Whether Freedom of the Press Matters Is Entirely Up To The Press And They're Proving It Doesn't

As I've mentioned before, of the rights in the First Amendment to the Constitution "freedom of the press" is an artificial, man-made "right" which is given to an artificial corporate entity, not a natural right which we all share equally as an endowment of God.   "The press," in modern terms, "the media" doesn't have any absolute right anyone has to worry about.  The "right" of the Home Shopping Network to sell junk to shop-a-holics to run up their credit card bills isn't any "right" that I have any reason to care about, the "right" of FOX to show Family Guy is nothing that a drop of blood should ever have been shed for in battle or struggled for in any way.

If I thought it would get a serious, honest, deeply considered answer I'd ask the members of our armed services though history if they thought their life was worth sacrificing, the pain and loss and hole in the lives of their family and loved ones so that whatever piece of crap TV show or radio show or supermarket tabloid lie could be told and sold.

I will tell you without any hesitation that none of those and most of what is put out by the American media is not worth breaking a fingernail over, never mind the lives of soldiers, most of what our media puts out is definitely, positively and intentionally damaging to democracy and a decent life,  A lot of the lies put out by the media in the past two decades have been explicitly with the intention of inciting disasterous wars which have gotten lots of people killed for the basest of reasons, the enrichment of oil oligarchs and their ilk and the destruction of democracy.  And that is true from the New York Times down to those basest and most disreputable tabloids, hate talk radio shows and neo-fascist websites - which have provided content for the most allegedly reputable of them.

The only reason to have put "freedom of the press" on the same level as real, natural rights of people is the theoretical, ability of private media to serve the function of accurately informing The People in order that they can cast accurately informed votes, and, it is seldom mentioned, in maintaining the good will, good intentions and sense of moral obligation on which democracy and a decent life depend. Unfortunately, all too often that has been so theoretical as to be a fiction. That's the only reason for people to give the media any kind of freedom, at all.  And it doesn't work when the media is allowed to violate that obligation.  And allowing that is not only foolish, it is extremely dangerous. 

Freedom of the press, the media is not like mere freedom of speech by individuals, the media amplifies whatever it chooses to put out, it is heard or seen or, far more rarely, now, read by many people who have been given the habit of believing that the media, the press, should be considered to be of enhanced reliability.   There is no such requirement placed on our media and they have, mostly, used the recent Supreme Court dogma of press freedom to violate any obligation to serve democracy by not only telling the truth but to refrain from telling even the most self-interested of lies.  The only positive role the media plays in democracy is in telling the truth and experience shows when you relive the media of that role held to be an obligation, they will turn around and do everything in their power to trash the truth, to tell the lies and to damage and destroy democracy.

The New York Times was one of the primary venues through which the Bush II putsch was normalized and made acceptable, they sold his illegal invasion of Iraq, the most disasterous of recent military and foreign policy actions of the United States government through reporting planted lies as if they were fact.  The New York Times has carried on a vendetta against Hillary Clinton and her husband for the past quarter of a century, it is still doing so today even as it risks putting Donald Trump in the same office it helped install George W. Bush in.   And what you can say about the New York Times you can say about the rest of the media, even more so the cabloid and online media which lies with complete abandon.  The Associated Press is carrying on that vendetta as it turns entirely routine contacts to the State Department during Hillary Clinton's time as Secretary into phony scandals in which nothing improper happened and no laws or ethics rules were broken. 

I think the media handling of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is one of the most blatant examples of how our media has made "freedom of the press" as practiced by them, not only unimportant for democracy but a positive danger to it.  I mentioned, yesterday, that Donald Trump is Paul LePage on a national and world level and, just as the media here not only didn't inform The People at a level so as to make a Govenor LePage impossible, the national media is pivoting to try to either put Trump in office or, if she wins, to destroy Hillary Clinton's presidency before she has even been elected.  If they do that they will certainly ensure that whoever the Republicans choose in their primary next time will stand a good chance of being elected by the lied-to electorate who have been subjected to the press which has been freed to lie about and assassinate the character of Hillary Clinton about whom even the most unselfish and even noble activity can't be turned into something to attack her with.  That, friends, is what a free press relieved of even the obligation to not lie will do.  The past half century has been an experiment in what happens and those test results are in.  

Update:  Simps, you're a lazy, ignorant putz.  I've given you enough time because I've been stuck inside a lot.  September will be Simps free at this blog.  Who knows, I might get use to not dealing with the stupidity and I'll make it Simps free all the time.   I don't want to go the same route as Duncan and find myself posting content free threads for putzes to putz around on.