Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Separation of Press and State

Who’s Minding the Press?

Our founding fathers very early on in the process of creating a free republic declared that the ‘press’ should be free, set apart from any government control - a sort of “Separation of Press and State”, if you will. The press is accountable to no empowered agency whose responsibility it is to monitor the activities of the press, and to no standard save its own. While ideologically sound, the reality is a victimization of fact and truth far beyond anyone’s imaginings, and with obvious and serious ramifications for the public that the press purports to serve and inform.

That the press (including it modernized brother, the electronic media) is a powerful instrument wielded to shape public opinion should never be doubted, nor can its effectiveness at doing so be overestimated. If the press were recognized as a political system, it would most nearly approximate a dictatorship. The citizenry have, in the written press, a limited, edited voice with which to address issues of public interest, but not matters directly related to the performance of the press itself. Public commentaries critical of the press are summarily excluded from publication/broadcast by that same press. Few individuals or groups have the resources to investigate the accuracy of the information disseminated by the press. And at any rate, the mainstream press is unlikely to print or broadcast allegations of subterfuge made against it.

Given that public opinion shapes public policy, and given the role of the press in shaping public opinion, a serious conflict of interest exists that will never be fully exposed under the current system of information dissemination that we have today in this country. The fox is carefully guarding the henhouse.

As citizens we fail in our duties when we allow the press to crank out doggedly biased information that goes unchallenged for the very fact of its bias. Listen carefully to the adjectives news broadcasters choose or the newspaper employs in its articles. An intentional, conscious effort is made to shape the viewers’ or readers’ perception of the facts. Equally important are the words that are left out of newspaper or television news broadcasts. Again I will say, the press is the most powerful instrument in human society, because it is the basis upon which public opinion is formed. Our own Revolutionary war was nearly a lost cause within a few short months of the Declaration of Independence precisely because the public’s opinion about the war was being purposefully manipulated by a non-sympathetic press to view it as a lost cause. The effect of this reporting crippled recruiting efforts by militia groups and the Continental Army as the ideal of freedom began to be painted as a cause beyond the reach of the Colonists. The hope and morale of the people faded. Had Thomas Paine not written a series of pamphlets, in particular one entitled The Crisis, that elucidated clearly the higher ideals at stake and the means –and cost - by which to effect them, America would doubtless be decades behind where it is today politically, socially, technologically and economically.

Words do matter because words convey ideas, and ideas shape actions. The English novelist Edward George Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873) was no fool when he wrote, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” When Michael Moore cried foul to the network news corporations about Disney Corporation’s refusal to buy and release his movie, Fahrenheit 911, the media’s presentation of the story left the unmistakable impression that Moore and his film had been suddenly jilted, skewered by the forked tongue of Censorship. The plain facts are that a full year prior to Moore’s film being ready for release he had been informed by Disney’s Miramax that they had no interest in the film, leaving him 12 months to market it elsewhere. The New York Times chastised Disney Corporation for this perceived ‘censorship’. Moore meanwhile harvested the energy falling out of the media tempest and sagely took his film to the Cannes Film Festival where the tidal wave of media-generated controversy landed it at the top. Thus making it a very tempting tidbit for a small UK company distribute on the energy of all the pre-release publicity. (The press performed this same function when it tried to squelch Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ by its continuous interviews with those claiming the film to be anti-Semitic.)

Michael Eisner, in response to the harsh criticism leveled at Disney by the Times, wrote the editors and let them know that just as the Times is not obligated to print every article or letter received by it, neither is Disney obligated to release every film that it is offered.

Or maybe you already knew all of that.

As a free and democratic society, we have a rich history of abhorring the political indoctrination of any people by any government. And yet we are subjected to it daily through the news media on which we depend to keep us informed.

The separation of Press and State is indeed a worthy and necessary breach. However, if the integrity of the mainstream media does not improve, and significantly so, the time may come when the press will have to disclose themselves as a political party, if not a branch of government, and surrender their press passes to those enlightened enough to want to pursue truth for the sake of truth and not with the intent of manipulating the perception of the citizenry.

At that point we will truly have a free press.

Kansas, Dust, and Education

The year was 1999. The Kansas State Board of Education’s decision to strike evolution from the state competency examinations had scarcely drawn its first breath, and already turbulence rocked the cradle. The Board’s action generated so much national publicity - much of it erroneous and condescending – that upon installment of newly elected State School Board members eighteen months later the decision was promptly reversed.

Did Kansas reverse its decision simply to dodge the taunts of a hostile media and national commentary leveled by ‘experts’ near and far? (A sting so painful as to effectively quash any discussion of this same item in 2003).

The irony is this: never was it said in the 1999 decision that Kansans could not and should not believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. It was simply determined that it was not necessary to emphasize evolution in testing at the state level. In a national climate that fosters the expression of every freedom guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, many citizens are now asserting their First Amendment rights by rejecting the state’s attempts to eliminate God from the worldview of their children. Implicit in the state’s actions is the prohibition of open student discourse and debate about the state’s worldview, Darwinism, as the definitive interpretation of life’s origins. Naturalism is the only paradigm tolerated by the state.

It is dust that spawns the storm when it comes to humans reckoning their origins.

Evolutionary accounts describe the water and the dust of the earth combining in a precisely correct atmosphere and in the presence of a proper catalyst, so as to form the amino acids that eventually transformed into something meeting the criteria for life.

The biblical account of creation states that God took the dust of the earth and formed it into man, and, Himself being the catalyst, God breathed life into the man He had formed, and the man became a living thing.

Either way you slice it, we’re dust.

Since we cannot know with certainty in either case, evolution or creation, our only recourse is to believe. It is offensive and unacceptable for our government to determine for us via the public education system which tale of origins, which worldview is worthy of our credence and our tax dollar.

By adopting evolution as the national scientific standard for explaining the origins of life, we are making a public declaration of a national belief, principally that life arose exclusively by chance.

To say that the beginning of life and its subsequent evolution are autonomous and undirected is to tacitly embrace atheism. This is a direct contradiction to the beliefs of millions of American schoolchildren and their taxpaying parents. Further, if God does exist, and He indeed created the universe and all of life, then teaching otherwise is in fact political indoctrination at its most heinous: it is the attempt by the state to hide the truth by deception and to replace it with the state’s dogma.

Looking back, Kansas failed to respond thoughtfully to its critics. We instead capitulated in knee-jerk fashion, seeking pacification of those who had no vested interest in our state, yet used our state school board’s 1999 decision to castigate us absent any legitimate rationale for doing so.

In the fall of 2002 the state of Ohio likewise revamped their standards, creating new ones that allow for ‘critical analysis’ of evolutionary theory, while giving latitude to the individual school districts concerning intelligent design theories. Their prescience is laudable. It is a decision whose continued existence, however, rests in the resolve of present and future school board members, and parents, to stand firm in the face of government-backed opposition.

Presently the state school board of Georgia is engaged in similar dialogue regarding its stance on the question of evolution’s place in the education objectives for their students. May they opt for a sensible course of action - one that speaks to the true needs of its students - and in the process model leadership, open mindedness and good old-fashioned backbone. Something Kansas failed to do.

The chronicles of science are filled with men and women who bucked the prevailing and ingrained doctrines and widely held beliefs of their day. They followed expanded, farther-reaching beliefs - their hypotheses - and in the process enlarged the realm of knowledge and the richness of the human experience. Using the tools at their disposal, and the empirical evidence at hand, they pushed against academic and intellectual frontiers and grew them, rather than imprison the intellect within immovable boundaries of improvable theories. By their inquisitiveness and persistence they demonstrated leadership.

Kansas did not think broadly enough on the issue at hand, and, when the flames of opposition grew too heated, demonstrated an unwillingness to step up as a leader in an emerging ideological debate, a debate that is far from over. Leadership not infrequently flies in the face of prevailing thought. Leaders are people intent on discovering the truth, knowing all the while that whatever their contribution to the advancement of these qualities, and to the human race, it is merely another starting point for discovery and not a firm and final conclusion. These are the people who leave an indelible strand woven in the collective fabric of our daily life experience.

People like Charles Darwin.

J.K. Decker