The Useless Press, and Deeper into Disaster

More and more, it appears that there is almost no reason at all for having a"mainstream" press in this country. The evidence continues to mount about the extent to which the press is utterly servile, and does nothing but slavishly repeat the line that those in power wish to have repeated.

Here is Larry Lessig about an instructive example as to how this works:

The US president owns neither his words nor his image - at least not when he speaks in public on important matters. Anyone is free to use what he says, and the way he says it, to criticize or to praise. The president, in this sense, is"free." But what happens when the commander in chief uses private venues to deliver public messages, holding fewer press conferences and making more talk-show appearances? Who controls his words and images then?

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 has grabbed the headlines, another documentary is at the center of this debate. In August, Robert Greenwald will release an updated version of his award-winning film, Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War. Greenwald has added a clip of President George W. Bush's February interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press, NBC's Sunday morning talk show. In the clip, the president defends his decision to go to war - astonishingly unconvincingly.

Greenwald asked NBC for permission to run the one-minute clip - offering to pay for the right, as he had done for every other clip that appears in the film. NBC said no. The network explained to his agent that the clip is"not very flattering to the president." Greenwald included it anyway. ...

So why did the current leader of the free world, who rarely holds press conferences, agree to speak on a talk show that refuses to license on a neutral basis the content he contributed? Is vigorous debate over matters as important as going to war less important than protecting his image?

This question is crucial, and thus Greenwald has decided to defend his fair use right, even if it means staring down a bunch of lawyers in court. The argument: It's hard to tell"the whole truth" about the Iraq war when you censor bits of that truth because a network tells you to. But what this incident demonstrates most is what many increasingly fear. Concentrated media and expansive copyright are the perfect storm not just for stifling debate but, increasingly, for weakening democracy as well.

I must repeat here a crucial point which Lessig and many other critics of"media concentration" miss completely. And that is simply this: such media concentration is only made possible by government intervention. It is not that government has done anything to" create" more competition, or to discourage the increased concentration of media power in the hands of a few.

On the contrary, as I discussed here at length, when government first intervened in broadcasting -- using the very dangerous fiction of"public ownership" to do so -- it did so on behalf of certain already vested interests, precisely to discourage the rigorous competition that was emerging. Just as in the history of the railroads, the vested powers in the communications industry wanted to cut off that competition -- and they decided that relying on government power was the most effective route to doing so. From that earlier entry, quoting an article by Sam Wells:

[C]lassical economist Adam Smith, New Left historian Gabriel Kolko, activist"liberal" consumerist Ralph Nader, conservative Chicago School economist Milton Friedman, liberal power-structure analyst William Domhoff, right-wing constitutionalist Dan Smoot, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, power-elites researcher Antony Sutton, and libertarian economic historian Murray Rothbard -- whatever their differences on policy recommendations and other issues -- they all concur on one point: privileged power elites and oligopolies tend to be strengthened rather than weakened by bureaucratic regulations from government. Political interventionism tends to artificially stabilize the market in favor of"the big boys" (as Ralph Nader calls them) and against greater diversity, market alternatives, and competition.

From the late nineteenth and early twentieth century on, events followed the pattern they always do when government intervention is involved: the intervention causes massive dislocations and imbalances in a certain sector in the economy; people decry the dislocations and imbalances, and insist that only more government intervention will solve them (failing to notice that government intervention caused the problems to begin with); the newest intervention causes more problems; the additional problems, say the critics, can only be solved by still more government intervention...and on and on it goes.

It used to be the case that some liberals could see this phenomenon in foreign affairs, but not in domestic economic matters -- and that some conservatives could see it in domestic economic affairs, but not in foreign relations. But now, since the Democrats and the Republicans are almost indistinguishable in terms of the fundamental principles that they accept, almost no one can see this phenomenon in any area.

So we pursue massive intervention both domestically and overseas. And that intervention causes more, and worse, problems than those it had been intended to solve. Did the invasion of Iraq causes serious imbalances in the Middle East and result in a greater terrorist threat? Never mind: another invasion (or the threat of one) will solve that. And then the imbalances and threats increase still more -- at which point, we are told that even more intervention is required, this time somewhere else (usually where our earlier actions have caused a previously negligible threat to arise).

And on and on it goes here at home, and all over the world -- and all any of our leaders can say is,"More! More! More!," unable to question their assumptions or challenge the premises which rule their outlook. As I have said before, this is one commonly cited view of insanity, raised to the status of rigid dogma in the halls of power: taking the same actions over and over, but somehow expecting a different result this time. And the press dutifully reports the government line, and refuses to question it beyond a certain point.

It is in this way that we are led further and further into disaster, on an ever-widening scale, and no one has the courage or honesty to challenge the framework which almost everyone has accepted for more than a century. And our freedoms, and genuine security, vanish more and more by the day.

Someday, perhaps at least a few people with a certain degree of influence and authority will have had enough. And possibly, if we are very lucky, it will happen in time.

Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.)