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 American middle class consists, by my definition, of people who respect others (too much, for example, to be comfortable styling less-prosperous people as "poor") and themselves (too much, for example, to be comfortable if anyone else were to stylie us as "poor"). Identification with we-the-people thus defined predisposes one to believe that a broad-franchise democratic republic--particularly the one defined by the U.S. Constitution--is adequate system of government. And in due consideration of the other known examples of government current and historical, we consider "adequacy" to be a high standard of accomplishment just as the framers of the Constituition did.

Respect for the typical American is one thing, and a desire to patronize a large segment of the population is a different matter altogether. There are various approaches to satisfying a desire for superiority over one's fellows. The Christian way of excelling by service is entirely compatible with the institutions of a democratic republic.

By contrast the "way of the world" is to seek power directly rather than respect among equals. Power, for example, to raise taxes and increase regulation felt by the typical American, and to lavish or restrain government payments to individuals of great or small means. But government power is not the only form of power, there is also psychological power in the form of academic or media credentials.

Academic credentials such as professorships and doctoral degress produce a presumption of intelligence and knowledge, but there is also a less rigorous way to attain such presumption. It is also possible to gain that presumption by demagoguery--by flattering the ignorant with praise of their knowledge, and the unprinipled with praise of their morality. That is the way of celebrity and public relations.

Public relations is the art of manipulating people with "positioning". For example, the segregation of overt opinion on the editorial/op-ed pages "positions" the rest of the paper as not being a mere matter of opinion--as "objective."

Another example of PR is the extent to which journalists self-regulate the competition among themselves. This is a form of go-along-to-get-along behavior quite as pernicious as price-fixing agreements to limit competition among manufactureres or merchants. It is, accordingly, conducted sub rosa even though the result--homogeneous viewpoint projection among journalists--is in plain sight.

Commercial journalism's business plan is to entertain by novelty/unpredictability and to entertain by frightening the reader. Journalism is a form of entertainment and would fail commercially if it did not serve that function. Other forms of entertainment--movies and TV dramas in particular--manifest a markedly similar, and similarly homogeneous, viewpoint. And journalists display a remarkable aversion to conflict among themselves, which would subject them to the approbium of other operatives of journalism. Accordingly journalists can best be seen not as apart from the celebrity entertainment melieu, but in and of it, differing in relatively small degree from the actor or, especially, the playright/screenwriter.

If journalists are not individually apart from entertainment celebrity, they are as a group the pilot fish of the celebrity melieu. Journalists as a group--and it is as a group that their behavior and importance is best understood--not only model timidity in their conformism within journalism but reinforce timidity everywhere else. They do so by militantly using any excuse and every excuse to write a story to scare their audiences into paying attention to them.

Journalism strongly tends to ignore any story which does not put someone and/or some institution upon whom the middle-class depends in a bad light. A story about crime will either find the police incompetent to capture and convict the perpetrator, or overzealous in doing so. A story about war will show the military in a similar way, either in a quagmire or being bullies.

As between the middle class American who identifies with we-the-people, on the one hand, and the acolyte of the power of PR on the other, which one will aspire to be a celebrity? And how could an acolyte of Public Relations--who thinks that a printing press or a broadcast license is a license to control the sheeple--possibly respect voters? The answer is that they cannot, and they do not. Socialists ("liberals"?--same difference) disdain, and lust for the power to control, the people. But, lacking titles of nobility, socialists find democratic legitimacy necessary for their ambitions. This implies the need for the socialist to patronize--speak in the name of, even as he disdains--society. Socialists are noted for a tendencey to "love humanity but can't stand people).

Liberal "bias" in "the press" is the name of the prevailing propaganda wind. It is produced by the bad news, scare-the-people negativity of comercial journalism. The effect of that negativity is exacerbated by the superficiality of journalism. That effecto is to question the benevolence/competence of the so-called "establishment."

While "the press" insinuates that all other commercial enterprises are venal and that the Constitution defines journalism as being objective and not subject to ideological scrutiny, the truth is that it is journalism itself which best fits the description of an entity which exists to control competition. The establishshment which calls itself "the press" denies its own existence as an effective unitary entity, but it punishes those who violate its turf. That turf is the high ground public relations, the presumption of objectivity. The nexus between media and porlitical liberalism is not limited to that business interest. Those who lust for power are attracted both to liberal politics and to journalism and the academy. The revolving door between "the press" and liberal--but not conservative--politics expresses that nexus. The power of the academy operates at a more retail level of individual students but is, for that, able to be more coercive of the student than the mere journalist--who can be ignored without penalty--is able to do.

To a child with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Journalists are people with a printing press, to whom everything looks like a problem that people need to be read about. Journalists are the pilot fish of those who desire celebrity; whatever journalists identify as a problem is something any celebrity finds safe, and convenient, to criticize. The catch, for the journalist, is competition. While the journalist leads the timid celebrity to identify himself with what the journalist will not criticize, the journalist is himself a PR-craving celebrity in his own right.

Newsstands are placed whereever people are waiting around and bored. Newspaper headlines are designed as an antidote to boredom. Bad news for the reader sells--prevents the passerby from ignoring the story.

That sort of news implies limitations on the adequacy and/or the beneficence of the powers-that-be; the more sensational and extreme, the greater the implied criticism of the status quo. That is, although identifying and correcting problems is prudent and thus conservative, the more things seem to need to be corrected the less legitimate the status quo--and conservation of it--seems to be.

Desire for celebrity and good PR is a motive for working in any of the entertainment media, including journalism. But all celebrities working in the media not only desire but have a commercial need for good PR. Journalists are far from immune from that desire and that need. Consequently the effect of competition in journalism is not diversity of journalistic perspective but, by and large, a homogenizing herd mentality. The resulting consensus is a safe haven, and the only safe haven, for anyone whose desire for celebrity transcends any considerations of long-term perspective (such as those articulated in the preamble to the Constitution of the United States.

Journalism could conform around any consensus, but in fact the observable tendency of that consensus is anticonservative. Like journalists, policemen's daily beat shows them the limitations under which unprosperous people labor--but police have the incentive to minimize the resulting chaos while journalists have the incentive to exaggerate and even exacerbate the problems they see. Thus the Rodney King riot was excitedly covered by journalism--and the version of video of the arrest of Mr. King was edited, not to summarize the truth as found by the jury but the "truth" that there should be no peace because there was no justice in that jury verdict.

The issue of "bias in the media" has been a particular focus of mine since the Carter era--which is when I learned clearly that the tendency existed. Though I clearly remember Barry Goldwater's expressing surprise that the "referees" had given him such unfair coverage.

But once I clearly understood that Accuracy in Media (AIM) could produce clear-cut instances of "bias in the media" until the cows come home, I decided that indeed there was no point in waiting around for those cows--that the only interesting question was not "whether" but why. And I flatter myself that I have developed an incomplete but fairly satisfactory theory.

That theory began to take shape about 1990, and you can see its status as of 9/01 and its development to its present state in the <a href="http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3ba20deb5ac5.htm"> http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3ba20deb5ac5.htm</a> thread.

In a nutshell: Journalism is the pilot fish of liberalism. Journalism has inherent liberal tendencies built into its business plan, those tendencies self-reinforce and weed out conservative viewpoints, and reinforce liberal tendencies in the rest of the entertainment media, from which journalism is distinct only in being a nonfiction (not explicitly fiction) genre of publishing. Liberal politicians simply sail downwind of the resulting propaganda tendency--a blatantly demagogic procedure.

Codes of journalistic ethics are irrelevant for analyzing journalistic treatment of liberals, in the sense that you don't need ethics rules to know not to embarass members of your own group. And codes of ethics are useful for analyzing journalistic treatment of conservatives, not for any realistic assurance that journalism actually avoid doing them, but only as a checklist of things to expect that journalism is likely to do.

And those who doubt that should ask themselves, not why it should be so, but exactly why it should not be so. And who told them that it was not so.

But Leno spokesman Bruce Bobbins insisted yesterday that the comedian never endorsed the Terminator. "They're just longtime friends" . . .

Davis spokesman Peter Ragone said, "Leno didn't endorse Schwarzenegger? Everyone in California thought he did."

Which one of them is right? Both, and neither. Objectivity is impossible.
Tradition and history tell one story, current events seem to tell another. Tradition and history tell a conservative story. By focusing on the short-term things like a house burned down, and not noticing all the things that went well (e.g., all the people gainfully doing a day's work on the same day that the house burned down), the news inherently tells an anticonservative story.
Except on a 9/11, the news is just entertainment--and keeping a radio to your ear for a 9/11 report is paranoid. Entertainment is "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl." Journalism is mostly the "boy loses girl" part. The "boy meets girl" and the "boy gets girl" parts are the everyday blessings of God. They are great--but they don't make "good copy."
It is because journalism's role is entertainment that its perspective is inherently anticonservative. Journalism is the pilot fish of liberalism, and the prevailing propaganda wind down which demagogues sail. Journalists, liberal politicians, and all other celebrities who want to justify their celebrity by sounding profound simply flatter each other and make each other look good.
That system even applies to academia, except in sciences with a fairly firm attachment to reality--and even among scientists the desire to look intelligent without serious thought results in aggressively projecting PC attitudes outside the scientists' own disciplines. The system works by a get-along by going-along system, and it tends to dominate expensive, high-production-value media because it protects against risk.
But that system inherently limits the perspective its acolytes allow themselves to see; it is a system in which everyone agrees to avoid the extremes of left or right--but one in which everyone is so immersed in the self-congratulatory worldview of leftism that they also agree that there actually is no such thing as "left"--and that the divide is between "moderates" and "right-wing extremists."
Journalists critique the rest of society, and conservatives in particular, from a leftist point of view--but deny the very existence of their own POV. Conservatives, OTOH, accept the fact that they do indeed have a POV. By accepting that their POV has a name rather than being the absence of a POV, conservatives are self-critical and admit that they critique journalism and the rest of society from that POV.
Conservatives are very uncomfortable with demagoguery and go-along-to-get-along compromise of principle, and that makes them pariahs to the go-along-to-get-along crowd. They are the curve-breakers who see the establishment's underwear and are unwilling to pretend otherwise. Their reward from the establishment--from journalism, from academia, from Hollywood--is scorn, ridicule, and vituperation.
Thus conservatives see journalism's codes of ethics, and laugh bitterly. You do not need a code of ethics to know how to treat your friends kindly--and a "code of ethics" which is not, and can never be, enforced against your abuse of your critics is a facade. Such enforcement would have to come from the very establishment which brooks no criticism of itself.
"The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves." The First Amendment designs a system of open debate, and of judgement of that debate by we-the-people and not by the government. The liberal establishment is illegitimate by its own standards, but not by those of the Constitution and conservative principle, except to the extent that the government entangles itself in political decisions pertaining of right only to the people themselves.
The solution to this conundrum is not for conservatives to apply liberal standards to liberalism, but to ridicule the liberal standards themselves. We have to laugh "objective" journalism out of the court of public opinion. And with its mock-bombastic "talent on loan from God", "all-seeing all-knowing Maja Rushie", "truth detector and Doctor of Democracy", and so forth, that is exactly the project of the Rush Limbaugh Show.

NBC Supports the Politically Partisan Leno
The New York Times ^ | October 10, 2003 | BILL CARTER

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

In creating a government designed as a blessing to people yet unborn (i.e., us), the framers of the Constituiton took a long view of the future. Today conservatives of that tradition assay to similarly take the long view into the future. And it is impossible to take a long view of the future without reference to a long historical view of the past.

The framers did not make an explicitly theistic government, but patently intended that we should have a government which did not exert itself to control, coerce, or coopt our efforts to pass religious traditions and institutions down through the generations.

That is actually part and parcel of the broader First Amendment project to assure that the government did not assay to coerce the opinions of the people in any regard other than to prevent them (by means short of a constituttional amendment) from instituting a religiously/politically coercive government. And indeed historically religion has been important to the legitimacy of government.

The project of the Non-Religious Left is to delegitimate Christian (i.e., traditional, highly influential religious) institutions. That project would (does) have the effect of delegitimating tradition generally. And it is not the parchment it is written on but only the tradition of respect for it which gives the U.S. Constitution any force whatsoever. It is after all scarcely the case that no other country has the U.S. Constitution; since the words of the document have been in the public domain for centuries they all do. But only in the U.S. is there a tradition of respect for that document as "the law of the land."

Hence the title of Ann Coulter's latest book--Treason relates strongly to the effect of the project of the left not "merely" on Christian observance but on respect for the limited-government strictures of the Constitution--and ultimately on the respect of the government for we-the-people and our posterity.

Leftism is betrayal of our own posterity--it is disgraceful in principle and in fact. And the conceit that journalism is or should be "objective"--thus respected more than the Constitution--is the fatuous fallacy which lies at its root as a systematic influence in America. The idea that journalism should be enabled by the government--eg, by censoring the people in order to create clear broadcast channels for specially connected FCC licensees--and respected by the people with the trust associated with the Constitution itself--is directly counter to the First Amendment.

Journalism calls itself "the press", not simply applying "First Amendment protection" to inself alone but insinuating that there is no right to deviate from the line which is convenient for journalists to adhere to. No right, ultimately, for the Supreme Court to recognize any difference between what is convenient for journalism, and the meaning of the Constitution. That is the implication of a "campaign finance reform" which gives print and broadcast journalism license to wage politics while muzzling those which the cabal of self-anointed "objective journalists" does not accept into its Establishment.

The Democratic Party: Home of the Non-Religious Left (Wonder Land)
Wall Street Journal ^ | Friday, October 17, 2003 | DANIEL HENNINGER

In the 1992 election, Bill Clinton got 75% of the secularist vote, while the current President's father received support from traditionalists (church-goers) by 2 to 1. That pattern held in the 2000 election. "In terms of their size and party loyalty," Messrs. Bolce and De Maio argue, "secularists today are as important to the Democratic party as another key constituency, organized labor."
The Democratic Party: Home of the Non-Religious Left
Wall Street Journal ^ | Friday, October 17, 2003 | DANIEL HENNINGER

Journalists evidently covered the general's speech and published his remark for the purpose of persecuting him for his religious belief. The other Democrats, the ones running for POTUS, have picked up that opportunity to criticize a Christian. That plays to the Democratic base, and may be necessary to win the nomination, but the sentiment is also inherently unconstitutional for a POTUS to act on-- no less so than requiring a general to be a Christian would be. Can the Colonels also be required to not be Christians? The Lieutenants? The Sergents? The Privates? And would it matter that the Christian soldier happened to be black?

Where, precisely, do these nonsense-talkers think to find a reliable American military, if atheistic Democrats (who don't have much tendency to become officers, as Gore implicitly acknowledged by trying to suppress the military absentee vote in Florida) are to constitute the entire pool of qualified officers?

The unspoken conceit that Islamacism is a monster which will eat atheists (or, in Lieberman's case, Jews!) last is laughable. What must happen instead is that the American military model First Amendment freedom of religion for Iraq, making no effort to persecute moslems but exerting influence for religious freedom for Iraq's minorities, not excluding its Christians. Such a polity established in Iraq would represent a defeat for Islamicism and for the atheistic Democratic Party.

Democrats love "The First Amendment" as they pretend it to be (with a "wall of seperation" to suppress religion), and actually loathe the First Amendment in its concrete form. They want to establish atheism or at least agnosticism as the religion of the state, they want to establish journalism as infallible when speaking ex cathedra. In short they think contrary opinions to theirs are to be suppressed as "racist" or some such.

Kerry, Lieberman urge ouster of Army officer
Boston Globe ^ | 10/18/2003 | Raja Mishra

My word, Lynn, you've been busy -- and to very good effect.

I think it's close to critical that we have a nationwide -- if not worldwide -- brainstorm on fundamental political topics. Freedom, rights, limited government, and their several domains of applicability are no longer shared concepts on whose meaning there is general agreement; instead, they've become "shibboleths."

The ancient Hebrews used the word "shibboleth" as a password to their fortified places, because their enemies could not pronounce it properly. In current parlance, a "shibboleth" is a position-point that's effectively beyond debate. That is, when you introduce it to a discussion, your opponent is unable to respond effectively, except perhaps to note that you've changed the subject. Another term for this is "motherhood issue."

Everyone is for "freedom." Everyone believes in "rights." Everyone believes in keeping government to its "proper duties." It's when you get down to details that the conflicts come out.

This is too large a topic for a full exploration on FreeRepublic's bandwidth. Watch the Palace; with luck, I'll have a piece up there within a day or so.

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit the Palace Of Reason:
http://palaceofreason.com

[Bush] complains that negative news crowds out good news in the reporting about Iraq. He has a point because news is almost always by definition negative. A former NBC executive once said that news is what the government would pay you not to print; the rest is advertising.

That's true under a First Amendment-respecting government-- when journalists compete to attract attention by scaring the audience. But when a government does not respect the First Amendment, it does its own advertising and prevents actual news (as defined above) from being published. And, lest we forget, that's a perfect description of Saddam Hussain's regime--and The News We Kept To Ourselves CNN admits it accepted the regime's restrictions as the price of appearing to report "objective news" from Baghdad.

And if the news is what the govenment doesn't want to discuss, that does not prove that the rest--"advertising"--is untrue. It simply means that journalism has a different, and practially opposite, perspective and set of incentives to those of the government (at least a Republican government).

The obstacles faced by journalists working in the United States pale next to the experiences related by the IWMF Courage awardees. We’re chafing under Bush’s public-relations offensive against the national media.

Journalists view a Republican president's effort to use the so-called "bully pulpit" with hostility because of the contrast of incentives between them--and because they expect to control the best pulpit. Journalism functions as an Establishment (one which, like the mafia, denies its own existence) for that very purpose.

The lunch concluded with a solemn video tribute to 18 journalists who died in Iraq. They came from many nations, but they were all drawn there to learn the truth, “or whatever is closest to it,” said CNN’s Judy Woodruff, who acted as moderator.

No, they went to gather news. The truth is more than the news. The news functions as a half-truth--the part of the truth which makes a propaganda wind at the backs of liberal politicians.

Courage Under Fire -
What GW Bush could learn from journalists
who cover the world’s hot spots
Newsweek | 10-17-03 | Eleanor Clift

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