JOURNALISM ISN'T THE ONLY so-called profession that shouldn't have come to rely on an aspirant having a bachelors or higher degree from a college or university of whatever purported credibility as a credentialing board. I think that the arts are far better learned on something like an apprenticeship model. I have told a number of very good musicians who wanted to know about majoring in music in college that the only degree program I would ever recommend anyone take a degree in is Music Education where they might get a job teaching in a school which will provide them with a salary, insurance and enough leisure time during the summer (assuming they didn't have to take a job as a store clerk) to pursue some outside music activities. I would hold the same about visual arts as a major. So called "artists degrees" are worthless and a waste of money. I can tell you that from personal experience.
I would say the same about writing as a career, only its worse because even the lower levels of the paid writing racket have imploded with the death throes of the ink on paper journalism. Nowadays it's primarily having your voice or face on some screen or on the radio, and the radio part of that in the US is shit. You'd do better to learn makeup. Knowledge doesn't seem to be much required in that profession.
Unlike the arts, though, real journalism, the collecting and reporting of facts and, occasionally, the telling of the truth is a vital necessity for the possibility of legitimate governance in an egalitarian democracy. You no doubt notice I stipulated FACTS, TRUTH, AND EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY. The current professional practice of the decadence that "journalism" has become serves none of those, it reports obvious lies and did even before Bari Weiss took over and destroyed CBS "news" or what was left of it after the firing of the likes of Dan Rather. It concentrates on "opinion" instead of reporting, it reports opinion polling instead of presenting issues, it has retreated into the cowardice of first, both-siderism" and gradually that become one-siderism as it presented what the owners, the publishers, the editors, the advertisers and the wealthy wanted it to present. It's no accident that the whore Bari Weiss was brought into "journalism" first with the backing of millionaires and then billionaires whhen she had absolutely no journalistic abilities (as she proved at that Ivy League oligarchic whore training academy she attended) and absolutely no intention or inclination to publish facts, truth or to serve egalitarian democracy. She intended to service the millionaires and billionaires here and the Zionist government in Israel, on behalf of whom she so notably lied from the time she was a poisonous liar in college.
I was entirely sincere when I said the First Amendment was stupidly written in several ways, though here I'll only concentrate on "freedom of speech" and the freedom of the "press" which has taken both and used them to not only use that recent innovation invented by the Warren Court, the "right to lie" but to privilege lies over facts and truth and to the intentional determent of egalitarian democracy.
James Madison and his colleagues who wrote the so-called Bill of Rights were a mixed bag. As the great American historian Paul Finkelmann has noted, Madison was forced into supporting one in the first Congress because Virginia would not have voted to adopt the Constitution if he had not made that promise. He didn't want to have one. I think the reluctance to do that shows up in no places so much as the badly written and considered First and Second Amendments. The problems with the Second Amendments will certainly show up in those weekly if not daily mass shootings and I'll deal with that again another time.
As mentioned by me many, many times over the past three or so years, the failure to distinguish between the absolute right to tell the truth (albeit, a right that is only morally exercised with real responsibilities in regard to the consequences when telling that truth might lead to a moral atrocity) and the absolute fact that there is no such a thing as a "right to lie" is the major defect in the "freedom of speech" part of it. I think the fact that so many of the members of the First Congress were lawyers (51% by this paper from that Ivy League training brothel, Harvard Law*) can account for why they may have wanted to give lying the benefit of Constitutional protection. Though it could have just been the stupid urge to write bad late 18th century poetry instead of the typical and probably safer dry prose that would have made that clear. The result has not made the United States or its law and legal practice notably more honest than that of many other countries when the sanctimony that oozed and gushed out of the founders and framers about erecting a "new order of the ages" would have led you to believe that was the intention. It clearly was not and never was. I will note that the very same men, in many cases, when it came to the protection of the slavery that made them wealthy, either through the holding or the importation and selling of human beings into slavery, didn't just leave it to vague poetics.**
The same kind of defect saturates "freedom of the press" which was mistaken as the protection of a right when a "press" is an artificial entity and can have no rights. What they did was foolishly erect a privilege for the press to lie and to spread lies more effectively than a speaker at a podium or pulpit or on a stump to a lynch mob could, to corrupt We The People with cleverly told lies, fashioned for far easier sale to the vulnerable and morally deficient than the harder to take truth is. That failure of reasoning and writing has been one of the most dangerous defects in the Constitution from the time of its adoption. We remember the martyrs of the "free press" such as Elijah Lovejoy because they told the truth, the reason so many journalists are getting fired these days. That happens while those who practice their "right" to lie and to publish lies (as the NYT was given by the Warren Court) prosper. And, yet, the "journalists" like the lawyers wonder why they are so distrusted and despised.
An artificial entity whether a media corporation or the kind that the Supreme Court playing God granted "person-hood to" (by lying about the 14th Amendment) cannot have rights which are a characteristic of a naturally living being. There is no rightful claim by an artificial entity to the kinds of rights that were dangled in front of the common American People by the Declaration of Independence to get them to fight the war for independence on behalf of the aristocrats who wrote that document. There is no real instead of notional obligation to allow them ersatz "rights" though they can be given certain privileges, which is what the "freedom of the press" really is.
The defect in the First Amendment is that that was not made specific WITH AN OBLIGATION THAT THAT PRIVILEGE DEPENDED ON THEM SERVING THE NEED FOR PEOPLE IN AN EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY TO HAVE THE FACTS AND THE TRUTH AND NOT TO BE PEDDLED LIES AND BIGOTRY AND HATRED THROUGH AN APPEAL TO WHAT WAS WORST IN THE AMERICAN POPULATION. Instead Madison and his colleagues didn't mention any of that and much if not most of the "press" and now the even more degraded form of that "media" serves up lies to the People to gull them into voting the worst of the worst into office and on to courts. And I have every confidence that there was some level of intentionality for that to happen, so many of those drafters of the Bill of Rights as it became being lawyers and "planters" (that would be big slave holders, in most cases) and others who were served by lies and who, as in so many cases among the framers and members of the First Congress, despised equality and democracy. They were certainly experienced in the management of lies and peddling them. Again, lawyers. They'd have seen that possibility.
It is one of the major defects of the teaching of American History that the major force in that history is almost never mentioned, the agitation and struggle AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION by those who were enslaved under it, those who were subjugated under it, those who the laws that were made on the basis of it - whether by the Congress or under the usurped powers stolen by the Supreme Court. As I have pointed out, starting with the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800 and in many states and at times the federal government after that, the real virtue of the United States has been in the expansion of the exercise of rights and freedoms (though, alas, hardly ever with mentioning the responsibility of that freedom) AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION INCLUDING THE SO-CALLED "BILL OF RIGHTS."
There a reason that fascists on the Supreme Court always pretend to be going back to the original intent of the framers and the text they produced IT'S BECAUSE THAT IS HOW THE COURT ROLLS BACK EVERY MEASURE OF PROGRESS MADE AGAINST THE INTENT OF THOSE SLAVEHOLDERS, INDIAN MURDERES AND LAND STEALERS AND CON ARTISTS. When Little Ms. Amy Coney Barrett or a thug like Alito mouths such civic seeming pieties, that is what they really mean.
And all that comes from the defects in the original Constitution made worse by the usurped Marbury and other powers stolen by the Supreme Court.
That is what we face and until it becomes the common understanding that that is what we face, the enemies of We The People, the despisers of egalitarian democracy and the common welfare that we were falsely promised reap the benefits of it. And the strongest tool they have is the "right to lie" that the Courts gave them and the "press."
* I'm not sure that the law having been one of the earliest professions to give up an apprenticeship model in favor of the erecting of law faculties at elite universities wasn't a decision to make the profession both more pretentious than it was and far more adept at lying and pretending that there was some higher virtue in that. But it's worth thinking about.
I'd never send a kid wanting to be a musician to an Ivy League or its equivalent. If they wanted to be a teacher there are land-grant universities that do a much better job and if they wanted to try their luck as an artist or composer, it would probably be a huge mistake. And an extremely expensive one. I know a young woman who has an "artists degree" who can't get work in her field and who has large student loans to pay off. She realizes now she was had.
** I don't know if it's really necessary to point it out, but rereading that passage while editing this reminds me of the gangster Meyer Lansky who sardonically noted that the Mafia's "men of honor" were so honorable that they couldn't trust each other to not kill them. It's not much different in the early history of the founders and framers. The struggles and bile thrown in the early struggle between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian-Madisonian "Democrats" and the attempt of the Federalists to throw their fellow founders in prison for sedition is certainly relevant.
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