First there was medicine. Then came the awareness that medicine could harm as well as heal. Then came the concept of medical malpractice.
First came journalism. Now comes the awareness that unethical journalism can cause harm. Is there any way to have some concept of journalistic malpractice?
Careful now! The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech. The media bosses would raise hell and put a chunk under it if we tampered with their right to be unfair. Those who remember America during World War II know we survived giving up smaller freedoms in order to preserve larger ones. It's possible that all we can do – and still call ourselves Americans – is complain about the shameful and shocking lack of fairness in media and underscore the damage such unfairness can cause.
If you're a conservative, you don't need much underscoring! Fair-minded followers of the media coverage of Trump versus Hillary feel like the prizefighter whose opponent was allowed every kind of illegal blow by an obviously biased referee, while he was penalized points merely for attempting some kind of self-defense in the ring. The boxer complained to his manager between rounds, "Dammit! I gotta score a knockout in every round just to break even here!"
When a sharp-eyed reporter recognized the man sitting right behind Hillary at a rally in Florida as the father of Omar Mateen, who shot and killed forty-nine people at an Orlando night club, the father, Seddique Mateen, claimed he'd been invited to the rally by the Democratic Party. Indeed, he occupied a seat of honor. You don't just wander into a political rally and just happen to wind up sitting right behind the presidential candidate! But killing stories that might harm Hillary's chances are a common form of newsroom abortion. The story of Seddique Mateen's "chair of honor" started out weak and gradually tapered off. Can you imagine if the Trump campaign had singled out such a guest for special welcoming?
Let's divorce this plea for fairness by seizing an example far, far remote from this election. In March of 1980 an incident at the Peruvian Embassy in Havana, Cuba, resulted in the fatal shooting of a Castro policeman who tried to stop a Cuban from gaining asylum inside that embassy. An infuriated Castro called for Cubans to turn out and join him outside the Peruvian Embassy the next night to protest Peru's granting asylum to a Castro adversary. Ten thousand Cubans showed up, and guess what? Right there in front of Fidel all ten thousand defected into the embassy! (The premises have a huge courtyard!)
For a while it looked like the wavering Castro regime might fall, but he was rescued by President Jimmy Carter, whose State Department issued a statement emphasizing, "We see no threat to the stability of the Castro government." The following night there was a huge anti-Castro rally in Miami's "Little Havana," which I witnessed from an upper floor of a nearby building.
Now I'm going to ask you to trust me on this one. In the Boy Scouts I was a miserable failure at tying knots, camping out, even identifying common birds. I was a whiz, however, at estimating how tall a flagpole was, how far it was from the mess hall to the lake, how many people were in a crowd – that sort of thing. I figured there were 8,000 Cubans at that Miami rally, and the police agreed with me. After the rally I hurried to a bar on South Beach so I could see how local TV covered it.
And when I saw their coverage I wanted to throw the piano through the plate-glass window of the bar. The anchorman, contemptuously and dismissively said, "A few hundred anti-Castro dissidents joined the protest"!
Look what that does. Positive news energizes. Negative news depresses. The truth here would have energized freedom-loving Cubans. A wet-blanketing of a freedom rally depresses those who crave freedom. When the truth supports freedom, why don't free journalists in a free country go ahead and tell it?
In politics, negative stories about a candidate's floundering campaign discourages volunteers, energizes his opponents with false stimulation, panics prominent allies who were all set to endorse and inspires donors to put their wallets back in their pockets.
I'm not asking for lies to help the side I favor. I'd just love a little truth, although I can't come up with a proposal to make biased liars with powerful audiences limit their observations to the truth. One remedy that might help is to have the FCC establish a mechanism whereby, for instance, if those Miami Cubans could prove that "a few hundred anti-Castro Cubans" is an egregious lie, the station or network would be obliged to grant the injured party equal time. Ideally, the media could be reminded to do what they clearly don't want to do by a memo "from on high" that admonished them, "Enough with your little bias games. From now on please stick to the truth!"
Our Founding Fathers guaranteed us a free press. They never guaranteed us a fair press!
Media wishing to interview Barry Farber, please contact [email protected].
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