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.

"My view of this is that the media is like the guy going down the street with a sign that says 'The End of the World is Near,' and he picks a date and the day comes and goes, and the world doesn't end. So he doesn't stop with the sign. He goes home, makes another sign, puts a new date on it, and starts marching again. That's the way the media is," Crichton said. He argues that researchers who study global warming often exaggerate the problem in order to get grants, often using celebrities to promote their cause. Foolish Fears / The Big Lie ABC TV - 20/20 ^ | Dec. 10, 2004 | Michael Crighton with John Stossel

Stipulated, as lawyers say, that grand jury testimony is secret, protecting the privacy of reluctant witnesses. If the source violated an oath, that was wrong. But it is the publication's obligation to the public to publish what it considers newsworthy - and not to assist the government in punishing the provider of that news.

Mumbo jumbo. What kind of "obligation" do you have to do exactly what you want to do??? The First Amendment protects the press (whether it be a newspaper or a book publisher) from any requirement to print any particular truth; most truths never reach the newspaper and even fewer reach books.
No, the newspaper prints whatever truth it wants and, truth be told, more than a few whoppers as well. But if the newspaper announces that it has obtained information which no one was legally entitled to give it, that should be just too bad for the source - or for the newspaper, if it is foolish enough to subject itself to geometrically increasing fines until it is bankrupted.
Judges as Plumbers NY Times ^ | Dec 13, 2004 | William Safire

Moyers claims, "We have an ideological press that's interested in the election of Republicans, and a mainstream press that's interested in the bottom line. Therefore, we don't have a vigilant, independent press whose interest is the American people."

We have a "mainstream" press that is interested in self-promotion, including promotion of its own bottom line. And we have a political party (the Democrats) which - like all other celebrities including each individual journalist - toadies to the arrogant, negative, superficial posture of journalism. The fact that it is the Democratic Party which is following journalism, and not the other way around, is a distinction without a difference - there's still not a dime's worth of difference between the ideology of the two.
The "ideological press" - talk radio and Fox News Channel - are just as interested in the bottom line as the "mainstream," but merely take the courageous contrarian approach and fill the ~~niche~~ gaping chasm left unserved by the "mainstream."
Bill Moyers biggest news story of our time -
Jewish World Review ^ | December 20, 2004 | Joe Scarborough

I think he misses the real significance of the 1950s; and, of course, stops sooner than we do.

Do you find it difficult to detach yourself from such current history as the War on Terror for analytical purposes?

Not really. I am of the view that while no historian can escape biases, one should neither pretend they do not exist (the "empiricists") or seek to counterbalance them with antithetical concepts (the New Left).

If you look at my previous book, "The Entrepreneurial Adventure," published in 2000, I went through 1996 or 1997 and (so far) my assessment of what was happening at the time I wrote it does not appear to be too far off.

I am interested in the nature of factual reporting, and the limitations of topical information ("the fog of war"). Part of my brief against journalism as we know it is the fact that journalists IMHO continuously hide from the judgement of history by taking refuge in the fog of breaking news. That is, they simply change the subject when events threaten the template in which they have been cramming the news into.
For example, "the Cold War is over" - but who won it, and who lost it? From the Tet offensive until the disintegration of the USSR, journalism was unanimous that the Right Wing Cold Warriors such as Reagan were the great threat to peace and safety of the world. Yet Reagan can be buried full of honors as the statesman who won the Cold War without the least implication that journalism, and journalism's pollitical organization known as the Democratic Party, fought Reagan tooth and nail from the start of his campaign for the presidency to the inauguration of his sitting VP as president. And beyond, with the Iran-Contra investigations.
As I said - the subject of journalism's wrongheaded perspective during the Cold War simply never came up when Reagan's life was celebrated. Yet the signal virtue of Reagan was that he was able to do what was necessary over the bitter opposition of journalism and its lackeys.
A Patriot's History of the United States . . . Finally, On Sale Today!
Penguin/Sentinel and Amazon.com ^ | 12/29/04 | LS

Corey Pein of the Columbia Journalism Review sent us an email yesterday, with a link to his article in that magazine on the fake 60 Minutes documents. "You may be interested in this," he wrote. We were interested, all right, but we're sorry to report that the article is astonishingly bad.

Pein's perspective is sympathetic to Dan Rather, Mary Mapes and CBS, and hostile toward the bloggers and others who exposed the fraud that 60 Minutes participated in, intentionally or otherwise. This gives his article a weirdly off-balance perspective. Pein holds out hope that the documents may not have been forgeries after all. He writes that:

We don’t know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination thereof. Indeed, they could be fake but accurate, as Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told CBS on September 15. So this is now, apparently, an accepted journalistic standard: fake but accurate. Which means, I guess: fake, but they help the Democratic candidate.

Journalism In Decline
Power Line ^ | January 05, 2005 | John H. Hinderaker

"I will put it this way, very simply I want the truth," KHOU-TV Houston President and General Manager Peter Diaz told Poynter Online. "We need to know how the system broke down at CBS."

The truth is that there was always far more evidence that Rather/Mapes wanted to damage the Bush campaign than there ever was reason to believe that valid memos damaging to Bush had been uncovered.

the topic of the report was arguably irrelevant; Bush wasn't running as a former pilot but as an incumbent POTUS; Bush did not claim to have been a paragon of valor in 1973. It was only the Kerry campaign which promoted the conceit that 30-yo records of military valor were more important than recent, far higher-level, political experience.

the "memos" were putatively written to file only and not to circulation, and were putatively so closely held that they did not surface during prior Bush political campaigns - but OTOH the only copies available were of the poor quality normally associated with widely circulated many-generation copies. Such poor copy quality, and not the original, is however normal for the attempted passing of forgeries.

the memos' putative author is dead - a fact convenient to a forger.
the next-of-kin of the putative author deny that the memo was in the putative author's effects and deny that the putative memos reflect attitudes expressed contemporaneously by the putative author.

the next-of-kin of the putative author assert that the putative author did not type (a characteristic not IMHO uncommon among military aviators of the period), and his secretary (although herself sympathtic to the sentiment of the documents) says she did not type it.

questionable to highly dubious internal anomalies, including an out-of-date address, exist in the documents.

and famously, of course, the font and format of the documents duplicates that of Microsoft Word at its default settings - and equipment which could have done so in 1973 was nearly nonexistent except for use in publishing, which is at the opposite end of the spectrum from what would be expected in a memo not made for distribution in terms of availability and operability by non-specialist operators such as fighter pilots.
IOW the truth is well-known already; the only question is how long CBS will continue to stonewall that reality. And whether the Bush Administration will do anything about that stonewall of the use of fraudulent government documents by broadcasters who require federal licenses to operate.
CBS Affiliates Await "60 Minutes II" Investigation Report http://poynter.org/ ^ | Jan 7 04 | Al Tompkins

Your right, Marx was wrong, Religion is NOT the opiate of the masses -- it is their shield and protection that allows them to stand and liberate. Broadcast Journalism -- now THAT IS THE DAMNED OPIATE.

At least three generations passed under the sway of the drug pushers of Broadcast Media, grown dumber than the worst main-lining junkie. We have hell to pay on that accrued account.

Not that we ain't saddling our own kids with OUR own nasty debts -- we are -- and they'll have to work through them in their way. Yet on this one -- the liberation from the narcotic trade that is Broadcast Media -- we are working together one generation shoulder to shoulder with the next. A happy thing, that.

Michelle Malkin. 100% on target.

Speaking of being in denial, some conservatives argue that the Pay to Pander program is no big deal compared to the CBS scandal. The Clinton administration did it, too, they point out. Other liberal journalists have failed to disclose ethically suspicious payments, they steam. Excuses, excuses. I thought we on the Right stood against such expedient moral equivalence.

The difference between Armstrong Williams and CBS is that Williams got paid. Otherwise the two are exactly the same; CBS aggressively worked to convince its viewers to vote the way CBS wanted. In fact, it's easy to show that CBS did so in reckless disregard of the facts.

CBS's "independent" investigation now says that Mary Mapes got on her "Bush skated in the National Guard" hobby horse 5 years ago with a memo to her bosses asserting that Bush got into the pilot billet despite the "fact" that there was a waiting list at the time - yet Mapes' own file showed at the time that there was no waiting list for TANG flying billets when GWB signed up.
And of course, as the "independent" CBS report states, a roomful of smoking guns makes clear that the "Gillian memos" were no such thing.

The issue is not whether people are getting paid to say things. The issue is whether the things they say are actually true. And for that issue, dear reader, you have no choice but to read critically, just as you read this anonymous posting critically.

The fact is that the anonymous posting you read on FR is in a significant way more reliable than CBS. After all, the FR poster does not have the a propaganda machine behind him/her; for all I know my post will follow immediately after a genuine, certifiably kook posting. My posting has to make sense and have the ring of truth, or it will easily be scorned - in the same FR forum as it was published in. OTOH the thing for which CBS (and the rest of the alphabet soup) is notorious for is the fact that it is a one-way medium which is formatted to exclude serious internal criticism.

The one thing that no "objective journalist" can be open about is the fact that everyone (including every journalist) has their own perspective, their own POV. It will not do to say that Armstrong Williams is a journalist; Mr. Williams has always been open about his own "conservative" opinions (since he doesn't conform to the facile socialism of journalism, he had no choice about that) and therefore would never have been called a journalist by those who put themselves forward as paragons of objectivity. And his being paid by the government, or not, didn't change that.

"Objective journalists" don't pander to liberal politicians; liberal politicians pander to "objective journalists." The font of liberalism is, as my tagline notes, the conceit that nothing actually matters but PR. Liberal politicians help the celebrities known as journalists to look good, whereas conservatives merely serve as a convenient target for both.

This column is not for sale (or, the stink of DU)
WND/Michelle Malkin ^ | Jan 12 / 05 | Michelle Malkin

My study of the problem has led me to the conclusion that leftists are natural journalists - in the sense that leftists elevate complaint to the status of action, and journalism is complaint as action. What happens when leftists obtain political power, of course, is that these mere second-guessers are cast in the role of one-guess doers - and the results are almost never pretty. The actual results, that is; the journalists/leftists are remarkably effective at putting a happy face on their own handiwork (for example, the Russians are still not sure that getting rid of the Soviet system was a good idea - and 48% of the American voting public thinks that John Kerry was fit for command).
Journalism in general has an inherent credibility problem, in that it claims to be objective, and in so doing elevates itself above us mere mortals on the basis of nothing more than its own word. Journalism is arrogant and cynical (negative and superficial).
And if such be the case with print journalism, which is truly competitive, the problem is compounded with broadcast journalism with its need to justify its broadcast monopoly licenses, and of ~~public~~ government broadcasting, with its further need to justify its government budget.
All publishing and broadcasting attempts to suppress the proper incredulity of its reader/listener. The main information problem of society is that we are too credulous when people position themselves as being authoritative. And that people who position themselves as authoritative can tend to underreact to an actual emergency for fear of undermining that authority by being seen to cry "Wolf!" Note that word the recent disasterous tsunami spread far too slowly through offficial channels; what was wanted was a ham radio network and/or a FreeRepublic to spread the word unofficially so that at least some of the public would have had timely warning.
Journalism constantly warns us of the influence of Republicans. There is however a real Establishment, hiding in plain sight - and that is the inherently leftist perspective of journalism itself.
BBC harm is worldwide
American Thinker | 13.01.05 | Aleksander Boyd

The Rathergate Report never directly addresses the standard of proof the panel applies to resolve disputed questions of fact. In general, it appears to apply the commonsensical "preponderance of the evidence" standard that operates in most civil cases. When the report reaches particularly touchy issues for CBS as a corporate entity, however, the report applies a standard of metaphysical certainty that is known nowhere in the real world outside of freshman philosophy classes.

First, it isn't the "Rathergate" report, it's the CBSgate report; the report itself is a coverup and part of the total story. The "independent" investigative panel did no substantive investigation beyond what we knew within a couple of days of the broadcast, and it didn't even draw the obvious conclusion that in fact the "memos" were frauds, and not particularly good ones. The "independent" panel was created for no other purpose than to apply a "metaphysical certainty" standard of proof to the "question" of political bias motivating the broadcast.
There is no logical reason for a disinterested observer to accept a CBS panel's definition of the appropriate standard of proof. Indeed there is no logical reason for a disinterested observer to accept any journalist's definition of the appropriate standard of proof. Because objectivity is part of journalism's institutional definition of itself, and anyone who says that a journalist is not objective is not - retroactively, "never was" - a journalist. As witness the case of Bernard Goldberg.
I'd say that the question belongs in court, but the trouble with that is that nearly all judges (Mr. Justice Thomas being the lone exception of which I am aware) subject themselves to the flattery and calumny of journalism by reading their own press clippings. That is a problem that is so pervasive that it is not to be noticed by anyone unwilling to be treated as if he had just declared that the emperor was naked.
Indeed, it is a question that would never arise if the First Amendment were actually to be applied to the issue; "freedom of the press" would override any other question but broadcast journalism is not part of the press. The First Amendment would of course forbid the government from requiring a license to broadcast, if broadcasting were actually considered part of "the press" (the other half of the conundrum is of course the fact that "broadcasting" as we know it only exists because of the censorship of all but the few government licensees). The justification for public outrage over the patent tendentiousness of CBS News (indeed of broadcast journalism generally) lies in the fact that the federal government enables the few to broadcast by censoring the rest of us.
Prove it!
Powerline ^ | January 12, 2005 | Scott W. Johnson

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