It seems everyone in the mainstream media, especially the print media, assumes that they and the institution they work for constitute the "fourth branch of government." And they certainly act as if that is so with their uncritical, and sometimes fawning, reporting about the current administration of President George W. Bush.
While the media reported in detail all the so-called "scandals" of the Clinton administration as if all were true, there is scarcely a critical comment on the Bush administration, with a few notable exceptions, such as Paul Krugman, Frank Rich and Keith Olbermann. The Clinton scandals ~ save for one non-intercourse sexual dalliance with a young consenting adult female ~ proved to be non-existent and the concoctions of an evil political movement that has only recently lost some of its grip on the nation. Never mind that Clinton's "scandal-ridden and most-corrupt" administration produced one felon conviction while the much-admired Ronald Reagan administration produced more than 25 (that figure doesn't include the miscreants Reagan's successor George H. W. Bush pardoned before they were charged), most of the press keeps bashing the political left, praising the right. Regardless of the attacks the Bush administration levels at the leading news institutions the press continues its love affair with Bush, like a battered wife who will never break away from the batterer.
Krugman explained in his New York Times column how the media pandered to the right by citing Bush's ascendency to the White House thusly:
"Six years ago a man unsuited both by intellect and by temperament for high office somehow ended up running the country.
"How did that happen? First, he got the Republican nomination by locking up the big money early.
"Then, he got within chad-and-butterfly range of the White House because the public, enthusiastically encouraged by many in the news media, treated the presidential election like a high school popularity contest. The successful candidate received kid-gloves treatment ~ and a free pass on the fuzzy math of his policy proposals ~ because he seemed like a fun guy to hang out with, while the unsuccessful candidate was subjected to sniggering mockery over his clothing and his mannerisms."
Much has been written and said outside the mainstream media in recent years about the press acting as a lapdog to the administration, serving as only a secretarial service for its right-wing propaganda and generally giving a free pass to what might be the worst and most-worthless presidency in American history. Much has been written and said ~ mostly by bloggers on the internet ~ about how the press has abandoned its duties as a watchdog keeping an eye on government to be a guarddog protecting the administration from others' eyes and has capitulated to the financial demands of a Wall Street that cares only about bigger profits, when a 20 percent profit on income isn't good enough so journalism must be sacrificed or reduced so the profit can rise to 21 percent only to see profits drop to 19 percent because of producing an inferior product.
The concept of the press as a lapdog for the GOP was demonstrated by the ridicule the media heaped on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for not being polite to Bush after he called Bush the "devil" in a speech at the United Nations. The fact that Bush had backed, possibly even engineered, a failed coup attempt to oust, and maybe kill, Chavez was never associated by the press with the 'devil" statement. Chavez was pictured as the "bad guy;" Bush as a victim.
To understand the fallacy that the media is the "fourth branch of government" we have to understand the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution's Bill of Rights. It is commonly thought that the Tenth is a "states rights" amendment. That is not true. States don't have rights, they have powers. People have rights. The Bill of Rights details the relationship of the federal government and the people of the United States. It has nothing to do with the relationship between federal and state government; that is taken care of in Article I, Section 10, and James Madison, who chaired the committee that wrote and proposed the Bill of Rights, knew that.
The Tenth ~ in a slightly paraphased presentation ~ says that the people give powers to the governments through their Constitutions and those powers the people haven't given to the federal government, or to state governments, they keep for themselves. The Tenth Amendment is therefore the "People's Power" amendment and makes the people the fourth branch of government alongside the legislature, the executive and the judicial and the fourth level of government with the federal, state and local. The press has no place, and doesn't figure, in this arrangement.
To understand how badly the press has ill-served the nation we shall look at the experiences of a slightly adorable and trustworthy ex-journalist.
Said journalist has twice held the highest top-secret clearance the federal government gives its intelligence operatives; once while a member of the United States Air Force Security Service as a codebreaker (when that job required a Mensa-quality IQ) and again as a civilian employee of the National Security Agency, so his honesty and integrity are unassailable.
While at the NSA, he studied constitutional law, among other subjects, at the Georgetown University Graduate School of Government in Washington, DC. A professor, the late Dr. Valerie Earle, asked him one evening why he had quit a job as a sports writer in Portland, Oregon, to study the Constitution at Georgetown (NSA employment was used to pay for grad school). He replied that he didn't want to spend his life writing about grown men playing childrens' games. He wanted to get into important work such as political reporting or editorial-page work and thought knowledge of the Constitution would be valuable because he felt that people doing that sort of newspaper work "don't know what they were talking about." Dr. Earle replied, "I know they don't know what they're talking about."
This from a woman who read The Washington Post and New York Times daily. If journalists at those those two beacons of journalistic know-it-all arrogance "don't know what they're talking about," what chance was there be that journalists at lesser lights would know? Our newsman never found a newspaper that wanted to "know what it was talking about" and eventually wound up at one of those lesser lights ~ The Denver Post ~ which advertises itself as a "great newspaper," but where he discovered that it didn't even care to know what it was talking about. He did find much disdain for our constitutional principles; the notable exception being that "freedom-of-the-press" thing.
He began at the Post on the copy desk ~ the common starting position for new employees at any newspaper ~ but never came close to using the expertise gained at Georgetown's grad school. After correcting copy for semiliterate sports reporters or a year or two (possibly because he knew more about sports than the writers, having been a college linebacker and a former sportswriter himself, having a brother who was the top high-school basketball player in another state and having a cousin who came within one out of pitching the first no-hitter in World Series history) he wound up reluctantly writing captions for nearly illiterate photographers while know-nothing hacks were penning editorials and columns that only demonstrated ignorance of, or disdain for, our constitutional principles. He later added editor of the new Food Section to his duties and made that section tops in the nation in news pages, news hole, advertising lineage, advertising income and profit despite being utterly misused.
When our journalist started at the Post, there was a copy editor named Adams entering his last week there. About four months later, the managing editor came the 15 to 20 feet from his desk to the copy desk to ask, "Have any of you guys ever heard of someone named Adams who claimed he used to work here?" That bad sign of a manager not knowing who worked for him foretold how out of touch leaders at that paper had become. That managing editor was promoted to executive editor when the previous executive editor left after being bypassed for the publisher's job, then told the news desk not to use the Washington Post or New York Times news service stories on Watergate because "they lead us down. a road we don't want to take." The previously progressive newspaper had endorsed Richard Nixon for president and now didn't want its readers knowing that Nixon was indeed the crook he claimed not to be.
That sort of journalism ~ a daily occurrence ~ caused the Post to lose readership and allowed the equally challenged Rocky Mountain News of Denver to surpass it in circulation.
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Thomas Bonsell is a former newspaper editor (in Oregon, New York and Colorado) United States Air Force cryptanalyst and National Security Agency intelligence agent. He became one of American journalism's leading constitutional experts through years of study at Georgetown University Graduate School of Government in Washington, D.C., and tries (without much success) to be patient with people who argue endlessly on subjects they have never studied. He is the author of "The Un-Americans: Trashing of the United States Constitution in the American Press", a critique of the mainstream media for ignorance of, or disdain for, our constitutional principles of self-government. He left newspaper work years ago, disgusted at the direction the Fourth Estate ~ under the mismanagement of ineffectual, out-of-touch, can't-do executives ~ was taking away from honest responsible journalism and the observation that there was no place in the mainstream media for a progressive, or liberal, constitutional "expert". Bonsell is an honors graduate of Woodbury College (Los Angeles, California) with a bachelor of business administration degree. He is profiled in Marquis Who's Who in America. (Self-portrait, above, was handled to make author/artist appear prettier than he actually is.)
Personal motto: Have brain; will use.
