September, 2007
The Failure of our Free Press
Lyle Kossis
"Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of...the press." And thus begins the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution. When one analyzes the language of the First Amendment and the peculiarity of its commands, one is lead to ask why the amendment used the declaratory and complete negative "no law" as opposed to a partial negative, such as one that read "no law except those deemed necessary for the public good" or "no law except those with regards to libel and slander." There is no asterisk or footnote in the constitution that is written after the First Amendment, claiming that "no law" allowed for traditional or historically acceptable exceptions to the rule. To be noted, the First Amendment does this because the founding fathers recognized and understood the importance of a free and unfettered press.
A free press, during the time of the American Revolution, was said to be one of the bulwarks of freedom and one of the great pillars of the Temple of Liberty. With the increasing complexity of the issues facing our country today, ranging from science, economics, politics, medicine, finance, and foreign policy, we have come to rely more and more on the media to help bring to light the many subjects of the day in a simple and unbiased light. With the enormous size of the government today and the almost infinite departments, sectors, agencies, and associations, we the people can not monitor government on our own accord. And yet in these times of the most pressing circumstance, our media has done just the opposite; they have consistently served as an institution that spreads the agenda of the ruling elites, limits the debate on important topics, squashes dissent, and keeps the citizens of this nation uninformed, lazy, apathetic and politically dormant.
The failure of the mass media we have today could not be more present than in the coverage of the presidential races currently going on in the two major parties. Men like Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel have been preaching a different message this campaign season, somewhat populist in nature, and appealing because it is something new and different that American voters haven't heard in a long time. These men talk about a respect for the individual, a distrust of large and expansive corporations, and overall, a more responsive and democratic government. And yet the mass media has continued to almost completely ignore them during presidential debates and then discredits an online poll that has Paul, Kucinich or Gravel winning as being influenced by an endless army of "spammers." This was evident when only a couple days ago, after Dennis Kucinich had won an online ABC poll by over 3,000 votes, ABC took the poll down and put a new one up, this time without Kucinich's picture. Fox news is also guilty of biased reporting when they deliberately misconstrued Ron Paul's statement on Blowback during the South Carolina debate to say that Ron Paul claimed "America caused 9/11," or when every major news network failed to cover the West Alabama Republican Party Straw Poll or the New Hampshire Taxpayer's Union straw poll, both of which Ron Paul won by almost 90%.
The mass media also doesn't seem to cover new discoveries in science or recent crises going on in the Mid-East. Most people are unaware that a team of Russian scientists successfully tested an HIV vaccine that was shown, in trials, to not only prevent the acquisition of HIV, but work as a therapeutic device as well. The media also conveniently forgot to mention that we have women soldiers in Iraq dying because of dehydration (what's scarier is that it's because the women refuse to drink water in the afternoon because they would have to go to the bathroom later, and would be likely to get raped along the way in the dark by male soldiers.) I guess Paris Hilton's posterior or Mrs. Lohan's recent drug addiction merits more attention than stupid, unimportant events like those mentioned above.
In the time we live in, where the price of information is getting higher and fewer and fewer people are controlling what goes on the TV, we must remember the sanctity of the free press. A press not governed by corporate control, media elites, lobbyists, or behind the scene political actors is truly a free press. A press that is obsessed with 30 second sound bites, flashing light bulbs, pearly whites, pre-packaged ideas, and manufacturing consent, is merely an aid to tyranny. I think it would do us all much good to remember what Thomas Jefferson said almost 200 years ago: "The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."