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.

To be a pure celebrity--to be famous for being famous--is to live and die by PR.

Journalists are celebrities. Like movie stars, they are not expert in the scientific controversies surrounding global warming and so forth. But all celebrities are expert in one thing: knowing what is the safe thing to say.

Whoever says something which flatters the profession of journalism will get good PR in return. And the thing which most flatters the journalist is to be called objective. In the world of celebrity, the "intellectual competition" is over who can flatter the rest of the world of celebrity most subtly.

Hollywood vs. "Stupid" America
FrontPageMagazine | 11/13/03 | Howard Mortman

The third theory is the most plausible: The Democratic memo reveals that much of what the media has been focusing on for the past six months has been a set-up job. The staff and Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have been selling story after story (think the Niger yellowcake and "imminent" threat controversies). Out of whole cloth, they have contrived an ambiguous but ominous speculation about the Bush administration's sinister motives for invading Iraq. Now, through this one memo, they have been revealed as nothing short of cynical political operatives. And the reporters who ran with their hints are revealed as breathless and easily manipulated amateurs.

What Memo?
Weekly Standard | 11/13/2003 12:00:00 AM | Hugh Hewitt

That was one reason for having Churchill's bust at hand. "At least from my reading of the history, he pretty much said what he thought, did what he thought was right, and led. He was courageous in his leadership."
History, and not individual presidents and prime ministers, would judge the decisions they made. "You're never going to be around to judge history." History written soon after the event was highly subjective, not least as writer had no chance to see the full effects of the decision-making. He added: "And in my case, most of the short-term historians probably aren't that thrilled with me being president in the first place, which might colour the short-term history." He laughed.
Mr Bush insisted he does not pay great attention to what is written about him. "It's not to say I don't respect the press. I do respect the press. But sometimes it's hard to be an optimistic leader. A leader must project an optimistic view. It's hard to be optimistic if you read a bunch of stuff about yourself."

"But my only point is, I think a president must not try to write the legacy of every moment. The president just does what he thinks is right." He must also try to explain his actions as clearly as he can.

Mr. Bush finds it necessary to flatter journalism; everyone who hopes to be fairly quoted by journalism faces that necessity.
Journalists are celebrities--people who are not experts but are expected to opine anyway--and are therefore naturally insecure. So they herd together for protection, and condemn anyone who doesn't join the herd. And all flatter the herd--implicitly, flatter each other. The most exquisite form of flattery is assigning the labels "courageous" and "objective" to a herd of gutless second-guessing whiners.
The counsel of journalism is the counsel of negativity ("It's hard to be optimistic if you read a bunch of stuff about yourself"). But not negativity toward government but toward the we-the-people. And journalism is that way because, ironically, that is what sells. It sells because in that way journalism entertains in much the same way as a horror movie does.
Journalists flatter journalism with the label "the first draft of history." And academic historians echo that flattery by creating "history" which is no more than the second draft of journalism. This is nicely illustrated in the abuse of the name of an honorable U.S. senator, Joe McCarthy.
The cacaphony of contemporaneous voices declaring that people were being muzzled is taken as gospel by "history," notwithstanding the obvious fact that people who truly are muzzled--as the Iraqis were under Saddam Hussain--are not able to get their stories published in their hometown newspaper. It is as if Sean Hannity were to declare day after day on the radio and on television that he was being muzzled--and not only every journalist but every historian in the country reported it as fact.

Bush:
Churchill did what he thought was right and led.
History will judge me.
Daily Telegraph ^ | November 14, 2003 | Martin Newland

The First Amendment makes it hard to punish what you think is an "abuse" of a printing press. That was the only possible way to keep the government out of the business of judging people for judging the government because it is difficult to prove that anything isn't in some significant way political.
Least of all--as the marked difference in religious observance between journalists and other Democrats on the one hand, and Republicans on the other, must suggest--religion (I believe it was King James I who declared, "No bishop, no king." What is apolitical about that?).

The package was edited by the news desk, not the features desk that handles the paper's movie reviews. It also ran in the Post's news pages, at the front of the tabloid rather than in the entertainment pages at the back of the paper where its reviews run.

The old "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" trick. Didn't work with Dorothy and Toto, won't work now.
Under the First Amendment there is presumptively no legal consequence to the New York Post's article. Rather, it merely serves as an exemplar of the hypocrisy involved in claiming a dichotomy between "hard news" and opinion. The decision to run that "news" article was--a decision. A decision which helped sell newspapers. The front page of the paper is an advertisement for the decision to buy the rest of the paper. That is, an attempt to convince you that you will be entertained by the rest of the paper.

Mel Gibson "Passion" bootlegged copy [reviewed by NY Post]
Variety ^ | Wed Nov 19, 7:00 PM | GABRIEL SNYDER

. . . more British are worried about losing fox hunting than ending the U.S.-Anglo-led war in the Middle East.

. . . The explanation for the misconceptions about the supposed unpopularity of Mr. Bush and the war is that the press regurgitates the press releases of protesters while ignoring the evidence

In the long run there is really only one issue in my mind: "Is it possible to have a free press, and yet actually to have a government which is distinct from it?" And that is actually to ask, "Is it possible to have a free press at all?" For if the government cannot be distinct from the press, that implies that "the press" is itself unitary--not a cacphony of competing voices but actually a single voice.
To state the question in that way is to sound absurd; I actually agree that we have a multitude of competing institutions such as The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, and the broadcast news media. Yet there is, operating in plain sight, a de facto conspiracy in restraint of trade in "the press."
That is, journalism defines itself as "the press," even though "the freedom of . . . the press" covers books which are not journalism at all. And journalism defines itself as "the press," despite the fact that broadcasting is not recognized as a right in the way that printing is. If broadcast journalism is part of "the press" under the First Amendment--and thus has "unabridged freedom"--then you have just as much right to start up your own broadcast news operation as WABC does--without so much as a "by your leave" to the government.
Not only is it true that journalism defines itself as "the press," the judiciary branch of the government declines to maintain independence from journalism. Were it not so, such a blatant contradiction could not possibly stand in law. The First Amendment as written would, if enforced, keep the government entirely out of judging whether any form of "speech" is "objective journalism"; the FCC is itself root and branch a negation of that sort of freedom. Say nothing of "Campaign Finance Reform" which proposes actually to regulate the printing of political newspaper ads.
The truth is that "the press" as it self-defines has no interest in the First Amendment as written. It does however love "the First Amendment" as they pretend it to be--a stricture against independent voices (especially freedom of religion) rather than against the enforcement of uniformity in speech, press, and assembly/petition. :
Bush's British support
Washington Times | 11/23/03

The liberal media/liberal adgenda is losing ground with the increase in internet users, which makes me wonder when the "battle for the internet" will begin.

The centralizing PR tendency started with the expensive high-speed printing press, and continued with the establishment of rationed, big-budget broadcasting licenses.
If you pay attention you will realize that the first principle of those one-way mass media is that one-way mass media are where to find out "what is going on." That is, although the individual broadcasters or newspapers do hype their own publications in particular, they almost as assiduously avoid flame wars with all of the others. IOW, one-way mass media are courage-free zones.
Talk radio, OTOH, arose as the solution to the obsolescence of AM radio and the consequent reduction in the cost (market value) of AM broadcasting time. Talk radio breaks the rule against criticizing "objective"--i.e., gutless--journalism.
The existence of the niche for criticism of "objective journalism" can be explained in a couple of ways. One view is that there are a lot of kooks in the country who can't face the objective truth. The other view is that the claim of objectivity is intrinsically arrogant, and is sustained only by an open, plainly visible "conspiracy" to concentrate and abuse propaganda ("public relations") power.
Which of the two is more nearly correct? The two explanations can be judged, in the long run, by the predictions which would follow from them. If consensus journalism is objective, critiques of it on talk radio and on the Internet are distinctly limited niches for the kooks, and have little political importance.
If OTOH consensus journalism is a blinkered worldview in which novelty and man-bites-dog oddity are given wildly exaggerated importance at the expense of mature perspective, explicitly conservative talk radio and interactive internet (hello?) must tend to subvert pretentions to objectivity which are supported only by mere cowardice. In the latter case, slander against explicitly conservative politicians and commentators will gradually lose traction and the party which relies on it will change either by becoming less anticonservative or by shrinking as its base ages and the youth find it musty and reactionary.
'Tech elite' choose Web over TV
The Washington Times ^ | November 24, 2003 | Tim Lemke

I could make a case for the alphabet broadcasts in America no longer being the free press. They are owned and operated by partisan interest groups. To the extent that a fair press simply reports facts and leaves the analysis of those facts to the audience, then what we see is not a "pure" free press.

Notice how you slide between "free" and "fair" in you analysis? That's because you are trying to make a square circle.
You can adduce no reason to believe that a free press is "fair." A free press is able to express the opinion of the printers thereof--irrespective of the opinion or desire of the officers of the government.
A censored press is controlled to suit the government, and therefore is conservative of the perks of its officers.
A free, commercial press is conservative of the perks of the owners and employees thereof, and thus tends to political anticonservatism.
Whether free or not, a press is political.
And whether free or not, the press is never more political than when it is claiming to be fair.
Broadcasting depends on government licenses, and therefore is not a free press. Broadcast Journalism is Unnecessary and Illegitimate

There is nothing which will make you stupid faster than the bland assumption that your own opinion doesn't have a name. If you "reject labels of right and left" for yourself, you assure yourself that those who disagree with you are inferior. And in that moment you become self-righteous, hypocritical, blind to truth.
It's why we have so many journalists who would test out at high IQs but who nonetheless speak as blithering idiots.

That is truly a great statement.

You are right, of course. ;)
I'm responding on this vanity thread wherein I have been developing points related to the one above.
You would not, presumably, be posting on FR if the expression of your own opinion was not of value to you. Accordingly I responded to your appreciation by looking at your home page. In your case it consists only of a set of links, and I chose to look at this one:
The Election Fraud Theory
In that article JasonC proposes statistical tests of the theory that the difference between most pre-election polling predicting a Bush win on the one hand, and the razor-thin escape of the Republic from a President Gore on the other, is best explained by massive (up to 5 million votes) Democratic fraud (and not, per the cover story, by the DUI October Surprise.
That thread becomes germane to this thread when, in his post #41 Agrarian objects
Republican operatives are as hungry for power as the Democrats. I will stipulate that most Republicans are more honest and patriotic than Democrats, and thus are less likely to cheat. Still, such characteristics shouldn't prevent Republicans from engaging in extensive investigation and documentation of these frauds. It's not like the Republicans can't afford such investigations or are too stupid to carry them out.
So, if they're going on, why the silence from the GOP?
My response, based on the analyis to be found in this thread, is that "liberals" have an institutional propaganda wind at their back--indeed "liberalism" is simply the adoption of superficial negativity toward we-the-people, in conformity with the predelections of journalists. That perspective--that we-the-people can't run our affairs without the aid of the elite--inherently flatters those who presume that they are the elite, and helps explain why intelligent people not infrequently adopt it.
If Democratic operatives act on the conceit that the elites (themselves and their firiends) should for the good of society run the show, and not we-the-people, they commit vote fraud. But the idea that the elites know best is the idea that vote fraud is no bad thing, so long as "liberals" are the ones doing it.
The upshot is that the Establishment which is journalism would go balistic over a major case of Republican vote fraud but is utterly uninterested in crusading against Democratic vote fraud.

I disagree. I think the blithering idiots would test out at the level of blithering idiots. Maybe ever so slightly above. Adjust for level of laziness.

But since it is not necessary to assume low testable IQ on the part of your adversary it is both more charitable and wiser to look to other explanations. Note that colleges and universities are notoriously loaded with high-testing lefties . . .
How Europe Gets Bush Wrong
Time Magazine ^ | November 23, 2003 | Michael Elliott

Voles rejected the widely held view that Hollywood disproportionately favors liberal Democrat politicians. "There are Republicans in Hollywood and there are Democrats in Hollywood," Voles said.

To claim to be above politics is to affect superiority over those who accept the fact that others disagree with them--who accept that their own point of view has a name.
To make the claim of being above politics is to assert that you speak for the Establishment.
To make the claim of being above politics is the most common form of partisan extremism.

Voles said ACT believes "that right-wing Republicans control the Congress and the White House.

"They've seized power and are using their extremist agenda, and the government is no longer working for the people," Voles said. When pressed on whether she considered President Bush a right-wing extremist, Voles replied, "Sure," then backed off a bit.

Apparently Voles thinks that one-party rule of Congress for 40 years is unexceptionable, as long as the Democratic Party is doing the ruling. To see Republicans in the majority in Congress, the Senate, and WH, is however cause for alarm.
Because her POV doesn't have a name, you see--anyone who seriously disagrees with her is "extreme." </sarcasm>
Soros-Sponsored Group Enlists Hollywood in Anti-Bush Bid
CNSNEWS.com | 12/02/03 | David Thibault

A statement put out last week by Mr. Hatch's office says that the accused staffer "improperly accessed at least some of the documents referenced in the media reports." That accusation bears scrutiny in light of how the committee's computer system is organized: Until Nov. 16, all Judiciary staffers used the same computer server and had access to a shared drive, a system put in place when Sen. Leahy took over as chairman in 2001 and hired his own IT staff.
The Leahy techies neglected to put up a firewall between the GOP and Democratic staff, making it possible for all staffers to read everything posted on the shared drive.

Isn't this the same crime that Watergate consisted of?

No one hacked into anyone's private files. These are, in effect, Leahy leaks.
It is as if you found a web site that had information that the owner of the web site didn't intend to make public. Are you the one at fault if you read it--and expose his shady dealings?
So why is the hapless staffer being hounded? And why is no one reporting the much bigger story of the memos?
Well I guess that is obvious. Commercial journalism (apart from frankly opinionated commentary) is inherently slanted against conservatism because that's what sells. Even--against our own instincts--to conservatives. And because journalism is anticonservative, anticonservative people make the most profitable editors and writers.
To such people, a scandal which damages the Republicans is a great story, whereas one that damages the Democrats is scarcely news at all. And certainly doesn't have legs.
The Sound of Silence: Why is the press ignoring what the Democratic Judiciary memos say?
Opinion Journal | 12/02/03 | MELANIE KIRKPATRICK (#20)

Seldom (if ever) do the activists do the large-scale, statistical studies and number-crunching to see if the substances they're worried about really raise disease rates. Some of the big-name environmental groups that generate scares don't even claim to have scientists on their boards; they issue their "findings" straight to the media instead of going through peer review.
To many reporters, that doesn't matter: The activist group has some evidence of what sounds like a serious risk. They're usually accusing a rich corporation of poisoning innocent people. And that morality play makes good TV.

What could be plainer than that this sort of story is

melodrama for entertainment purposes?
economically convenient for trial lawyers?
politically convenient for liberals?

What could be plainer than that there is therefore a symbiosis between trial lawyers, journalists, and liberal politicians? The First Amendment doesn't say that journalism will be objective, it says that journalism is a free-fire zone--and therefore implicitly political.

THE ANTI-JUNK SCIENTISTS
New York Post | 12/04/03 | JOHN STOSSEL

just equate the Democrats criticism of the war on Iraq with being unpatriotic and watch them weasel and squirm.

Democrats cannot adequately defend themselves against this because they absolutely do not want to say they ARE patriotic. Being a flag waver would be the kiss of death for a would be Democrat nominee. Much, much more attractive to the liberal base to be an America hater.

The issue of patriotism, and the extreme lack of it which Ann Coulter dared call treason, deserves study and the development of clarity. Ironically loyalty to the president of the United States, and even to the Consititution which defines the American Republic, is only derivitive of American patriotism, not the real thing itself.
American patriotism is solidarity. It is the belief that we-the-people, American society itself, is able to self-govern without princes and titles of nobility--and to function better better as a society without nobles than any society is able to function with them.
The Constitution, and the government it defines, represents that belief. And the flag represents that government and that Constitution. The Confederate flag, from that POV, represents an alternate vision of the polity, and an alternate expression of a republic based on the bedrock American principle of self-government. Neither the Stars and Stripes nor the Stars and Bars represents a perfect government, and they have different flaws. American patriotism, accepting the reality of history and the reality of human frailty and the existence of evil, conserves the Constitution as the best available expression of the principle of self-government.
First Amendment principles flow directly from the principle of self-government. But First Amendment principles are woefully misunderstood. First Amendment principles allow businesses to profit from propaganda, and to call propaganda truth. Whatever the undoubted virtues of freedom of the press, history reveals that it readily devolves into PR. And PR is nothing less than a challenge to the idea that we-the-people can govern themselves rather than being ultimately governed by whoever most effectively exploits PR.
The first duty of the citizen--solidarity with we-the-people--can be and often is opposed by the PR establishment, which synthesizes an impression of we-the-people as needing the support of a PR-based nobility. Needing the support, that is, of the illegitimate establishment which in America coopted the once-honored term "liberalism".
GOP TRIES TO BOOST DEAN BY BURYING HIM
New York Post ^ | 12/04/03 | DEBORAH ORIN (#16)

I write for Accuracy In Media and Accuracy In Academia . . . I am also back in school as a middle-aged Gov't & Int'l Politics/Elec Journalism student at George Mason University in Fairfax VA.

I learned of the existence of bias in the media back in the late 1970s, and subscribed to AIM for a year or two. Why did I stop? Because I was convinced! The parade of further examples became a twice-told tale, a bit like reading a daily report on the rising of the sun.
Once I was convinced of bias in the media, the issue was no longer "whether" but "why". And I have studied on *that* problem ever since. And I believe that my very reaction in discontinuing my AIM subscription is a perfect illustration of the reason for "bias" in "the media."
Why the scare quotes? Because in the first place, "the media" refers generally to *entertainment* media--and of those media in fact only *journalism* is "nonfiction," and carrying promises of objectivity. In the second place, the First Amendment requires that the government permit the expression of perspectives--and my "perspective" may be your "bias."
In law a contract with a quid pro quo is binding, but a mere "promise" is NOT enforceable in court. That undoubtedly leads to hard feelings when promises are not kept. And that is precisely the position of the AIM writer and reader--journalism *promises* objectivity but delivers entertainment, then takes refuge in the First Amendment to ward off any legal enforcement of its promises.
So far as PRINT journalism is concerned, the matter rests there, and the only possible response is to attack the credibility of journalism's claims of "objectivity." The Rush Limbaugh approach. Broadcast journalism is on altogether different constitutional footing, at least in principle.
This thread is my study of "the freedom of speech, or of the press"; whenever I post a reply to another thread which seems clarify my thinking on that issue I link it here.

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