SPEAKING OF PRINCESSES. I'm old enough and have enough of my marbles left that I recall the during the furor over the 1980 British-WGBH "documentary,"* Death of a Princess inspired by the execution of a 19-year-old Saudi princess and her lover for adultery, the House of Saud, the dictators of Saudi Arabia, objected and tried hard, directly and through British and American oil companies to get the broadcast of it suppressed. That suppression was resisted by PBS and stations around the country - it was the Carter administration, after all. If it had come a year or two later during the Reagan years I doubt they'd have mounted such a robustly independent course because Reagan's goons and their patrons in the oil industry would have suppressed it.
I mention that because I remember very well listening to a public radio program in which the journalist Elizabeth Drew (bless her, still with us at 90 and, I gather still working) was asked about the controversy and the fears that Saudi Arabia might mount another oil embargo like it had earlier in the decade, causing economic havoc. The film was said to violate their customs and cultural practices. Elizabeth Drew said, well, the United States has our customs and cultural practices and one of those was that the government didn't meddle in the free press. No doubt you, as I did then, smiled and nodded in agreement with that wise observation from a nationally respected journalist. But, as I noted, that was in 1980 and that distinction was already breaking down through the corporate ownership and control of the mass media - which PBS and NPR were already influenced by - and which now, under the billionaire-buying of the media, such as Bezos buying, gutting and discrediting Elizabeth Drew hometown paper and the Ellisons have been doing what they and Bari Weiss have been doing at CBS and are about to do at CNN. I could mention virtually every other major newspaper and network in the country and the erasure of the line between billionaires and multi-millionaires and their companies and Republican-fascist run government. And I would include, very much, the still family owned 2026 New York Times which, in 1980 would certainly have been considered a journalistic whore house. As I understand she still writes for them on occasion, well for the Book Review. I don't know if she has commented on that destruction of her profession, I don't follow that kind of journalism much, these days.
The "free press" isn't a human being, it isn't an animal, it doesn't have rights. It is an artificial entity, a corporation, corporations cannot have rights, they are given privileges that the idiots of the First Congress, Madison among them, misnamed "rights" and their stupidity was obvious in giving them that privilege without stipulating they only got that to the extent that they served equality,** democracy and the public good. It is among the most glaring of stupidities in the so-called Bill of Rights, along with the idiotically worded Second Amendment which is now a license for mass murderers to bear arms.
There should be no "right to lie" tolerated in the media. If you fear that would suppress "opinion journalism" WELL FOR FUCKSAKE YES! LET'S SUPPRESS IT! It's destroyed the reporting of fact and sunk the journalistic collection of fact. It has led us to this hell we are in right now.
* At best you might consider it a very unjournalistic drama-documentary with a lot of reenactment of interviews of those too fearful to appear on camera and, as I recall, some dramatic scenes, including the executions. Though, as I recall, they presented it as the princess being beheaded when she was shot by firing squad. Presented as a documentary, it was actually a somewhat abysmal exercise for what would become a far better series of investigative journalism, Frontline. If you're specifically interested in that 46 year old controversy and what it tells about the dangers of journalism depending on fictionalization widely mistaken for reporting of fact, the only slightly less troubling presenting of fact through fictionalized narrative and the enormous danger to telling the truth of that being dependent on the largess of oil and other malignant corporations you can read this interesting and informative paper at the Frontline website.
** Madison was not in favor of a bill of rights, he was forced to promise one to his constituents in Virginia in order to gull them into voting to adopt the Constitution. Once he did that he had to deliver as a member of the First Congress but it should never be imagined that he or his fellow slave-holders and crooked financiers in the First Congress ever meant any of it to serve equality or, really, democracy. It is one of the ironies of the adoption of the Constitution how Madison and the rest of the framers constantly expressed their fears of majorities when the government they have set up has given us the tyranny of the minority, especially that minority they were most fearful for, the wealthy, the white, the male, the WASP. I'll add the most rural over the large majority as can be seen in the putrid distortion that the Senate is in which the smallest 21 states have more 39 times more representation than the state of California. And you can make comparisons to other large population states as compared to the least populous states. Not to mention that now, under the Roberts Court reinstatement of voter suppression, many of the states, including the third largest of Florida, is actively bringing back the worst of anti-democracy denial of representation to very large percentages of their own populations.
Note: Elizabeth Drew's book about Nixon's Watergate scandal, the investigation of it and his resignation, Washington Journal, is vastly superior to the famous All The Presidents Men. It is a sign of how degenerate our media and our culture is that it is largely ignored or forgotten as that far inferior, cinematically structured (at Robert Redford's suggestion) and egotistical account of two reporters investigation is constantly referenced. I am not going to pretend I don't think a lot of that is due to it being two guys own story instead of a woman's factual reporting. As with "Death of a Princess" when you make a movie of something, the facts tend to suffer.
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