Posts are going to be a bit less frequent as I find myself doing this thing called "research." Also, as this isn't college and this isn't a term paper I'm not going to footnote every fact I find. I will link all of the sources I used at the bottom of the post for further reading if you are interested. Ready for it?
I’ve decided I’m going to jump around based on my personal feelings of the most egregious abuses/attacks of/on the Constitution. So, one of the biggest issues I have with the current Presidency is the attacks on the free press. The First Amendment, included in the Bill of Rights, does not just focus on the press:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
There is a lot to unpack there, so I’m going to divide this up into 3 parts, and not in order. I will speak on freedom of the press first. Probably, freedom of speech will be next and then religion. I find it interesting that these were all lumped together, assumedly because these rights were all determined to be the most important. Honestly, freedom of the press and freedom of speech are very intertwined, but I think there are points to be made about them separately.
Freedom of the press was very important to the founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” Under the rule of Britain, the press was constrained against printing anything about The Crown. Anything anti-government was considered seditious. Our Congress recognized that the press was an important watchdog over government so it was made part of the First Amendment.
There were efforts to subvert it shortly after the Bill of Rights was ratified in the form of The Sedition Act of 1798, which allowed for the criminal prosecution of those who brought the president or the government into disrepute and ridicule. Today, it is considered to be one of the most egregious violations of the First Amendment to date. Written and passed by the Federalists under President John Adams, it targeted dissent by the Democratic-Republicans and its leader Thomas Jefferson, who admitted to being afraid to “write what I think.” Ten people were convicted under this act (not all journalists) and later pardoned by Jefferson when he became President.
Times were different then and it was widely known and accepted that newspapers, pamphlets, and other writings were aligned with one party or the other. Nobody expected or assumed that the press would be non-partisan.
Today, there are some similarities with the situation back in the late 18th/early 19th Centuries. Two parties, bitterly opposed to each other and the party in power trying to quell dissent. However, the approach is much sneakier and makes use of two words...Fake News.
Fake news is not a new concept, although the use of the actual phrase is relatively new. Reporting rumors and made up stories as news had long been the purview of the tabloid press and yellow journalism. However, it wasn’t until “Pizzagate” and Hillary Clinton referring to the story as “Fake News” that her opponent picked up the term and ran with it.
Our expectations of the free press have changed too. Gone are the times that we expected news outlets to be non-partisan. Back in the heyday of widespread trust in journalism, when Watergate was the story on everyone’s minds, almost three quarters of Americans said that they trusted the mainstream media. News outlets were considered to be unbiased and imbued with journalistic integrity, not identified as “Liberal” or “Conservative.” they were just the news.
Today, most media outlets are identified as liberal/progressive and conservatives feel attacked by them. The media alienated a good chunk of their audience This made it too easy for the current administration to create a new weapon...Fake News.
All of us remember the infamous occurrence shortly before the 2017 swearing in of the new President. During a press conference, many mainstream media outlets were denigrated, the most stand out being that CNN was called out as “Fake News” and Jim Acosta, the CNN reporter present, was not allowed to ask questions. At the time, it was an unheard of situation and stunned many of the press.
Giving credit where credit is due, this was a genius move. If it was claimed that these news outlets were biased, it would have left them some credulity. Regardless of your politics, you could accept that underneath the bias of any news reporting, there was likely a grain of truth. However, by labeling the majority of the big names in mainstream media as “fake” any assumption of credibility was immediately cut off at the knees.
The first victim of this approach was the anonymous source. Today, “Deep Throat” would have been dismissed as a made up source and any information attributed to him as “Fake News.” Right now, there is a report that the President refused to visit the graves of American servicemen killed in the line of duty and described them as “losers.” This story is being dismissed as “Fake News” because the sources of this story remain anonymous. This is despite the fact that there are documented situations where the current President has disparaged veterans and those killed in the line of duty before out in the plain view of the public eye.
This attack on the First Amendment is much craftier and more insidious as it is not directly “prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom” of the press. It is making the press toothless, untrustworthy, and impotent. The watchdog has been caged in a maze of buzzwords and insults. Citizens are confused and don’t know where to turn. What is fake news and what is not?
As if that wasn’t enough, the President made the assertion that we need “to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws, so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts.” This slyly implies that there is too much lying about him going on and he wants to be able to sue over it.
However, on the bright side, some print media, such as the New York Times, has actually seen an upsurge in subscriptions and donations. Part of it is because people appear to be looking for more reliable sources of legitimate news, but it’s also because these news outlets have created and/or tightened paywalls. So while people are becoming more and more distrustful of broadcast news, they are looking for more trustworthy news online.
The downside of this is that many haven't differentiated between actual journalism and social media and now use Facebook posts and Tweets as news sources. This becomes concerning when the source of the Tweets is the President who keeps professional fact-checkers very busy.
What changes should journalism take to combat this attack on their credibility and fight against this insidious indirect violation of the First Amendment? I wish I had the answer. Comment below if you have ideas or suggestions.
Sources for further reading:
American Bar Association: Freedom of the Press: Challenges to this Pillar of Democracy
HistoryNet: Passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts
THE FIRST AMENDMENT ENCYCLOPEDIA: Sedition Act of 1798 (1798)
The Guardian: Before Trump: the real history of fake news
USA Today: Trump to CNN: ‘You are fake news’
PressThink: Rosen’s Trust Puzzler: What Explains Falling Confidence in the Press?
Niemenlab: More Americans are paying for online news — and those who do say they’re unlikely to stop
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