The principle of the First Amendment is freedom.Maybe Hugo will give you a job...to determine the continued Hugo-objectivity of the peoples' struggle against bourgeois concepts of press freedom and countervailing opinionAnd freedom is inconsistent with censorship.
The reality is that although radio transmission can exist without censorship, broadcasting - the ability to be hearable over a geographical area of hundreds of square miles - has depended on censorship of everyone else but the relative handful of government licensees. The principle of broadcasting is that you have a right to listen purchased with the duty to shut up.
That system was justified on the grounds that bandwidth was scarce. But in the 21st Century, bandwidth is not scarce in the way that it (arguably) has historically been. For example, there are laws against intercepting someone else's cell phone call - which means that it is technologically possible for anyone to do so, and hence, technologically, it is possible that cell phones could be constructed to be able to listen to any of a large number of other cell phones. That is, if the law were changed it is technologically possible to have hundreds or thousands of "radio" channels in a given city. So the "limited bandwidth" rationale of FCC censorship is at this point something of a red herring.
In an alternative universe where the FCC promotes our ability to talk rather than promoting only our ability to listen, there's nothing wrong with broadcasting as such. In that universe broadcasting is just like blogging or FReeping. And not different in principle from newspaper publishing - there is no barrier to entry.
But in the real America, the newspapers have gone into "go along and get along" mode with each other. Newspapers do not knock their competitors but promote journalism in general rather than saying that our brand of newspaper is giving you the word, and Brand X newspaper is slanted. So what you have is a situation where all the newspapers claim that journalism as such is objective, by definition. Journalism has created itself as an establishment which, by the power of PR, is able to persuade a huge plurality if not a majority of people to check their mental faculties at the door and accept the premise that journalists are superior beings who - unlike you or me - are "objective."
And if newspapers do that, broadcast journalists do it in spades. They need that system of consensus as a rationale for their very licenses to broadcast. According to that rationale, they aren't broadcasting propaganda of the left or right, they are broadcasting objectivity in the public interest and therefore are the good guys who should have licenses. How can you say that there is a First Amendment problem with broadcasters, when broadcast journalism is indistinguishable from print journalism, and there is no barrier to entry in print journalism?
Well, at least here on FR, I can say that there is a problem with broadcast journalism. Here on FR, I can point out the obvious fact that it is arrogant to claim superior objectivity, and to thereby claim that anyone who doesn't go along with you "is not a journalist, not objective." I can say that journalism which claims to be objective is the establishment in America. I can say that "talk radio" hosts like Rush Limbaugh are in fact journalists, whatever Tim Russert or any other establishment journalist might say. The fact that Rush doesn't presume to claim to be objective is not disabling as a journalist, it is a virtue - the virtue of humility.
I deliberately chose to take this issue on in this thread because it represents a hard case. Venezuela has a dictator shutting down actual dissent. In the US, the reality is that Big Journalism, not the government, is the establishment which is suppressing dissent.The Democratic Party promotes Big Journalism. And Big Journalism returns the favor and promotes the Democratic Party. Consequently the Democratic Party is "known" to be the party of the little guy, and the Republicans are "the party of the rich" - even though it is the Democrats who get the largest individual donations, and the Republicans who get the most donations.
Media under assault in the Americas
Miami Herald | May. 30, 2007 | Staff
The formula is that (6000 - 15)/6000 x 100% of the Mainstream Media stories are faked or overtly biased. That works precisely out to 99.75% of Mainstream Media being fake or heavily biased.
You don't understand the simplest thing about journalistic objectivity. The rule of journalism is that you select your stories on the basis that they are too unusual and/or too scary to be ignored.That is encapsulated in the famous dicta,
Journalism makes no secret of these dicta; journalists will tell you that that is how they select their stories for reporting and for emphasis. Now here we have two different stories, Abu Graib and al Qaeda torture.
- "'Man Bites Dog,' not 'Dog Bites Man,'" and
- "If it bleeds, it leads."
- Al Qaeda torture isn't at all surprising, everyone knows it happens all the time. And torture of foreigners, by other foreigners seven time zones from America, is not scary to Americans. So the al Qaeda torture story is strictly "Dog Bites Man," and not worthy of the attention of American Journalism.
- Abu Graib, OTOH, is just the opposite. It has:
- behavior which is completely unexpected of American officials anywhere,
- behavior which would be terrible if done by American officials anywhere, and
- behavior which reflects discreditably on the people - Republicans - whom Americans who want things done count on to get things done, right (nobody who actually cares about the government's getting the government's job - control of the power of the sword - done right would ever vote Democratic. Democrats just don't care about the government's controlling the power of the sword; they take that for granted. Bread and circus is all that matters to them).
So ever-parochial American journalism considers itself perfectly objective when, following its time-honored rules, it reacts with a "ho hum" to the discovery of an al Qaeda torture cell in Iraq, after having made a mountain out of a mole hill over Abu Graib. The reality is, of course, that their analysis of the case is profoundly contemptuous and dismissive of any interests other than their own.
NETS AND TOP PAPERS SILENT OVER AL-QAEDA TORTURE HOUSE
MRC ^ | 6/3/07