The modern free press
“The modern free press,” Infidel753 Blog, Infidel753
In the US, we have probably the world’s strongest protections for free speech and freedom of the press, thanks to the First Amendment and the citadel of jurisprudence built on it. And yet the mainstream media here are usually strikingly timid and reluctant to call a spade a spade. Recent examples of this include their treatment of Trump as a normal presidential candidate despite his abuse of power while previously in office and his role in inciting the January 6 insurrection, and their coverage of House Republicans’ threat to wreck the global economy by refusing to raise the debt ceiling if they don’t get a whole profusion of demands met (those demands themselves being a recipe for recession and plunging millions into poverty) as if it were just ordinary political maneuvering. At the time the First Amendment was written, the press was expected to take the lead in raising the alarm over such outrages. Today there seems to be a paralyzing fear of being perceived as “taking sides”, even when the truth requires it.
I think a big part of the problem is the role of money, and sheer size. Today’s mainstream media are not like the independent newspapers of the late eighteenth century — they are major corporations, usually owned by even more gigantic corporations. It may be inevitable that as media organizations get bigger, they get more timid. When there are employees to pay and shareholders to keep happy, the importance of revenue looms ever larger, and leads to a desire not to risk offending advertisers or losing a substantial chunk of one’s established audience. Telling the whole truth or distancing oneself from a dangerous but popular (in some quarters) demagogue becomes less important. That doesn’t always mean centrism or moderation. Because Fox News had entrenched itself in the niche of catering to a certain audience, after the 2020 election they had to parrot Trump’s “stolen election” bullshit even though, as the revelations of the Dominion lawsuit have shown, they knew it to be false. They couldn’t afford to tell their established audience things which that audience didn’t want to hear.
The smaller, newer, less advertising-dependent news entities that still have that fire in the belly for getting the word out, that view their own very existence as a means to that end rather than the primary thing to protect, that in some cases focus on a particular topic rather than trying to cover all news comprehensively — I’m thinking of Crooks & Liars, The Lever, Canary Media, Common Dreams, Reduxx, The Bulwark, and suchlike — are probably a lot closer to what “the press” was like at the time the First Amendment was written than today’s corporatized media behemoths are. They usually have a strong editorial viewpoint which affects their choice of what to cover — but the big media entities often do as well, and by reading a wide range of sources one can compensate for the biases of any one of them. And with the internet, even small news organizations have a potentially national or even global reach.
They are also probably less vulnerable to government censorship. A few giant media corporations with fixed headquarters and assets, with deep financial roots and entanglements, are much more vulnerable to government pressure than hundreds of smaller organizations, each run by a scattering of people often in several different countries, with a mostly online presence that could quickly be moved if necessary. On this point, audiences — citizens — have a role to play as well. There are technological work-arounds for most kinds of internet censorship. It’s up to us as participants in a free society to stay familiar with them.
These “mini-media” occupy a golden space between blogs and the giant media. They are big enough to do serious reporting on events relevant to their chosen areas of focus, while small enough to avoid the financial and political pressures and the concerns about access that water down the MSM. Not being owned by some giant corporation, they are free of centralized control. They often get a substantial part of their revenue from reader donations, making them less (or not at all) dependent on advertising. This does raise the risk that they will ultimately come to fear offending readers, but there are abundant examples showing that the distortions and pressures created by advertisers pose a far greater threat of watering down coverage. And everyone needs to cover costs somehow. Those sites whose content you value are well worthy of your donation dollars, if you can afford it. Such independent, decentralized, aggressive, small-scale journalism is today’s truest heir to the pull-no-punches free press of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those of us who value a free society need to help it survive.
“…I think a big part of the problem is the role of money, and sheer size…”
Who woulda thunk it???
Gross understatement as high art???
Ron:
Good to see you here again. Hope all is well by you.
Run,
Better every day here unlike the RoW.
Rest of World?
Yep, looks like a grim place to live when I see it on the evening news.
Sheer size ~ I long ago, at a space that no longer exists, when I was still chasing at academia, wrote about the statistical inevitability of a population grown too large, too diverse, spread across too diverse a geography ‘s failure. Like a perpetual motion machine, it is bound by the laws of man and science to consume itself from the inside out and implode.
Bigger than the media, I think; really reminds me a lot of the repubs’ modus operandi of sucking all the air out of the room: loading the place up with agitators making so much noise nobody can get a word in edgewise. It’s information overload gone misinformation overload.
Some circles we don’t call it a spade, it’s a fokin’ shovel …
i find this all confused or confusing. the corporate media are not timid. they tell as much of the news as they want the people to believe. On the other hand, they tell enough of the news that a reasonably intelligent reader can guess…and confirm from other sources… what is really going on.
Otherwise this sounds like an advertisement for “Infidel”…”you can trust us because we are small. and wear our bias on our sleeve.”
which is actually fair enough: my favorite journalist was Tom Paine and he was nothing if not biased.
Yep. The beauty of the system is that most folk do not want to know about reality as it would contradict their priors. The fig leafs win. Bliss is ignorance or vice versa. The few realists can still recognize the reality within the illusion. Alfred E. Neuman was a visionary.
Theory is that without those fig leaves we wouldn’t be able to think about anything else. I suppose the world was as bad a place in the fifties, but since i didn’t know about it i didn’t have to think about it…didn’t think i had to do anything about it. From what I have learned since, I think it might be better if most people don’t think about it, because then they might try to do something about it, and they would make a bigger mess.
Theory is probably wrong: the Arabs make their women walk around in fig leaves the size of tents so they don’t have to think about sex…and end up thinking about nothing else.
On the other hand…or maybe it’s the same thing: we have industrialized ignorance on a mass scale so we can fill their empty heads with lies which they shout at each other , making life easier for the best liars.
Lately, I am told, Russians (or intellectuals) have invented somethng even better….instead of plausible lies, they fill the people’s heads with nonsense so that they, the people, end up believing nothing at all. cosmic bliss.
Yes sir.
The republican system of representative government does give us a limited opportunity to make a few poorly informed choices, but even less opportunity to escape the inevitable negative consequences of those choices. The Treaty of Versailles, the Bretton Woods Conference deciding the new world economic order at the end of WWII, and the 1954 pivot on capital gains versus dividends tax preferences set the US and its kindred capitalists on a course of financialization and consolidation that has transformed piggish elites into ravenous hyenas, metaphorically speaking. Exorbitant privilege of the global reserve currency based on a single sovereign monetary system was a horrible idea both for the working class and for the global natural environment and also the global international diplomacy environment. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It was inevitable that a class based elitist society would evolve in this manner. It is no accident that dogs are man’s best friends – kindred spirits as it were. This is not to say that I have not known some very good men in my life and also some very good dogs, but as neither as a rule measures up to that standard.
All that said and aside, then life is still good and far too short. Politics is just the opposite. In celebration of this reality on Amazon this AM I ordered Gulliver’s Travels in an unabridged paperback edition for $11.48 including tax and shipping. With so little left to lose now and so little time left in which to lose it, then I am getting back to the basics.
yes. i have known some good dogs too. i like to say that some of my best friends are homicidal maniacs. but dogs are honest about it, and have evolved more than men to have good manners.