How The American Journalism Profession Is Destroying The First Amendment and Our Democracy

One of the once great things about this country was the First Amendment and the freedom of press guaranteed by it. A free press helps offset the political ambitions and freedom encroachments of politicians by keeping their actions in the sunlight of visibility, disclosure, and scrutiny, i.e. it helps keeps politicians honest.

Unfortunately, we for the most part do not have an unbiased, free press anymore in this country but not in the way you think. Most people, when they think that the free press has been suppressed, consider many of the actions of Presidents like Obama, who was one of the worst Presidents when it came to undermining the free press guarantee of the First Amendment:

• He went after and prosecuted more whistle blowers than every other President combined.
• He spied on journalists who he thought was an enemy of his views and efforts without proper cause or warrants.
• His administration fought tooth and nail, more than any other President, to block legitimate and legal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
• His administration even tried to illegally charge a legitimate news gathering organization, the Associated Press, an outrageous sum of money for a FOIA request.

All of these acts undermined freedom of the press in the traditional way. But unfortunately, freedom of the press has been undermined over recent years not by politicians but by the press industry and journalists themselves. For the most part, and especially at the national level, news organizations have gone from reporting the facts, realities, and news in an unbiased way to shaping those facts, realities, and news in a very biased way. 

When journalists lose their integrity and ethics, the bedrock of their industry and profession, they undermine the First Amendment as much as some shady politician who is trying to get by with shady and unethical behavior. How far have journalists fallen down the integrity scale in Americans’ minds? In a recent Gallup poll:

• Only 20% of those polled said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in television news.
• 45% said they had very little or no confidence in television news.
• Newspapers do not do much better with 23% saying they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers while 40% saying they very little or no confidence in newspapers.
• Ironically they both did better than Congress whose ratings were most abysmal among all major American institutions.

Consider the following election related stories on how journalists have “earned” these sorry reputations for trust and integrity:

• Erick Erickson, writing for the Maven website documented the following instances during the election season where journalists got the story mostly wrong, either intentionally or unintentionally, in his article, “Where Do We Go When Journalism Fails Us?”
• His first example involves the state of Georgia where former Georgia Secretary of State and Republican, Brian Kemp, probably won the race for Governor in that state.
• National reporters and journalists reported that Kemp tried to close predominantly African American voting locations which forced black voters to travel far distances by driving or walking to voting locations in mostly white neighborhoods which in turn discouraged black voters.
• Nice story but wrong since it was not Republican Kemp closing these voting locations but it was the Democratic county commissioners and the Democrat controlled local board of elections that closed those locations.
• They/local Democrats had hired a consultant who recommended closing some voting locations to be in line with the Americans With Disabilities Act requirements.
• In addition, the locations that were closed were ALL in mostly Republican precincts, not Democratic and black precincts.
• As you can see, the national press got just about every detail of this story wrong.
• The Associated Press told the story of a woman in Georgia who was supposedly denied the right to register to vote because, as required by state law, the name she put down on her voter registration form did not exactly match the information on her driver’s license, it was missing a hyphen, and thus, her voter registration application was denied.
• The AP then went with this story nationwide.
• But the truth is that she was not allowed to register because she was ALREADY registered to vote. 
• Despite the screw up, the Associated Press never retracted or amended this incorrect article.
• The Associated Press also reported that 53,000 Georgia voters had their voter registration paperwork held up and classified as “pending voter” and that the majority of those tied up were from minority voters.
• This made it look like there was a massive minority voter suppression effort underway.
• In reality, 75% of those on the pending list had submitted registrations with bogus Social Security numbers.
• And 23% had been on the voter registration list from 2014 and had had their names re-submitted by the the voter registration efforts of the black Democratic candidate running for governor.
• Thus, at least 98% of those 53,000 on the pending list did not have their voting rights suppressed, they either were duplicates or had submitted bad information themselves. realities that the Associated Press never mentioned.
• The national press also ran stories that accused Republican Kemp, as Georgia’s Secretary of State, of kicking minority voters off of voting registration lists to improve his chances of becoming governor.
• But the reality is that he was prohibited under state law from doing an such thing, the voting registration lists are maintained by local voting officials, they are the only ones allowed to remove people from voting lists because of death, felony conviction, or deemed incompetent.

The article correctly points out why the national media in these cases were more interested in building ratings and readership than reporting the truth and they themselves abused the freedom of the press trust that they should have protected with integrity and ethics: “Local media in Georgia got these stories right while national outlets flubbed them. They distorted the facts and got basic facts wrong. The national reporters wanted to build narrative arches with protagonists and villains instead of just giving people the facts. As local news outlets rely more and more on national reporters or fade away, more stories like these will be reported and even more people will distrust the press.”

2) But it is not just bad, biased reporting of election stories that made the press look bad, their polling results also bring into doubt their integrity. Remember back in the 2016 Presidential election how almost every media poll showed Hillary winning the election? 

One reason they may have all been so wrong is that maybe, like CNN did, they purposely over weighted their polling sample with Democrats/liberals which skewed the results to Clinton. The one conclusion that many people drew, given the bad confidence levels of the press in Americans’ minds, is that CNN wanted to shape the election and make it look like a Clinton victory was a done deal. That in turn would depress and suppress Trump voters and possibly add a bandwagon effect for Clinton, i.e. if CNN says she will win I might as well vote for a winner.

Could this same intentional skewing of poll results, in an effort to affect elections, also happened in the recent midterm elections, as pointed out by an article by Dick Morris:

• In 40% of the pre-election polls in the most closely watched Senate and governor races, the polls picked the wrong winner.
• In other words, you could have done almost as good a job on average by flipping a coin in picking winners, 50%, than the major news and polling organizations did with their much more sophisticated efforts.
• And even when the polls picked the right winner, in 60% of the time they were more than three points wrong in the number of votes the winner got despite their polling methods.
• The results would be less suspicious if the wrong predictions were more or less equal between Democrats and Republicans. 
• But these results were also skewed in that 75% of the major polls indicated that Democrats were doing better than what really happened while only 25% doing better than finally happened, a more than random difference.
• According to Morris: “Of the nine major polling firms, eight showed Democrats doing better than they actually did and only one — Trafalgar — showed Republicans doing better than it turned out.”
• The NBC/Marist poll was the worst polling effort, overestimating Democratic vote totals by 6.8%.

Given that the press constantly favors Democrats and liberals in their biased reporting and given that the press and their polling partners constantly overestimate the chances of Democrats and liberals in elections prior to voting, it should not be a surprise that Americans who cherish the First Amendment and the freedom of the press guarantee that it provides have a very low and dubious view of the integrity and confidence that the journalism profession has today. The journalists in this country have been entrusted with a very important component of our democracy and sadly, they flub that responsibility every day of their working lives.

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http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w