Just a reminder of the political landscape of America.
The government, so we're told in the defining document of America (hint: The Constitusomething), is of the people, by the people, for the people. We, the people, give the government power in our name, thereby relinquishing some of our rights and restrictions in favor of the common good. But a state or federal official is still a stand-in for The People and that won't go away until we get rid of the constitution.
Outside of the government - representatives that the People relinquish power to - there is the direct power of the People as defined by our remaining rights (also in the Constitution). The chief of the rights, and thank you Tommy J for putting this in writing, is the 1st Amendment which allows anyone in America (and not just Americans, as far as I know) to say, think, believe, worship, and assemble in any way they want. Yeah, unless it's for violence but that's a reasonable compromise for thinking people to accept.
The Press
Through the 1st Amendment, we have outsourced the remaining non-governmentally-bequeathed power to other representatives: what we anachronistically call the "Press" (a shorthand for "printing press," whatever that is). It's important to remember that the Press is anybody and everybody. In the olden days (and I wrote my Princeton senior thesis on this stuff so wa-hoo) getting the word out required a massive mechanical device (a press for printing, I believe) and money. Nowadays it's a bit easier to inform the world as a single individual. One guy with a camera phone and an internet connection is all you need (and the examples are numerous). Worhol's inane "15 minutes" is as pseudo-true as ever but off by an order of magnitude; it's 15 seconds and there are unlimited refills.
All of this is to emphasize how the Press and the government are two sides of the same coin: power that We The People wield. The Press is Us. And we use it to keep tabs on the government because, like lending your car to a irresponsible relative, you want to know what's going on with a prized possession (in this case, your money and your liberty, often in that order).
However, just as there's been this exponential increase in range of an individual's voice, there are also more people who - due to the geometrically increasing complexity of individual life - have less time to spend on being informed. Note, this is not a swipe at those who sit and watch TV 8 hours a day. Ironically, they will be informed (albeit poorly and falsely). My assumption is that most people are too busy with work and family to stay properly informed. As such we rely more than ever on the BIG press outlets. This is bad for liberty.
Our Broken Press
The press (as I've written about many many times on this blog) took a steep dive off the usefulness cliff once some greedy clown discovered you could make money off of news. I blame 24 hour cable news, others blame "US Today," but basically the news became a profit business. It should be non-profit, because for-profit news has become indistinguishable from entertainment.
The Press is a branch of government because, like the government, they are our representatives who wield the power of the 1st amendment. But because of market forces, they don't investigate abuses of liberty and money, they seek to entertain us. Bad.
Bad to Worse
Here, in 2008, we are facing a crossroads of our liberty. Many of the things America stands for has been suppressed and assaulted. Many of the Constitutional Amendments are to preserve the rights of people (the People) who are accused by the state (the People's representatives); so when the State decides to bypass the court system, like we've done under Bush, many amendments are trampled. Remember, under the Military Commissions act - rammed through in the last gasp of the GOP Tyranny right before the '06 midterms - allows Bush to declare even U.S citizens as unlawful combatants, which strips us of all our lovely amendment rights.
Nearly every amendment has been compromised:
- First: Eroding the wall between church & state (Schivo case, stem cell research, even climate science), preventing oversight of White House decisions, etc.
- Second: this one is doin' dandy, actually, as expected under the GOP.
- Third: I'll explain this one anon. But it's bad when even the third is attacked.
- Fourth: The most erosion. Unreasonable search and seizure, warrantless wiretaps, etc.
- Fifth: When the fourth goes, the fifth ain't far behind: no self-incrimination, due-process, all out the window under Bush.
- Sixth: Hoo boy. Innocent until proven guilty? Speedy trial? Habeas Corpus? Right to attorney? Ha! No longer.
- Seventh: Trial by jury? Or military rendition? Remember Joseph Padilla.
- Eighth: Cruel and unusual punishment? Torture. Choose.
- Ninth: Prevents the federal government from interfering in individual lives. For a 'conservative' the Bush administration is pretty damn invasive. And I think this should be applied to the way the Bushies have injected partisan politics into ordinary services of the government (cf. Laurita Doan).
- I could go on (and I guess I will in another post) but my point is made.
Bush and his crew should have been arrested and/or impeached. You wouldn't know that from the press. It's broken.
How to fix the press?
The Press is no longer our representative, they are providing us a product (infotainment). We are the customer, they are the vendor. And they are slavish to our whims.
Example: after 9/11 the 'liberal' press went lock-step with the crazy conservative government. Why? Because journalists are generally low-self-esteem nerds who can be easily bullied and they were afraid of seeing 'unpatriotic.' The result: an unexamined buildup to the Iraq War. But journalists are bullied by what they think is the market force; they beat the drum to war because they also have a low esteem for what they think is a bottom-feeding, interested-only-in-no-underpants, public. They THOUGHT we wanted war, so they gave us war.
They thought we liked the GOP - based on the '02 and '04 elections - so they didn't criticize them. Now, after the '06 midterms, they are coming back to the Democrats' side... but not entirely. They press still has the GOP manufactured view that Democrats are out-of-touch latte-drinking liberals. It's a myth, but the journalists are bullied, and they think the 'public' believes it. See "bittergate" for the best proof of this.
What will 'fix' the press is to break the Vendor-Consumer mentality. Another is to show them that we care more about facts than trivia.
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