First Amendment and Media

There has been talk by the government of the need to control the content of airwaves with the resurrection and institution of the ‘Fairness Doctrine’. In order to understand media issues, one must first learn the history of the media and how it came to have so much bias.

Once again, Cliff Kincaid provides us with a good background in this June 9, 2009 Canada Free Press article.

He reports that back in the 1970s, he learned what journalism was all about when he studied from Curtis MacDougall’s classic textbook, “Interpretative Reporting”. This book is credited in part with the massive shift from objective news reporting to interpretative and advocacy journalism. Curtis MacDougall and his textbook trained several generations of journalists, and we are seeing the results.

Kincaid asserts that “our only hope is not so much highlighting the errors and omissions of the other side, but in getting our own story out. The problem is the other side has billions of dollars in federal-and big liberal foundation-money.”

Further he states, “this is the direction many of the “progressive” groups are going. In fact, a socialist-oriented “media reform” group with ties to the Obama Administration has called for new federal programs and the spending of tens of billions of dollars to keep journalists employed at liberal media outlets and to put them to work in new “public media.””

Please read the rest of the article to see who’s who in the funding of the media and how the pervasiveness of their agenda means we must preserve the ability get our own message out without government intrusion.