Whatever happened to the free press?

“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.” -Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson said that long ago, and it is more true now than at any time in our country's history.
But at what point did our press go so badly wrong?

The American Society of Newspaper Editors, in 1922, established their 'Canons of Journalism' spelling out what they considered to be the standards by which journalists operated, and the ideals to which the journalistic profession adhered. The ideals included the upholding of freedom of the press and thus the encouragement of the free debate which is essential in a democratic republic.

At their 16th annual meeting in 1938, the ASNE felt compelled, in view of developments in the world (this was on the eve of World War II, with the rise of totalitarian governments in Europe, of course) to reaffirm their principles.

Unfortunately all citizens do not think through the meaning of a free press. Too many regard it as merely the profitable privilege of publishers, instead of the right of all the people and the chief institution of a representative government. A free press is that privilege of citizenship which makes governmental dictatorship impossible. When editors fight for the liberty to speak and write, they fight for the greatest of all human rights under government. He is not thoughtful who cannot see that democracy cannot exist except through the maintenance of a channel through which information can flow freely from the center of government to all the people and through which praise and criticism can flow freely from the people to the center.

In view of what we believe to be this growing lack of appreciation on the part of the public of the true value and functions of a free press, we hold that the members of this Society should carry on a constant campaign for the purpose of making the average citizen more acutely aware that a free press is not principally the editor's privilege for himself alone, but his right and mandate to be of the utmost service to his fellow citizens in a republic.

While we abhor every sort of government citizenship that exists elsewhere and every suggestion of it that has been made or could be made in the United States, we take upon ourselves the responsibility of a censorship of good taste which will lead us away from such invasion of privacy as is not absolutely warranted by the public welfare.

We take upon ourselves a censorship that will lead to the elimination of propaganda.

We take upon ourselves a censorship that will lead to greater accuracy in the reporting and presentation of the news.

It has been well-said that "The press must stand guard over itself that it may be worthy to stand guard for the public."

We call upon all editors, then, to recognize a growing criticism, to face it fairly, to set their houses in order, to be governed by good taste, a sense of justice, by complete devotion to the public interest, and to toil unceasingly to educate our readers to such a sense of the value of a free press in America that the citizens of this republic shall become the willing cooperators, the fellow warriors, in a never-ceasing fight for the maintenance of democratic institutions."

The statement of principles was further revised in 1975.
The revised principles emphasized freedom of the press, and the principles enumerated in the document included responsibility, independence, truth and accuracy, impartiality, and fair play. So far, so good; there is not much to disagree with there.

Contrast their statement of principles with the mission statement which is on their website today.

ASNE's priorities are:

* To protect First Amendment rights and enhance the free flow of information.
* To drive the quest for diversity and inclusion in the workplace and newspaper content.
* To promote the newspaper’s role in providing information necessary to the informed practice of citizenship.
* To encourage innovation and celebrate creativity in newspapers.
* To respect and encourage the involvement of all its members.
[...]
Continue to emphasize core values.
Awareness of the First Amendment and the role of the press in society.
Freedom of information.
Newspaper coverage of elections and other issues of democracy.
Diversity in newsrooms and news coverage.
Accurate, fair and complete news reports.
[Emphasis mine]

Notice the current emphasis on diversity. A page is devoted just to 'Diversity'.

And here is the statement on newsroom diversity, from which I have excerpted:

While American newsrooms have become more diverse in recent years, newspapers will fall short of achieving racial parity in newsrooms with the population by 2000.

ASNE reaffirms its commitment to racial parity in newsrooms and to full and accurate news coverage of our nation’s diverse communities. The Society urges everyone in journalism — newsroom professionals, publishers, educators, journalism associations and others — to join the quest for greater newsroom diversity.

ASNE has adopted the following mission statement on newsroom diversity:

To cover communities fully, to carry out their role in a democracy, and to succeed in the marketplace, the nation’s newsrooms must reflect the racial diversity of American society by 2025 or sooner. At a minimum, all newspapers should employ journalists of color and every newspaper should reflect the diversity of its community.

The newsroom must be a place in which all employees contribute their full potential, regardless of race, ethnicity, color, age, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability or other defining characteristic.''

The Society of Professional Journalists also emphasizes 'diversity'
And read the diversity guidelines:

On Oct. 6 at its National Convention in Seattle, the Society of Professional Journalists passed a resolution urging members and fellow journalists to take steps against racial profiling in their coverage of the war on terrorism and to reaffirm their commitment to:

— Use language that is informative and not inflammatory;

— Portray Muslims, Arabs and Middle Eastern and South Asian Americans in the richness of their diverse experiences;

— Seek truth through a variety of voices and perspectives that help audiences understand the complexities of the events in Pennsylvania, New York City and Washington, D.C.

[...]Visual images

— Seek out people from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds when photographing Americans mourning those lost in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

— Seek out people from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds when photographing rescue and other public service workers and military personnel.

— Do not represent Arab Americans and Muslims as monolithic groups. Avoid conveying the impression that all Arab Americans and Muslims wear traditional clothing.

— Use photos and features to demystify veils, turbans and other cultural articles and customs.

Stories

— Seek out and include Arabs and Arab Americans, Muslims, South Asians and men and women of Middle Eastern descent in all stories about the war, not just those about Arab and Muslim communities or racial profiling.

— Cover the victims of harassment, murder and other hate crimes as thoroughly as you cover the victims of overt terrorist attacks.

— Make an extra effort to include olive-complexioned and darker men and women, Sikhs, Muslims and devout religious people of all types in arts, business, society columns and all other news and feature coverage, not just stories about the crisis.

— Seek out experts on military strategies, public safety, diplomacy, economics and other pertinent topics who run the spectrum of race, class, gender and geography.

— When writing about terrorism, remember to include white supremacist, radical anti-abortionists and other groups with a history of such activity.

— Do not imply that kneeling on the floor praying, listening to Arabic music or reciting from the Quran are peculiar activities.

— When describing Islam, keep in mind there are large populations of Muslims around the world, including in Africa, Asia, Canada, Europe, India and the United States. Distinguish between various Muslim states; do not lump them together as in constructions such as "the fury of the Muslim world."

— Avoid using word combinations such as "Islamic terrorist" or "Muslim extremist" that are misleading because they link whole religions to criminal activity.

And on and on it goes; read the rest for yourself if you can endure it, although it's all rather predictable.

We all know that the media is self-consciously doing these things; there is a dominant leftist mindset that pervades journalism these days. And we don't have to read websites like those linked above to know that there is an agenda; there is a glaringly obvious pattern to the way our 'free press' tells these stories.

It is no accident that our newspapers are full of stories about 'diversity' and 'underrepresented communities' and poor suffering immigrants and 'hate crimes'.

The TV cable news channels are just as biased, except that they are more monotonous in repeating and repeating the same insignificant stories to the point of nausea; for example, the ridiculous live coverage of Paris Hilton's arrest or court appearances. The world is full of momentous events and issues these days, and our TV cable channels can give us mostly gossip and empty celebrity stories alternated with propaganda. It's hard to escape the impression that the TV 'news' channels are mainly designed to distract us from the important events of our times. They are meant to keep our attention focused on the trivial and the vacuous and the tawdry, while our world is rearranged and overturned.

Go back and read the early Statement of principles by the ASNE back in 1938; their talk of the vital importance of a free press as the line of defense against a dictatorial government is ironic, when we look at how very unfree our press is now. While at times, the mainstream 'old media' play at being adversarial towards our present administration, in most respects it seems as though the media and our present rulers are all singing from the same hymnbook: they are all singing the praises of holy diversity and multiculturalism and tolerance. There is no balanced viewpoint in the traditional media; the blogosphere is now the last line of defense against the monolithic ideology that dominates our 'free' press.

The old media and the journalism profession today are as hollow in their pretensions to honesty as was Pravda in the old days of the Soviet Union. The fact is, they are purveyors of a totalitarian ideology, as was Pravda, and no dissenting viewpoints are allowed to be presented.

Their choice of stories also seems to reflect the leftist agenda, with a constant returning to themes such as 'discrimination' towards victim groups: gays, immigrants, especially non-white, non-Christian immigrants. There are never any stories depicting the negative effects of immigration on the majority American citizens. Where are the stories telling of the people who have lost their jobs to illegals, people like the construction workers who have almost all been displaced, in some areas, by crews of cheap illegal labor? Or the meatpackers, whose once well-paying union jobs have been given to illegals who work for half the wages or less? What about the disabled people who are waiting years, in some cases, for subsidized housing because of the large number of immigrants who are added to the waiting lists? The media never tells us these stories.

The media answer critics who complain of leftist bias by the token inclusion of a few safe 'conservative' writers, the ones who never question Holy Diversity or Open Borders or the gay agenda. These PC 'castrated conservatives' as Carleton Putnam called them represent their excuse for balance.

Despite the presence of a few tired 'conservative' columnists who crank out pro-administration boilerplate, there are precious few real conservative voices in the regular media. The reporting , however, is almost always slanted toward leftist themes: exploited, suffering immigrants, poverty, racism, 'hate groups', global warming, and so on. We all know the constant refrains.

And the idea of hiring 'diversity' reporters seems to be meant to promote particularistic minority points of view at the expense of the majority. Some newspapers hire gays to present the gay point of view, while black columnists write about the 'African-American community'. Notice that increasingly stories on immigration and border issues are written by people with Hispanic names. No bias there, I'm sure. And now there are many Moslem-sounding bylines, often writing stories about the 'Muslim community'. The implicit assumption here is that whitey can't write an unbiased story, so we hire 'diverse' reporters to report on their own 'communities' -- but obviously they are presenting a biased point of view. Pro-minority bias is good, in the old media's perspective; it's to be preferred. There seems to be an effort to get us accustomed to having these different minority groups interpret reality for us, and to condition us to loss of majority status.

This recent article from Jakarta Post discusses the media's role in monitoring 'hate and xenophobia':

More than 80 media practitioners are meeting here Monday and Tuesday for the second Global Inter-Media Dialog to discuss this particular issue.

With the theme, “Primetime Diversity — Journalism in a Troubled World”, the gathering is facilitated jointly by the Norwegian and Indonesian governments, and it follows the successful inaugural dialog held in Bali last year.

“The media must transform diversity, which is a fact of life, into pluralism, which is a set of values,” Dodou Diene, a top United Nations official, said during the meeting’s opening day.

Societies must recognize, accept and then defend and promote diversity, said the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia and related intolerance.
[...]
He noted with concern how xenophobia and racism had found their way into the election platforms of political parties in some European countries, and that once elected they would push to turn their anti-immigration agendas into policy.

He also attacked scholars who give intellectual legitimacy to racism and xenophobia, singling out Harvard University professor Samuel Huntington, who wrote about the so-called “Latin threat” to the U.S. in a recent book.''

There you have it: the UN has decided this is to be a worldwide agenda, but focusing of course on European and European-derived countries which are resisting the global, open-borders agenda.

There seems to be no escaping this relentless push.

Reading newspapers has become a grueling chore for me these days: I read many newspapers for the sake of keeping a finger on the pulse, but there is always the necessity of filtering what I read, and taking much of it with copious amounts of salt, because of the ever-present bias. Reading the old media, and watching the cable news channels, and local news, is something which I find truly tedious and grim.

Do they know, these media people, how odious their 'product' is to many viewers and readers? Do they care? They seem to value the agenda more than profitability, which makes no sense from the business point of view.

If 'diversity' is so all-important to these media drones, why on earth is there so little real diversity in their ideas, in the themes they present, in their word choice, in the viewpoints they allow to be expressed? It is all so wearyingly uniform and drably predictable. If real diversity were valued, we would see a much more varied picture of our world in the media; we would have a multiplicity of ideas and opinions presented, and a much freer exchange of ideas. We would have a much greater range of voices.

The blogosphere is stepping into that void, providing that range of voices which the mainstream media shut out.

A couple of weeks ago, the L.A. Times ran this piece which slammed bloggers, specifically bloggers who presumed to undertake criticism, and write book reviews. The writer sniffs that this art should not be attempted by amateurs. He says dismissively that blogging is somewhat like fingerpainting.

Most of us who blog are used to this kind of sneering superiority from those who consider themselves professionals and artists of the word. And it's understandable that they feel threatened: how dare the amateurs infringe on their territory? The fact that newspaper readership is dwindling all over the country, and that many newspapers are foundering, surely gives the professional journos a sense of insecurity.

If blogging is like fingerpainting as Schickel says, then I suppose what the professional journos, with their 'diversity guidelines' and politically correct templates, are doing is the verbal equivalent of paint-by-numbers.

Surely deep down they must be envious that the blogger is much more free to write from the heart and write the truth, whereas the journalists, God help them, are condemned to keep rewriting the same old stale PC template stories again and again and again. How many times can they write the 'Muslim community fears backlash' story or the 'Immigrants fear ICE raids' story or the 'Migrant workers exploited' story? How many times can they write the 'School officials troubled by achievement gap' story?

The fact is, the blogosphere arose because the once-free press gave up its freedom and its commitment to truth and accuracy and chose to undertake a leftist social engineering project. Instead of being commited to a pursuit of the facts and an honest presentation of those facts to the public, the old media began to regard themselves as some kind of moral arbiters, who have to oversee the ignorant masses, and herd them in the correct direction. They began to position themselves as teachers and preachers, rather than as fact-collecters and reporters. Instead of restricting the didactic pieces to the Op-ed pages, almost all 'news stories' are full of editorializing and preaching, presenting a consistent, liberal point of view.

And yes, we bloggers editorialize and preach, but at least we offer another side to the story, and we don't hide our editorializing and pretend it's objective reporting as the dishonest old media do.

If bloggers are so resented by the 'respectable' old media, then they should stop and think why people increasingly turn to the Internet for their news and the blogosphere for commentary and discussion. If the media find bloggers to be a thorn in their side, good. In a just world, that would provoke the old media to reconsider what they are doing wrong, and try to correct it. But I think they are beyond correction, so they must decrease while the bloggers increase. And are the media really free to change anyway? Far from being the independent press that our Founders foresaw, they are basically just the creatures of globalist big business and their leftist One World partners.

In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Who ever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech." - Benjamin Franklin

Our freedom of speech has been subdued in the 'respectable' media, and the Internet, being the last bastion of free speech, will now be the focus of the next struggle. It's important that we prepare to deal with the continued assault on our free speech as it moves on to the next phase.