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The Decline In The Institution Of Journalism Has Dragged Us Back To The Eighteenth Century.

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Journalism has not always been understood as a formal profession, but in the course of the twentieth century it went through a transformation that left it with all the characteristics of one, and with links and similarities to many other core professions. Like those other professions, journalism in our day confronts a crisis.

Journalism is not in crisis in every respect, of course. Demand for its offerings is strong, as public interest in current events, and politics in particular, has soared in this era of political turbulence. The supply of journalism is plentiful too, and its quality—while obviously variable—is surely on par with any golden age of reporting we might point to. The economics of journalism in the information age has been brutal, but some journalistic outfits large and small have gradually been finding effective ways to deal with it. The freedom of the press, which has not always been secure in our country, is in no real jeopardy now, or even in much question or dispute. So what’s the problem?

The crisis now confronting American journalism is a crisis of public confidence—a crisis of integrity and trust. President Trump has frequently given vent to the attitudes underlying this loss of trust. “The Fake News Media has never been so wrong or so dirty. Purposely incorrect stories and phony sources to meet their agenda of hate. Sad!” So Trump wrote on Twitter on June 13, 2017. This was a thoroughly characteristic statement of his regarding the press—unusual neither in tone nor in substance. That the president of the United States would speak about the profession like this and that he would do so on a social media platform that affords him direct access to many millions of Americans on his own terms are marks of the peculiar situation of journalism, and especially political journalism, in contemporary American life.

The trouble, moreover, is not so much about trust in individual journalists, or even about trust in particular publications, networks, or platforms—though some come in for more criticism than others. Rather, it is a matter of trust in American journalism as a whole, or at least trust in so-called mainstream journalism as an institution, understood as part of the array of institutions that compose the American establishment.

American journalists have never been at ease understanding their work as part of such an array of institutions. Journalism in a democracy always prides itself on its ability to hone a certain civic skepticism, to hold leaders to account, to uncover important facts hidden from the public, and to enable citizens to assess government officials. In this sense, American journalism sometimes imagines itself to be countercultural or an anti-establishment force like the muckrakers of old.

There are, of course, elements of this way of thinking and operating in the work of contemporary journalism. But journalism in America underwent a multi-decade process of institutionalization, over the first half or so of the twentieth century, that fundamentally transformed its character. By the latter decades of that century, political journalism had largely come to be practiced by highly educated cultural elites in America’s major cities, and many of the most prominent media enterprises came to be owned by large corporations or the very wealthy. Journalists fell into the habit of applying their skepticism mostly toward critics of elite institutions and challengers to elite norms, and their work had come to be implicitly protective of what might be called an establishmentarian status quo.

Yet most political journalists never came to conceive of themselves and their work in this way and so were not prepared to defend themselves against a rising tide of anti-institutional sentiment. That tide has continued to rise in this century. American journalism, like most of our major institutions, has been subject to intense social, cultural, and economic pressures that have undone some of its institutional forms and character—undermining its ethic and its social standing and increasingly subjecting it to competition from a range of upstarts. America’s media giants are still largely populated by highly educated elites and largely owned by major corporations or extremely wealthy individuals, but they are now engaged in a struggle for dominance with less-established competitors of various types.

No one imagines that the major newspapers or television networks have some inherent claim on our trust or attention. In this sense, American journalism offers an instance of a larger pattern in our national life, as public trust in nearly every profession has plummeted in recent decades while the culture has grown far more variegated, fragmented, and diverse. But the crisis of American journalism is especially acute because journalism conveys information that is only valuable to the degree it is deemed reliable, so a crisis of confidence presents it with a distinctly challenging problem.

Perhaps above all, the media landscape now resembles the circumstances of journalism in the early republic—when barriers to entry were relatively low and the media environment was teeming with mostly small voices. One telling artifact of that era is a brief essay published anonymously by Benjamin Franklin in 1789 called “An Account of the Supremest Court of Judicature in Pennsylvania, viz., The Court of the Press.” Like much of Franklin’s writing, this short essay is at least partially satirical. But it advances a very serious point: that anyone with access to a printing press can make wild, unfounded accusations and destroy the reputation of anyone he might choose to target. The press has great power with no clear limits on its use, Franklin worried. It is in this sense like a court without law. “It may receive and promulgate accusations of all kinds against all persons and characters among the citizens of the State, and even against all inferior courts,” he wrote, “and may judge, sentence, and condemn to infamy, not only private individuals, but public bodies, etc., with or without inquiry or hearing, at the court’s direction.”

This court, Franklin noted, is not governed by any clear rules: The accused is allowed no grand jury to judge of the truth of the accusation before it is publicly made, nor is the name of the accuser made known to him, nor has he an opportunity of confronting the witnesses against him, for they are kept in the dark as in the Spanish court of Inquisition. Nor is there any petty jury of his peers, sworn to try the truth of the charges. The proceedings are also sometimes so rapid that an honest, good citizen may find himself suddenly and unexpectedly accused, and in the same morning judged and condemned and sentence pronounced against him, that he is a rogue and a villain. Yet, if an officer of this court receives the slightest check for misconduct in this his office, he claims immediately the rights of a free citizen by the constitution and demands to know his accuser, to confront the witnesses, and to have a fair trial by a jury of his peers.

The danger of this pseudo court abusing its power is thus immense, Franklin suggested. The press has the power to purvey lies—fake news, we might say—or (to recall President Trump’s terms above) to spread “purposely incorrect stories and phony sources to meet their agenda of hate.” At the core of this complaint is the assertion of an absence of standards. As Franklin understood, this was a function not of the concentration of media power but precisely of its dilution. The power of the press in his time, Franklin wrote, was available to anyone who, “by education or practice in scribbling, has acquired a tolerable style as to grammar and construction, so as to bear printing; or who is possessed by a press and a few types.”

Anyone could become a menace in the court of public opinion, and his victims would have little recourse. “For if you make the least complaint of the judge’s conduct,” Franklin wrote, “he daubs his blacking balls in your face wherever he meets you; and, besides tearing your private character to flitters, marks you out for the odium of the public, as an enemy to the liberty of the press.”

To Franklin, there seemed no real remedy to this problem except placing constraints upon that liberty of the press. “If by the liberty of the press were understood merely the liberty of discussing the propriety of public measures and political opinions, let us have as much of it as you please,” he wrote. “But if it means the liberty of affronting, calumniating, and defaming one another, I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it whenever our legislators shall please so to alter the law, and shall cheerfully consent to exchange my liberty of abusing others for the privilege of not being abused myself.”

That remedy has, with good reason, generally been ruled out of bounds in our politics, at least beyond very narrowly constructed libel laws. Franklin wrote just over a year before the Bill of Rights was ratified, but he was well aware of the abiding commitment to the freedom of the press in American public life—a cause he had championed himself at times. He seems to have intended to raise the question of how the power of journalism to abuse its subjects might be contained.

This extract is from Levin, Yuval. A Time to Build (pp. 71-79). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. Copyright (c) 2020 by Yuval Levin.

Progressives, By Applying Their Own Standards, Engage In Effective Self-Immolation.

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Since at least 2016, CNN has mostly ceased being a news agency, but that hasn’t stopped it from being an active participant in #TheResistance. The network is so caught up in the fervor of this movement that many of its guests and regular hosts have been fired, reprimanded, or apologized for threats to the president or general obscene references (e.g., Reza Aslan, the late Anthony Bourdain, Kathy Griffin).

Many of its marquee reporters have resigned, were fired, or reassigned for fake-news bias (e.g., Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Haris), or came under fire for false reporting (Jim Sciutto, Marshall Cohen, and Carl Bernstein) or have had to offer retractions and/or apologies (Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper, and Brian Rokus.)

Its anchors have apologized for obscenity (Anderson Cooper) or simply making up false statements (Chris Cuomo), while analysts have been caught in a number of contradictions about their own role in on-going scandals (James Clapper).

The common denominator has been the new journalistic ethos that aborting the Trump presidency justifies any means necessary to achieve such noble ends. Throughout CNN’s descent into parody, progressives still smiled at the usefulness of CNN for the larger project of delegitimizing the Trump presidency. Few understood the Thucydidean concept that once nihilists destroy norms and protocols of ethical behavior for perceived short-term advantage, they usually rue the loss when they themselves become victims of their own biased zealotry and are in dire need of the civilizational help they recently ruined.

So it was last week, when CNN moderator Abby Phillip warped the recent Democratic presidential primary debate by not asking, so much as accusing, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) about a claim that he said a woman such as Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) could not be elected president—in the fashion of a “When did you stop beating your wife?” question: “Senator Sanders, CNN reported yesterday, and Senator Warren confirmed in a statement, that in 2018 you told her that you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?”

Leftists were outraged at the CNN host’s flagrant bias—as if there was gambling really going on in Casablanca, as if CNN’s own Candy Crowley had not attempted to hijack the second 2012 presidential debate to aid favorite Barack Obama, or as if CNN’s Donna Brazile had not leaked a debate question to aid Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Diversity Drama

The same irony is on display with the Democratic presidential field. One strange theme has been dominant since the primary debates began: the more the white frontrunners pontificated on “diversity” and deplored “white privilege,” the whiter the Democratic field seemed to grow—until there were no nonwhite candidates left.

Those who followed the Democratic field were vexed, given that for three decades the Left has canonized its two fundamental identity politics principles of “proportional representation” and “disproportional impact.” These are the rather strange ideas that racial, ethnic, and gender groups must be represented in coveted jobs and billets according to their percentages in the general population—and its addendum that if there was not proper proportional representation, then no evidence of bias or discrimination was needed to take reparatory action to ensure that race governed hiring and admissions.

Thus, according to progressive doctrine, the white liberals and democratic socialists on the Democratic debate platform, not Democratic voters, pollsters, and donors themselves, are in a way culpable for the absence of candidates of color, whether or not a Biden, Buttigieg, Sanders, or Warren was guided by prejudicial behavior in beating a Booker, Castro, Harris, Patrick, or Yang.

Impeachment Indiscretion

Democrats may also be hoisted by their own petard in the ongoing impeachment psychodrama. They more or less rigged the House impeachment proceeding, by using their majority to depart from past practice. They monopolized the witness lists, selectively leaked, and rushed to indict Trump on the theory that every day the president was not impeached was another day the country was endangered.

Then when bipartisan support never appeared, when there was no special counsel’s damning report, when there was no public majority support, and when there was not the appearance of constitutional indictments for treason, bribery, and specific high crimes and misdemeanors, the impeachment writs simply sat, ossifying as if the House prosecutors suddenly wished to be sober, judicious, and reflective, when in truth they were finagling ways to fortify their anemic writs before what they feared would be a disastrous and embarrassing Senate acquittal.

Perhaps if the Democratic candidates lived by the rules they had enforced on universities or other public agencies, then an underrepresented Cory Booker or Julian Castro would have been by fiat reinstated on the debate stage and an “overrepresented” Bernie Sanders or Pete Buttigieg, the beneficiaries of centuries of “white privilege,” would be passed over from the opportunity—for the greater societal good of diversity.

The idea that a Biden or Warren “earned” their stronger polling or greater fundraising, based on any meritocratic notion of out-debating, out-hustling, out-campaigning, or out-politicking a Harris, Castro, or Booker would be considered not just absurd, but proof of the bias of any who embraced such a structurally racist position.

Absurd? Perhaps, but for the rest of the country that has been lectured unceasingly by progressive elite scolds, it was pure schadenfreude.

Impeachment Indiscretion

Democrats may also be hoisted by their own petard in the ongoing impeachment psychodrama. They more or less rigged the House impeachment proceeding, by using their majority to depart from past practice. They monopolized the witness lists, selectively leaked, and rushed to indict Trump on the theory that every day the president was not impeached was another day the country was endangered.

Then when bipartisan support never appeared, when there was no special counsel’s damning report, when there was no public majority support, and when there was not the appearance of constitutional indictments for treason, bribery, and specific high crimes and misdemeanors, the impeachment writs simply sat, ossifying as if the House prosecutors suddenly wished to be sober, judicious, and reflective, when in truth they were finagling ways to fortify their anemic writs before what they feared would be a disastrous and embarrassing Senate acquittal.

Democrats insisted that the Senate trial have witnesses and that Republican senators conduct the proceeding in a nonpartisan fashion antithetical to the partisan manner in which they had rammed through impeachment in the House. In other words, Democrats demanded that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) not replay the roles of Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

Yet the obvious expectation in such a free-for-all impeachment and trial circus was always that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden would be the most preeminent witnesses called, given Trump’s logical defense that the younger Biden was utterly corrupt, was known to be corrupt but found useful by Ukrainians, and thus naturally such a high-profile case justified presidential suspicions of Ukrainian requests for aid—with the corollary that the elder Biden, the font for Hunter’s ability to leverage money for access, would not be able to testify honestly about the degree to which he knew of his son’s skullduggery.

Joe Biden, despite his senior moments and his lifelong reckless speech, may be for now the Democrats only hope to carry the Midwest swing states that sent Donald Trump to the White House. Thus, the Democrats in the very fashion they have conducted themselves throughout this impeachment farce, may be insidiously destroying the candidate with the best chance of regaining the White House—even while likely enhancing Donald Trump’s polls.

That the Democrats realized such risks and ignored them, either suggests the Left wants to finish off the Biden candidacy, or their obsessions with destroying Trump outweighs any practical considerations of replacing the president with one of their own.

Blinding Rage

These are strange times, in which progressives grow near quiet when courageous Iranians hit the streets to protest a murderous government, but express remorse over the killing of one of the most murderous of all Iranian autocrats.

For years, leftists have decried the bipartisan kid-gloves treatment of China, as its mercantilism systematically hollowed out the old Democratic blue-collar base in the Midwest—only to blast the first president who agreed that China had to be confronted before it eroded what was left of the American industrial heartland.

And we were always warned to fear the government overreach of the intelligence agencies, even as ex-high officials go on liberal networks, warping their use of their security clearances, to contextualize their own previous unethical behavior.

Of all the strange symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome, progressive self-immolation is the strangest.

This article first appeared at American Greatness.

Reject The Establishment Narrative And Arm Yourself With Real Information.

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Ron Unz is an interesting guy. After a successful business life as an innovator and entrepreneur, he now devotes himself, at unz.com, to offering for readers’ consideration a number of alternatives to the traditional and official narrative fed to us by government, the media, the schools and history books. His mission can be summed up in this phrase that he uses in an article called American Pravda:

The realization that the world is often quite different from what is presented in our leading newspapers and magazines is not an easy conclusion for most educated Americans to accept.

Mr. Unz does not ram his point of view down our throats and demand that we swallow and fully digest. Rather, he presents alternative sources, gives reasons why they might be considered credible, and invites us to make up our own minds or do further research on our own if we are so inclined. He simply wants us to be open to the idea that the official, widely accepted narrative may not be truthful. Donald Trump points to “fake news”, but Ron Unz is a little more artful in his use of language.

To cite one example, unz.com recently published an article questioning John McCain’s claims of being a torture victim in Vietnam. In the article, Unz cites journalistic sources, based on research, that have published the opposite case, including what he calls “Sidney Schanberg’s massively documented expose” of a cover-up of Vietnam War POW scandals. Unz also details his own first hand conversations with Vietnam vets who make charges about McCain’s collaboration with his captors and his broadcasting of their propaganda, and he points to finding some contemporaneous articles in Stars and Stripes and on the UPI wire service.

His main point is not whether or not McCain was a liar. It is to surmise what the implications might be. Powerful people in the establishment and the deep state possessing incriminating information about a political star trading on his war hero status could use it to manipulate his behavior and political decisions. Why was McCain such a persistent and unapologetic war monger? Why did the media unite in praise and why were they unwilling to consider alternative evidence? What if McCain had won the Presidency? Who would have controlled him? What narrative would they be peddling?

The challenge in this age of fake news and untrustworthy narratives is that the onus is on each of us as individuals to find our own truths, rather than accepting someone else’s.

Katie Hopkins is a UK journalist who writes at MailOnline. She is concerned that her country, like many in Europe, is culturally at risk in the face of an onslaught of Islamist immigrants. Her position is opposed by the establishment. The official narrative of the multiculturalists revolves around the rights of the immigrants, not the rights of UK citizens. Anyone who, like Hopkins, takes the opposite point of view is vilified and conceivably opens themselves to legal liability.

Hopkins tells us that we have three actions we can take to resist the assaults of the establishment when they assert the primacy and sacred unchallengeability of their institutionalized position.

First, reject the narrative. In her specific case, she calls it the mantra of multi-cultural acceptance: that multiculturalism is intrinsically good, that we should all be “united” even in the face of the shocking, deadly violence committed by immigrants, and that we should “carry on as normal” – even when conditions are far from normal in a UK where communities and individuals are living in cowed fear of assault.

In the more general case, all of us should be perspicacious enough to spot official media-endorsed or government-endorsed or establishment-endorsed or corporately-endorsed narratives, and question them. Ask ourselves if we know if they’re true, and if we suspect they may not be, to try to find alternative sources and check their credibility.

Which takes us to Ms. Hopkins’ second action: we must arm ourselves with our own information. Look for the core truth that lurks within the official filter. She has been exemplary in doing so. She went inside the immigrant way station outside Calais in France, known as “The Jungle”, where migrants camp, waiting to jump trains and trucks to the UK. She witnessed the violence in the camp first hand, and she knows that the immigrants bring their violent antipathies with them to their new countries. She travelled to the “no-go” areas of Sweden to witness for herself the total takeover by the immigrant population who have fought back the police protection that would normally be expected by citizens, leaving them fully exposed and unequipped to defend themselves.

The rest of us are probably not inclined to go to such first hand lengths for truthful information, but we can listen to those who do, and choose whose evidence we give greater weight to.

And thirdly, and most importantly, we must find the moral courage to fight back. It takes bravery to withstand the aggressive media attacks and the vitriolic social disapproval that holding the wrong opinion or favoring the minority report can bring upon us. Both the media and social networks can be vicious. But resistance is key, according to Ms. Hopkins, and we must gird ourselves.

Slowly, she believes, the quiet rumblings of discontent at being force-fed the establishment narrative will become a roar; people will demand to be heard, even when they hold a non-approved opinion. Eventually, we can turn the tide.

 

The Real Victim of Social Media Censorship is Individual Responsibility

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Between Trump’s tirades against alleged “fake news” outlets and the recent banning of Alex Jones from Facebook, Apple, and YouTube, our society appears to be obsessed with trying to silence the opposition by controlling the flow of information. And while the recent Jones prohibition has sparked a national debate over who the First Amendment applies to, there is more to this story than just the issue of state-protected free speech.

To be sure, the Bill of Rights is vital to individual liberty and was written explicitly to restrain the government from infringing upon the rights of the people. And while Facebook may sometimes be more accommodating to the government than many of us would like, the fact remains that it is a private company and it has the right to ban whomever it chooses. The same goes for YouTube and Apple.

And while we are each free to disagree with the decision to censor certain users, debating the constitutionality of Facebook and Apple’s decision ignores the real heart of the matter: Facebook, CNN, Apple, YouTube, and Fox News are not responsible for the spread of misinformation, no matter how much believing so may reinforce our own narratives. When all is said and done, the only person responsible for distinguishing fact from fiction is the individual.

When I was a child and used to accompany my mother to the grocery store, I would always stare in wonder at the sensational tabloid magazines that sat near the registers. “Saddam Hussein is Really a Woman,” one headline read. Another claimed to have an exclusive interview with a man with four heads while another had the scoop on the exorcism of a demonic cat. Even as a child, I understood these headlines were false, but I was still confused.

“Why are these magazines allowed to tell lies? Shouldn’t this be illegal?” I asked my mother. “What if someone believes them?”

“Some people do believe them,” she said as she told me about her friend from school who never missed an issue of World Daily News. She continued, “But each person is responsible for making that decision for themselves.”

The freedom to choose and think for ourselves is one of the most sacred attributes of the individual. But over the last several years, many Americans have adopted an attitude that puts political opinions ahead of individual responsibility.

Politics has created a divide in which everyone is accusing those with different opinions of spreading misinformation. And to be sure, in the political world, there is a lot of misinformation. This is not exclusive to just one party; everyone is guilty of it. But the finger-pointing has gotten out of hand. And the recent banning of Alex Jones and the Infowars podcast has demonstrated just how severe the problem has become.

While Facebook and others have denied that the banning of Jones has anything to do with the fear of spreading “misinformation,” that is essentially what their argument boils down to. Facebook, YouTube, and Apple have all stated that Jones was removed from their platforms for violating their respective terms of use. Specifically, the social media giants have each cited hate speech and bullying as the primary causes. And out of fear that people will subscribe to Jones’ beliefs, which some do, these organizations have made the decision to censor information they deem to be false or misleading.

Hateful opinions will exist whether Jones is on social media or not, but at least by allowing him to say his peace, we allow people to make their own decisions about his views. And if those decisions include the foolish choice to judge someone based on their race, immigration status, or sexual orientation, then at least we know who to avoid. By allowing people to freely associate with unsavory people, we can make better use of that same freedom by choosing to disassociate ourselves. Alleged “hate speech” should be treated as a social signal, not an excuse to ban.

The best way to combat bad ideas is with good ideas. And by allowing a plethora of different opinions to be circulated on social media, you give individuals the opportunity to judge the merits of each opinion and ultimately make their own decision. And if our ideas are truly the “right” ideas, then we have nothing to fear.

The rise of the alt-right and the alt-left has brought all sorts of weirdos out of hiding and yes, some of them have views that most of us would deem inappropriate and even immoral. But banning them only shows that we fear what they have to say. There is a market of ideas where different viewpoints compete with others. And if we, as individuals, believe that our view is the “right” or “good” view, then we should let that it compete on its own merits in the marketplace of ideas.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey appears to understand this, as he has refused to participate in the Jones ban, saying:

If we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce (and evolve) impartially regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that’s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction. That’s not us.

And even though this decision has resulted in backlash from the left who have attacked him for not taking a “stand” against Jones, Dorsey has stood his ground. He even responded to the criticism via tweet, telling journalists that if they are concerned with Jones’ views, they should be diligently combating them with their own opinions.

“Accounts like Jones’ can often sensationalize issues and spread unsubstantiated rumors, so it’s critical journalists document, validate, and refute such information directly so people can form their own opinions. This is what serves the public conversation best.” He also released a statement stating that his platform cannot, and I would argue should not, be “the arbiter of truth” in regards to determining which information is true or false.

But no matter who you side with, this problem is hardly exclusive to the left. Trump seized on the term “fake news” (originally deployed by his political enemies) because he disagreed with what CNN and other news outlets had to say about him. But while these private companies are entitled to ban those they disagree with, they should be aware that this act is opening up the door to something much more threatening: government censorship.

The prohibition of Alex Jones has led Democratic Senator Chris Murphy to call for increased censorship in order to “protect our democracy.” In a chilling tweet, he said:

Infowars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart. These companies must do more than take down one website. The survival of our democracy depends on it.

If the flow of all information, true or false, is tearing our nation apart, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with. And for an elected official who, unlike Facebook, has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution is calling for further censorship, then every single one of us has cause for concern.

We can argue until we are blue in the face over whether or not Facebook and Twitter should censor information, but the government has no business calling for such an act.

So, if Facebook can, but probably shouldn’t ban users and posts it doesn’t like, and the government most certainly should not and is constitutionally prohibited from censoring opinions, what are we to do to stop the spread of misinformation? It may bother some of you to hear that the answer is: absolutely nothing.

All we can do is create and circulate information and trust that our ideas are strong enough to speak for themselves. Only the individual is responsible for their consumption of information. And by constantly trying to ban everything, we are really demonstrating that we do not trust the individual’s ability to make the right decision.

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