At least judges are appointed by politicians who are in turn elected to their positions.
It is time for a change to the Constitution. But it won't happen since liberal journalists will use their 'bully pulpit' to thwart it.
BUMP
Understand that. I post a lot of articles on here, some quite upsetting at times to me.
From my #59 (to which this is, FR-wise, a response; click "to 59" below):If, heaven forefend, you were to find yourself in peril because the ice on the lake was thinner than you suspected and you are now in frigid water, you would draw my attention to your plight and earnestly ask me to venture in some way to help you escape. I on the other hand would be put in a different distress: lacking a rope I must now choose between behaving as a coward, and venturing into harms' way myself at the risk of sharing your fate.Journalism creates certain emotional facts. It is not entirely clear that they are healthy for the audience.
But my thesis is that the Constitution is good as written. It is only the utter lack of judicial application of it to the FCC which is a problem. And, as you note, "objective" (their codeword for liberal) journalists are hugely influential even on SCotUS. Only one justice has settled it in his mind not to care how he is portrayed in--does NOT read or view--the newspapers or TV News.Congress has passed McCain-Feingold, and that will be reviewed by SCotUS. IMHO nobody will argue the case correctly; the defenders of the law will argue that it's fine for Congress to decide who can talk on the radio and who can't, the opponents will argue that the status-quo-ante was uniquely constitutional and Congress can't control the FCC.
Congress created the FCC and therefore could uncreate it; it certainly CAN control it. But that, of course, is a constitutional problem of its own; it reveals the FCC for what it is: a smokescreen for Congressional control of political speech in the venue of wireless.
There exists a category of constitutional law know as "strict scrutiny"; basically it means that if you are skating close to discriminating against blacks SCotUS will not give you the benefit of any doubt. The FCC deserves such treatment simply for existing, as a creature of Congress, for the constitutionally suspect purpose of regulating wireless communication in general and wireless political communication in particular. The history of broadcast journalism--simply amplifying the biases of print journalism--can be shown, IMHO was shown in Slander, to be so endemic, pervasive, and systemic that the FCC not only cannot withstand strict scrutiny, it cannot withstand any scrutiny at all.
I created this thread to define how that could in principle be done.
I disagree with your premise that broadcast journalism is entertainment. My contention is that there has been a very serious communist/socialist core of believers in the U.S. since the 1930's who raised their children and grandchildren to be believers and who have recruited many others via the media and the schools/universities.
They are very intelligent and determined and committed, and they are not interested in entertainment except as they can use that medium to carry their propaganda, rather like a corporation doesn't carry about the entertainment in a show, only the ratings, the demographics of the ratings and their product placement.
These core communist/socialist believers are to the left what the Christians are to the right, the spiritual and religious focus from whom have derived all the planning for the last several generations to take over schools, universities, unions, politics, movies, news, entertainment to dispense their viewpoint and thus take over the country.
If you don't see this, I think you are missing the most serious threat to our Constitution and The American Way, and indeed, to Christianity as well.
Whoever spoke of disagreement over that point?My point is that we don't have to fight on that ground alone. That, in fact, although the usual suspects have the First Amendment squarely on their side (more firmly by far than we would like), that is applicable to print but not to broadcasting.
And that the affectation of objectivity--actually, the use of "objectivity" as a code-word for "Political Correctnes", aka socialism--is a false signal endemic to broadcast journalism. Theoretically at least, it's illegal to broadcast false signals over the regulated airwaves. That's only theoretical because the FCC is guilty of nonfeasance in not enforcing the prohibition against it.
My thesis commends to conservatives the concrete action of suing the FCC and its licensees who perpetrate the fraud of "objective journalism". Theoretically the case goes to SCotUS, where the defendants make an issue of the fact that Justice Thomas doesn't read the papers or tune in the news. Plaintiff replies that that makes Justice Thomas the only person who is not coopted by the flattery and derision of journalism.
Congress has sent a First Amendment political speech case to SCotUS in McCain-Feingold. Anti-regulation people would claim that Congress can't tell the broadcasters what to broadcast, and what to abstain from broadcasting. But if so, Congress can't tell you what you can and can't broadcast, FCC license or no.
I appologize for the tardiness of my response; couldn't seem to get going on a good reply.But patriciaruth's #154 essentially amplifies your #152, and my #155 is directly on-point to your #152.
You will never get any traction with this in the public arena. Only the people who like to discuss how many angels can sit on the head of a pin will ever exchange more than two emails with you.
If you want to fight the good fight, I believe one needs to pick the fights and the issues where you have a chance of making a difference.
I sincerely believe your issue is not the issue nor the time.
Anyone can own a press, nowadays--you probably have a printer attached to the computer you're using to read this message. The internet, indeed, is the poor man's soap box, with global reach. This is really the practical realization of the First Amendment ideal--we-the-people assaying to transcend our individual ignorance, inexperience, and folly by pooling our individual knowledge, insight, and wisdom. But the seperation of the wheat from the chaff is for each of us individually to discern.Broadcasting, and the high-speed press which is its Public-Relations progenitor, create a seperate PR universe. In that PR universe wisdom, insight, and knowledge come from the elite as an accomplished fact; we-the-people are mere consumers of the wisdom of our betters. In that universe the First Amendment right to speak morphs into the FCC-proclaimed right to be quiet and receive wisdom from on high.
The difference between the First Amendment paradigm and the Public Relations paradigm is the difference between we-the-people as decision-making adults on the one hand, and on hand "the masses" as subjects to be worked upon by PR technique.
NPR, being government owned as well as government licensed, is the purest form of big media. But although the rest of broadcasting is privately owned it is equally government-licensed. Lacking any other definition of objectivity, broadcasting takes its cue from print big media. Print big media avoids flame wars by defining objectivity as consensus. And since faddishness and demagoguey are what sells papers the easiest, big media's "objective" consensus is a continual denial of the lessons of history. Journalism is far too busy hyping its objectivity to ever focus seriously on the tendencies which inhere in its own business model.
The dirty little secret of broadcasting is that its evanescent nature makes it ill-suited to serious consideration. Even more than print journalism, broadcasting is "of the moment;" even more than print journalism it is therefore faddish and demagogic. An enduring medium such as a book or a self-archiving web site is the only tool we-the-people have to scrutinize journalism and broadcasting.
The salient comparison between commercial broadcasting and NPR is not its funding difference but the fact that both posture as being in the public interest--and though both interest people generally, neither in fact is in the interest of preserving the Constitution.
One might for instance discuss federalism vs. the central government we now have; I do understand your point. But I think that federalism vs centralism is widely if dimly understood (at least I for one have understood the original federal design from my youth).OTOH I reached the age of 35 without so much as recognizing that journalism had a consistent political tendency, and 55 before I began to be clear on the nexus between that political tendency and the business model of journalism--and the disjuncture between First Amendment freeedom to speak (and implicitly to listen by choice and to individually decide) and the propaganda idea of a "right to know"--to shut up and listen to your betters.
Yes, people find it difficult to accept. But I understand that; it took me over fifty years to begin to figure it out. It's difficult precisely because the main propaganda thrust of big media is designed to make it so. And it is an interesting challenge precisely because of its difficulty.
Yes, like federalism First Amendment freedom is an endangered species which the SCotUS could scarcely vindicate in one sweeping decision outlawing all broadcasting. But at least I would like to think that Clarence ("high-tech lynching") Thomas could see holy land afar off. That attempted lynching wasn't "high tech"--nothing digital about it; it was simply the PR Establishment waging war on prudent judgement by we-the-people.
McCain-Feingold will go to SCotUS, and neither the plaintiff nor, certainly, the defendant will address the central issue. The central issue is the PR Establishment, and the impropriety of the government's contribution to it.
This is a very revealing statement. Many of us have long argued that leftists do not ask, "Who is right and who is wrong?" but rather, "Who is strong and who is weak?" in determining their positions on world and national issues. The substitution of power criteria for moral criteria is one of the reasons the left so often takes immoral positions. It is, therefore, helpful to hear such a candid acknowledgment of Hollywood liberals' moral confusion. Not to mention ignorance -- no Palestinian city has been "turned into rubble."
The tendentiousness of the Politically Correct movement is most stark in the case of journalism, which hypes itself as "objective" but actually makes its living delivering entertainment to audiences--and, thereby, audiences to advertisers. But that begs the general question, "Why does entertainment default to anticonservative values?" This seems to provide an answer.Rooting for the underdog on Monday Night Football is "passion without consequence." But in a political context, rooting for the underdog is rooting against the powers-that-be, against tradition and those who prosper under that tradition.
The irony of rooting against American tradition is that our tradition is to give the individual a chance to try new ways of doing things. Conservatives look at an individual who prospers because of the leadership he assumes by dint of his own efforts and see the little guy as compared to the government. PC thinking, OTOH, looks at that same prosperous leader and sees only a fat cat as compared to the poor.
The truth is that in America "the poor" is to a remarkable degree a phantasm, an aprocraphal construct. The so-called "poorest quintile" of the American economy is neither a quintile (only about 15% rather than 20% of the population) nor a static group of people without much money. Although it includes truly poor people it is loaded with young, upwardly mobile people.
The "richest quintile" does include rich people, and its aggregate income is large. But that is partly because it is not a quintile but a full quartile (25%), not 20% and certainly no merely 15%, of American incomes. And even the 80th-percentile (say nothing of the 75th-percentile) income is scarcely rich by American standards. Top-quartile Americans know all too well that it is no trick at all to descend to lower quintiles--which may explain why they work twice as many hours in a year as is typical of the lowest "quintile."
PC is all about emotionalism, excitement, and superficiality. It is the domain not of the little guy who posts logical analysis on a low-cost web site but of the true fat cat who can make money with huge investments in production values--and who is deathly afraid, not of being shown to be illogical and unscientific, but of being out of step with others similarly situated. Mere logic can usually be trumped by good PR, but a flame war with other people who buy ink by the barrel is--horror of horrors--bad PR.
Denis Preger, JWR
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