Does Freedom of the Media infer Media Freedom?
On the surface, it seems to be one and the same thing, but is it? We are brought up to believe that truthful people, if given the opportunity to be truthful, will adhere to that policy. But is that the way it plays out? Or wishful thinking? Most folks, trusting to a fault, would probably agree that a free media reports the truth! Because there’s no disincentive to do so. But evidence shows that you can have a media that is not controlled by a police state or other forms of say governmental coercion, but that media enterprise could still be a subdivision, let’s say, of a conglomerate that may have special interests/agendas that might lead to suppression, under-telling the truth or some alternative to an expression of the full truth. While that may be a hard truth to learn, we should have learned that right out of the box when GWBush was elected to lead the country and journalism took a hit that even today damages the reputation of some very well-known names..
What we did learn, in a painfully hard way, was that some of the media took inexcusable liberties with the truth, suppressing either the news altogether or coloring the outcome to make it favorable to some other of their interests or so as not to lose a close relationship with the parties involved. Well, if you think that’s a dereliction of a commitment to all the news fit to print, you’re right! But the definitions of our rights and options under the changed laws governing the use and the misuse of journalistic rights are still mainly untested and untried.
What was worse, we discovered in our probes that one of the leading newspapers that laid claim to report “all the news fit to print,” had a leading staffer who instead of fulfilling her commitment to journalistic truth, instead wound up representing several of her clients in her reporting, serving, instead, as a PR shill with the backing of a leading media empire, misleading the people who thought that they were getting the truth!....Unfortunately, were she the only isolated case, it could be overlooked, but journalistic integrity has suffered mightily in the decades since WWII when most journalists felt that their integrity was unassailable and the majority of the population felt no qualms about supporting that hypothesis. Were we all naïve, hypocrites or have conditions so changed that we need to re-examine journalistic standards for the protection of all?
To make matters worse, two things have happened to journalism that have thrown objective, honest writing into turmoil. One was the result of Newt Gingrich’s arrangement with Murdoch and Powell, then at the FCC, to upturn the guiding principles of the FCC, allowing fewer competitors to increase their span of control in violation of original guiding principles.
This has had the effect of allowing fewer and fewer communications resources to control more and more of the marketplace, allowing the newspapers in a market area, for example, to control regional TV, affecting diversity and limiting the point of view in that specific geographic area.
Thusly, if the media, with its freedom, decides not to cover a subject, it may not be covered by anyone within a geographic area, denying knowledge to the public or coloring the information to suit what might be veiled interests, and with no one to dispute the facts, that the citizenry would be hard pressed to find a more objective view.
The second blow to journalistic objectivity came with the pressures that the White House under Bush exerted on the media. First, when Ambassador White failed to play ball with the administration’s attempts to justify going to war with Iraq by claiming that Iraq was making nuclear weapons, the White House got even by revealing Ambassador White’s wife’s name, a station chief for the CIA in the Middle East, a clear violation of the law and the information was released by the media knowing that it was against the law, endangering the Ambassador’s wife and the many people she was involved with in representing the CIA’s oversea’s mission.
While Cheney’s Chief of Staff went to jail ostensibly protecting others, he was eventually pardoned by the president, someone who had a vested interest in the information released and proved it is possible to get away with crime at the highest levels of government.
The other way the White house manipulated journalistic standards was to issue information that the WH might deny access to an uncooperative media, or one that didn’t see things the White House’s way. It should be clear that a media with “access” denied, is a media with a particularly uncertain future. Secondly, the White House, through channels, let the media world know that it had plenty of tools it could draw upon and that the media needed to show the appropriate deference in its reporting.
One channel, most powerful, was the power invested in government to conduct licensing of all media venues which allowed the Administration the power to deny a license to a media company that failed to somehow meets its obligations…. Another tool in their bag of tricks was the fact that if they didn’t like their treatment, they could always employ power such as the ability to use the IRS to investigate their books. With only those three tools, licensing, the IRA, and “access,” the media could be influenced and controlled .
So, what have we got? We have fewer and fewer independent media to service the public, with more and more of the available media covering all facets of services to some markets, from TV to broadcasting to newspapers. We have a White House exploiting its powers to control what the public sees and hears. Add to this equation the fact that one of the political parties has learned how to frame the issues and set the agendas and possesses the mechanics to assure that they have utter and virtually complete control of what is issued, seen by the masses and believed, because the other party has surrendered the opportunity to stay equal and competitive in the game of communications resulting in the fact that the one party is in pretty much control of the dialog, whether it meets journalistic standards for accuracy, honesty, factuality, and content could be legitimately argued in a court of law.
For example, we now know that the Murdoch empire was in cooperation with the Bush government in supporting the misleading information that the Global Warming was unproven and that scientists were using this as power to confuser and mislead the people in order gain acceptance for their points of view despite the facts. This kind of media control and domination of the airwaves to reinforce a point of view served to support Bush’s friends on the radical right, like the Koch brothers, who gave money to the government to further their interests in producing profits from their ventures in coal and other toxic enterprises that impact air and water quality, which are patently against EPA regulations and the law of the land.
Clearly, ‘Americans have ignored these issues for too long and we need to change the FCC regs once again to better reflect the needs of the people and stay vigilant to continuing abuses to control the dialog.
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