REGULATORY AGENCY’S PLAN PUT ON HOLD
TO SEND ‘MONITORS’ TO GRILL EDITORS
AND REPORTERS IN U.S. NEWSROOMS

Are American newspapers a ‘polluted vehicle’?
Should Obama Administration bureaucrats
have oversight  over journalists’ work?
 
A VOICE OF BALTIMORE EDITORIAL
 
By Alan Z. Forman
 
Thomas Jefferson, the great champion of Freedom of the Press, dramatically altered his view on the importance of free speech once he ascended to the presidency.

The First Amendment, he came to realize as the nation’s third chief executive, is not the friend of people in power.

“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,” Jefferson wrote in 1807, his next-to-last year in office. “Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”

In 2014, if newspapers can be said to be “polluted vehicle”s, then what does that say about the Internet? Facebook, Twitter and all the sundry online publications where most Americans get their news these days, and which are unencumbered by government regulation, and in many cases, truth.

Or from comedians like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and the like, who are also unencumbered by government regulation, and in many cases, not entirely truthful.

Satire requires a grain of truth, to be sure, but is not required to be totally accurate, nor is it mandated to be fair and unbiased, although Stewart and Colbert certainly seem to not play favorites when it comes to making fun of politicians and newsmakers.

Like Jefferson, and numerous presidents in between, Barack Obama and members of the current administration seem determined to “unpollute” that Jeffersonian vehicle, which now includes far more than simply just the print media.

SIX CONGLOMERATES CONTROL 90 PERCENT OF AMERICAN MEDIA

It’s not enough that six conglomerates control 90 percent of the media in America (cf., http://www. businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6). The government, on the national, state and local levels, decides for all of us most of the time, what is and is not news.

With few exceptions, investigative reporting, Woodward & Bernstein/Washington Post-style, is a thing of the past. Most media outlets won’t commit the money — or simply don’t have it to spend — to keep adequate track of what the nation’s politicians are doing.

And even when they do keep track, how many of us actually pay attention? or even care?

It’s easier and cheaper to send reporters to cover press conferences, where our mayors and governors, senators and representatives — and yes, even our president — tell us, via the journalist, what’s important, and what we can safely be permitted to know.

And when a whistleblower, like tobacco industry insider Jeffrey Wigand, for example, reveals uncomfortable truths, they demonize the messenger rather than deal with what is wrong in society, and turn a blind eye toward the secrecy that pervades our legislative chambers and administrative bureaucracy.

SNOWDEN NOT A SELFLESS WHISTLEBLOWER

(An aside: Voice of Baltimore does not consider NSA secrets leaker Edward Snowden, who is currently hiding out in Russia, to be in the elite class of selfless righters of wrongs such as Wigand, who refrain from putting people’s lives in jeopardy and have never been fugitives from justice, choosing to live in a county with a totalitarian government so repressive it makes ours look tame by comparison.)

In Maryland, the governor and mayor invite their friends and families, and political associates, to sit in skyboxes paid for with taxpayer dollars at the two stadiums in Camden Yards, and the lieutenant governor entertains his campaign contributors — also at taxpayer expense — in Maryland’s Washington Redskins skybox.

But does anybody appreciate the money the Baltimore Sun spent to investigate and reveal those indiscretions? And to point out that the State Legislature is delaying any investigation into the Redskins skybox perks until after the primary election, to protect their golden boy?

Even more important, does anybody question when news reporters show up at lavish events hosted by the same politicians and newsmakers that they’re covering?

Marylanders can’t vote in New Jersey, but would any of us elect a governor to be president who’s such a poor judge of character that he hires political operatives who think it’s OK to intentionally create traffic jams to punish a politician for refusing to endorse their boss?

ORDERING STATE POLICE TO BREAK THE LAW

And would we vote for a candidate who thinks it’s OK to avoid traffic jams by ordering his State Police contingent to break the law by driving down a median strip, leaving other drivers stalled in bumper to bumper traffic?

Well, yeah, we might.

We elected a president — twice — who, despite his good intentions for the country, and backed by enormously favorable media support, is now attempting to influence the agenda of the press, even going so far as to allow some of his agency appointees to attempt to enter newsrooms throughout the country under the guise of “monitoring” what reporters and editors consider “news” and how they make their decisions.

The Federal Communications Commission caused a furor, and a conservative backlash, recently when it announced its invasive plan whereby the agency intended not just to monitor television and radio station newsrooms, over which it has jurisdiction and grants licenses, but newspaper newsrooms as well, over which it decidedly does not.

Conservative media outlets decried the planned invasion, accusing the FCC of violating the First Amendment, but much of the press remained silent on the issue, as if afraid, like the TV and radio station broadcasters, of incurring the wrath of a regulatory commission with the power to shut them down.

GOVERNMENT INTRUSION, TRAMPLING ON FIRST AMENDMENT

Would the mainstream media have been so sanguine about government intrusion and trampling on the First Amendment if Obama’s predecessor were still in office?

At week’s end the FCC backed off, claiming that it never intended to muzzle journalists. But it will nonetheless revise a pilot version of its proposed “study design” so that editors and reporters will not be required to answer questions about their work.

House and Senate Republicans and committee leaders said “it is imperative that the FCC ensure that any study, with any agents acting on its behalf, stays out of newsrooms,” adding that “the courts have rightfully struck down the Fairness Doctrine, and any attempt to revive it, through study or any other means, should not be attempted by the FCC or any other government agency.”

Locally the intended FCC invasion of the nation’s newsrooms attracted little attention and even less concern.

At a gathering Friday of some current but mostly retired Baltimore Sun reporters and editors, including at least one academic and a smattering of PR people, Voice of Baltimore was stunned by the disinterest in a First Amendment issue one would expect all journalists to be up in arms about.

One even chided VoB for paying attention to alleged right-wing criticism of the Obama Administration’s heavy-handed attempt to control the media.

LANGUAGE ‘TRANSFORMED BY THE WHITE HOUSE’

However one former Sun reporter noted in an email that “we need only look at how our language is being transformed by the White House to allow for various interpretations that can spin in any direction, to know that we are facing an era of concern.”

Roger Twigg, who reported for The Sun on crime and politics and is now a paralegal in downtown Baltimore, identified “trust” as the “single most sustaining aspect in a journalist’s arsenal when disseminating information to the general public.

“When that trust is encrypted in any fashion by the government — whether voluntarily or via forced intervention,” he explained, “journalists no longer garner the same respect earned by those who tirelessly worked in the past to keep the general public factually informed on what is happening, not only in the United States, but throughout the World.”

Adam Chadwick, a former staffer at the New York Times and filmmaker who for several years has been chronicling the decline of print journalism and the seismic shift to online news, was alarmed by the attempted FCC invasion, which he found to be “incredibly frightening.”

Even if the Obama Administration bureaucrats promise not to “interfere on the editorial side of things,” how will the information that they gather manifest itself in action? Chadwick asked.

‘FIRST AMENDMENT IN SERIOUS DANGER’

“Surely it must, in some form,” thereby putting “journalism and the First Amendment in serious danger,” he maintained.

But if most reporters don’t even care, and the ones that do are demonized as Tea Party-type conservatives, then what does the doctrine of free speech and Freedom of the Press — even the First Amendment itself — face in the future?

And what is to stop the FCC from coming back six months or a year from now and trying to enter newsrooms again, next time by the back door? being extra careful the second time around to keep their clandestine intentions off the national radar?

It’s admirable and right to condemn obnoxious and bigoted free speech using language such as the so-called “N-word.” But should we put people in jail for doing it?

Or kick them out of NFL football games?

“I disapprove of everything you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it,” Voltaire famously wrote more than two centuries ago (loosely quoted here).

In the age of “Big Brother,” where is it proper for us to draw the line?
 
alforman@voiceofbaltimore.org
 
FOR AN EXCELLENT ANALYSIS OF PRESIDENT OBAMA’S UNWARRANTED ATTACKS ON THE NEWS MEDIA, SEE BALTIMORE SUN TELEVISION CRITIC DAVID ZURAWIK’S INSIGHTFUL FEB. 24 COLUMN, “WILL TEAM OBAMA EVER STOP TRYING TO INTIMIDATE THE PRESS?”  (click here)