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Journalism is defined by its deadlines, and by its self-proclaimed "objectivity." But it turns out that short deadlines are a liberal bias. Short deadlines focus the attention on the short term, just as surely as a microscope focuses the eye on the small picture.

In temporal economic terms, the big picture is our free competitive economy gradually doubling our standard of living every couple of generations. But that fact doesn't change from day to day, and so is ignored by journalism. Journalism focuses instead on short-term ups and downs which are superimposed on that long-term secular trend. Not only does this miss the main thing which happens to the economy over an individual's lifetime, but--a remarkable result of modern Chaos Theory--on relatively short time scales the largest changes will be drops rather than rises in stock prices even while the long-term secular trend is upward.

I repeat:

In a perfectly dispassionate day-to-day account of the biggest changes in the stock market, declines would predominate even while the long-term secular trend is upward.

It follows that short deadlines are, in and of themselves, skewed towards the reporting of bad news. And that an attraction to the reporting of news on short deadline is an attraction to the reporting of bad news. This has political implications.

The question of the definition of the political spectrum is much discussed among conservatives and especially libertarians. IMHO the American conservative viewpoint is best extracted from the preamble to the Constitution:

. . . to . . . promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity . . .

Journalism tends to erase the long term conservative trend in favor of incessant alarums about immediate negative changes. The tendency of self-selection is, therefore, that journalists are anticonservative. Anticonservative people are eager to report bad news on short deadline because it makes the institutions and people upon whom we-the-people depend look bad. This explains why anticonservative political figures such as George Stephanopolis fit so easily into the mold of journalist, whereas conservative political figures are never positioned by any journalist as being "objective." De facto, "objective" is, a code-word for "anticonservative."

If such be the case, as it obviously is (see Ann Coulter's Slander for supporting anecdoatal, but abundant, evidence) is the First Amendment wrong to establish freedom of the press? Not at all, because journalism is not the whole of the press nor is all of journalism (as we know it) part of the press at all. Books are unambiguously part of "the press," for example. And although the government was never to be faulted for the fact that the Internet didn't exist as a major public forum 20 years ago, the fact that the Internet does now exist as "the poor man's soapbox" with national and even global reach establishes it as part of the press today.

But all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, broadcast journalism is not protected by the First Amendment. Broadcasting (radio transmissions which you have a right to receive but no right to transmit) is based on government censorship of we-the-people to provide clear channels for government-favored licensees. If something is a constitutional right, how can the government punish you for doing it without the government's permission?