America’s freedom of the press allowed anyone with a printing press to be ‘the press.’
This from frontpagemag.com.
Reporters Without Borders warned:
[Trump’s] election to a second term in office marks a dangerous moment for American journalism and global press freedom.
A few days later Reporters Without Borders sued X.
The global leftist media advocacy group, often known by its French name of Reporters sans Frontières, is demanding:
[D]isinformation on X must be cleaned up by prioritizing media content and media reporters, and providing media outlets with a special independent appeal mechanism on social media along with other privileges for the Fourth Estate.
Reporters Without Borders would also like mandatory ‘neutrality’ for X (a demand that only came up once Elon Musk took it over). Media outlets would have no such neutrality mandate.
Freedom of the Press is very different from press freedom. Much as RWB’s mission to defend the ‘freedom to be informed and to inform others throughout the world’ is very different from the right to speak out.
American Freedom of the Press was never meant to be:
[A]n institutional privilege jealously guarded by a professional guild whose highest priority is gatekeeping.
In other words, the Constitutional Freedom of the Press:
[I]s not the freedom to inform others, whose very phrasing suggests that the freedom is reserved only for those parts of the press deemed to be genuinely informative.
Or worse still:
[T]o inform others with its undertone of liberal condescension.
Rather, the Constitutional Freedom of the Press is the absolute right:
[T]o engage in unrestricted commentary and debate.
To say that again in still other words:
Freedom of the Press means that while there may be such things as libel in the press (and American media has the world’s greatest freedom to engage in it) there is no such thing as ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ in contrast to a press freedom limited to progressive outlets being able to ‘inform others’ about what they should think and believe about important issues.
America’s Freedom of the Press was laid out at a time when anyone with a printing press was ‘the press.’ Contrast that with RWB setting up its own ‘Journalism Trust Initiative’ to determine who belongs and who does not. ‘Trust’ is one of those words that has more than one meaning.
Rather than maintaining trust in journalism, Reporters Without Borders has set up a journalism trust to monopolize press freedom and jealously guard it for a select approved group.
The entire disinformation narrative being advanced by Reporters Without Borders and much of the institutional leftist political machine is built around the idea of distinguishing:
– between good and bad media,
– between views that should be aired and those that should be censored, and
– between press speech that informs and press speech that is misinformation or disinformation.
Today anyone who spends enough time on special media IS the ‘press’ and:
[T]he distinction between speech and the press has largely been collapsed by the democratization of technology.
And while social media is filled with lies, deliberate or accidental, that is also speech. The media’s recent performance has provided us with no reason to believe that a professional media guild is any less prone to lies, propaganda and manipulating reality for ideological gain or personal profit than any random assortment of grifters pushing out the worst clickbait.
The same media that spent much of the year lying about [Dementia Joe] Biden’s physical condition, about the economy, about crime, about Israel, and about the election is in no position to pretend that putting its advocacy masquerading as reporting ahead of free discourse will lead to truth.
The difference between media clickbait and social media clickbait is professionalism (in simplest terms, being paid to do it). That’s it.
The First Amendment does not value the press because of its ‘professionalism.’ The rights of the press are protected within the larger context of defending personal and public conscience.
The press was protected for the same reason that the right of assembly and the right of speech were protected, and for the same reason that the right of the individual to follow his own religion was sacrosanct from government intervention. Freedom of the Press was not about the press. It was about freedom.
NOTE:
Americans today do not need Freedom of the Press.
They need freedom from the press.
To wit:
– Media cartels have built themselves up into a fourth estate, a monopolistic trust and a corrupt guild,
– They demand special privileges at the expense of the general public,
– The media does not seek to take part in a diverse marketplace of ideas, but to control it and crush it out of existence, and
– The media’s push for censoring any speech that it disagrees with is an attack on free speech.
Both Madison and Jefferson’s proposed formulation of Freedom of the Press began by defining it as one of a variety of forms of public discourse engaged in by ‘the people.’
Madison’s proposed wording ran:
The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, or to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.
Jefferson’s counter-proposal was:
The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak or to write or otherwise to publish any thing but false facts affecting injuriously the life, liberty, property or reputation of others or affecting the peace of the confederacy with foreign nations.
In Jefferson’s wording the press did not even exist as a separate entity from the people while Madison’s press clearly derives from a right assigned to the people, not some separate entity.
The First Amendment’s wording emphasizes the right rather than the people, but amounts to the same thing.
The amendment was not setting up a fourth estate, but protecting an existing right.
Freedom of the Press does not belong to the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, FOX News, Reporters Without Borders, or any entity, umbrella group or platform, rather Freedom of the Press belongs to the people.
The official media’s demands for censorship and gatekeeping
make the press into the greatest enemies of Freedom of the Press.
