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.