On Politics and the Fourth Estate: Toppling a Presidency, Pt. 2

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. 

– Thomas Jefferson, 1787.

For my part I entertain a high idea of the utility of periodical publications; insomuch as I could heartily desire, copies of… magazines, as well as common Gazettes, might be spread through every city, town, and village in the United States. I consider such vehicles of knowledge more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry, and ameliorate the morals of a free and enlightened people. 

– George Washington, 1788.

Newspapers, as we know them, were an essential part of the birth of American democracy. The first newspaper, entitled Publick Occurrences, appeared in Boston in 1690. Because publication under the British required the permission of the government – and the fledgling circulation was printed without such authority – it was immediately suppressed, the publisher arrested, and all copies were destroyed. (It would have been lost to history – was, in fact – until 1845 when the only known surviving copy was discovered in the British Library.) The first “successful“ newspaper was the Boston News-Letter, begun by postmaster John Campbell in 1704. Although it was heavily subsidized by the colonial government the experiment was a near-failure, with very limited circulation.

Pamphleteers like Thomas Paine agitated the spirit of the colonists to such a point that revolution – against the strongest Army and Navy in all of world history to that point – was a realistic idea in the minds of many. The British abuses of the colonists may have been the causus belli, but the transmission of the ideas that underlie the American Revolution were an essential part of the events that led to American independence. Without “the press,” all of the British acts would have been necessarily local, and unknown to any outside of the immediate environs of, for example, the Boston Massacre or the Tea Party.

In its infancy, the “Fourth Estate” as it later came to be known, was at the heart of the original American “resistance.” The current Media “resistance,” however, no matter how hard it tries to cloak itself in the same language and use the same rhetoric, misses the essential point of the Press as conceived by Jefferson and Washington in the above quotes: that is the idea of the Press as educator of the people and antagonist to all government, generally as the greatest threat to individual Liberty, not just the current schlubs in control who aren’t your friends, or from your party, or tribe, or Team, which is what the current hissy-fit du jour is really all about. Worse yet, though, is the current Media’s (1) participation with government they like, including favorable/fawning coverage or trying to help steal a Presidential election, and (2) doing it under the pretense that they’re providing objective, disinterested news/facts.

The latter of these two is important. I’m not against the Media being advocates for a particular candidate or political view – that’s not inherently evil. In fact, they have a First Amendment right to do so! Moreover, for the first century of the American Republic – and during other periods – newspapers and other media openly advocated a political point of view. Different Media historians disagree about when “objectivity” really became the dominant principle of journalism in the United States – there is testimony before Congress by newspaper owners on objectivity in 1856 – but my concern is less with its origins and more with when it became ingrained as a cultural meme, an unquestioned assumption that people don’t even think about now. That is much more difficult to pinpoint, though Walter Lippman’s name has to be central to the discussion.

In 1919, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, an associate editor for the New York World, wrote an influential and scathing account of how cultural blinders had distorted the New York Times coverage of the Russian Revolution. “In the large, the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see,” they wrote. Lippmann and others began to look for ways for the individual journalist “to remain clear and free of his irrational, his unexamined, his unacknowledged prejudgments in observing, understanding and presenting the news.”

– Kovach and Rosenstiel, quoted in American Press Institute, “The Lost Meaning of Objectivity“

Walter Lippman believed that journalism was being practiced by “untrained accidental witnesses.” His solution was for journalists to develop

“the scientific spirit … There is but one kind of unity possible in a world as diverse as ours. It is unity of method, rather than aim; the unity of disciplined experiment.” Lippmann meant by this that journalism should aspire to “a common intellectual method and a common area of valid fact.”

Id.

It’s not that I dismiss the entire idea of media objectivity as a myth; it’s that the phrase has become nothing more than a bromide because the people calling themselves journalists are nothing more than lazy, partisan hacks. I agree with Lippman that “[i]t does not matter that the news is not susceptible to mathematical statement. In fact, just because news is complex and slippery, good reporting requires the exercise of the highest scientific virtues.”

As noted by the headline, however, it’s the myth of media “objectivity” that is the problem because it is a form of fraud on the American people and the under-informed. In claiming they’re doing a Joe Friday and presenting “just the facts, ma’am” when in reality they’re advocating a very conscious and deliberate point of view – to the point of working in concert with a political campaign to its advantage – they perpetuate a sub rosa fiction. The American people have a right to know the partisanship of the Media and then be able to judge the information with the proper context.

The Russian “hack” may have finally fixed that with the recent election.

If (1) above seems like hyperbole, consider that Donna Brazile, the former head of the Democratic National Committee and CNN contributor has finally admitted what the Russian “hacked” emails showed the world: she was trying to fix the DNC primary contest for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders. She repeatedly fed the Clinton campaign the questions in advance of debates and town halls. As Linda Stasi of the NY Daily News noted:

For starters, serial question-passer Brazile worked for both ABC and CNN while she was vice chair at the DNC, which seemed to present no conflict at all for the networks. Then she even continued as an unpaid contributor to CNN after taking the interim chair job! And we journalists wonder why people don’t trust news organizations anymore?

Yet despite it all, TV anchors still stop short of calling Brazile a lousy cheat. Sharks don’t eat their young, I guess.

There could be no clearer way to influence the outcome of an election than to provide one side the debate questions in advance of the debate before one of the most-watched debates by the largest share of the electorate. The other side is blind to what will be asked and the Clinton team could basically have written and memorized what she was going to say – never mind the advantage of not even have to worry spending time preparing on other topics! The advantage in knowing debate questions is enormous, patently unfair, and was an unconscionable fraud on the American public – that she stood there in front of the television and people in that audience and pretended like the question was as foreign to her as it was to him makes Hilary Clinton a complete, unconscionable liar.*

*(Of course, this is not news, either. The “I landed under sniper fire” in Tuzla whopper indicates a pathology. It’s one thing to lie when the details are murky, but it’s DSM V stuff when you lie and there is a plane load of press, celebrities, Sinbad and Sheryl Crow with you… and just weeks and months later you are repeatedly claiming to have made corkscrew landings and run with your head because of sniper fire.)