The Melchizedek Chronicles – America - The Enemy from Within - Part 3 Freedom of the Press

3.  The Futility of Freedom of the Press

The Constitution of the United States

Article [I] (Amendment 1 - Freedom of expression and religion) Approved 1789

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Two hundred and thirty years ago the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights was adopted guaranteeing freedom of the press.  Ironically, since that date the US Supreme Court has avoided all attempts to define exactly what “the press” means.

I leave the definition to the scholars and the courts and apply a common-sense conclusion for use in this story.  “The press” as intended by our founding fathers, applies to newspapers, magazines, and other businesses that communicate news to the public by print, television or radio, or the people who work to prepare and present the news.  At a minimum, “the press” must include those originators of news stories.

Writers of the stories are the originators, those reporters out on the beat.

The news media are considered America’s Fourth Estate, along with the first three, the Legislative branch of Congress, the Executive branch of the President, and the Supreme Court.  The primary obligation of the press is that of veritas. To serve the Truth.  If journalism fails to live up to its intrinsic duty as the guardian of veritas, reporter of facts, we will be overcome by fake news.

I had a firsthand seat in the rise and fall of journalism and the news media for over six decades, as a reporter, communicator, and seeker of Truth spanning newspaper, radio and television more recently with an online newspaper (the Coltons Point Times) and as a contributor to the Huffington Post.

So where do we find ourselves today?

The news media has transformed from one of the most respected and trusted of American institutions fifty years ago to a joke today, now having less credibility than Congress, whose polarization and paralysis has transformed it into, a joke as well.

I do not say this lightly because one of the many hats I have worn is as a journalist and nothing makes me more upset than to see and hear the sorry state of journalism of today.

Truth in the present news media is bought and sold just like the politicians.  The Truth in news coverage has nothing to do with reporting what the people want or need to know.  It is more focused on taking a side and promoting whomever might advocate the cause.

Study after study shows the vast majority of news media hate President Trump which is in total violation of the Code of Ethics for Professional Journalists adopted by the Society for Professional Journalists, which require objective reporting without bias.  Most major news outlets are signatories to the Code.

Never in our history has the news media advocated bias on such a massive scale as today.  Never has our news media viewed themselves as news makers rather than reporters of the news.  And never has the credibility of the news been so ignored and scorned by the general public.

According to recent polls the news media has less credibility that Congress and that is about as low as you can go.  Yet the politicians and especially the neophytes recently elected let themselves be compromised by the media attention if they oppose Trump, often for the dumbest of reasons and more often than not the source was fake news in the so-called news media.

There is no fairness in news coverage of the politicians because the news media are biased and today’s twenty-first century news media includes a whole new array of Internet news sources such as news aggregators like Yahoo, Facebook, Google, and others.

These aggregators are dependent on advertising revenue through Internet hits for their owners.  What is to keep them from using unethical, immoral and underhanded tactics to get attention for their stories to increase the hits and revenues?

By their own acknowledgement they have made mistakes, and continue to do so in the case of biased news.

There have been two major changes to the media business in recent years that have fueled the media chaos, the collapse of values and principles, and created the opportunity for an avalanche of fake news.

First, virtually all forms of media from newspapers to radio to television began to be acquired by huge corporate conglomerates that wanted to have greater influence over the news.

Here is what the Center for Media Literacy had to say about the situation.

Today, despite 25,000 media outlets in the United States, 29 corporations’ control most of the business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books and motion pictures.

During most of this century the process of media consolidation remained quiescent, but beginning in the mid-1960s large corporations suddenly began buying media companies. The financial trigger was Wall Street's discovery of the best kept secret in the business of American newspapers.

Twenty-two years ago, President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The act, signed into law on February 8, 1996, was “essentially bought and paid for by corporate media lobbies,” as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) described it, and radically “opened the floodgates on mergers.”

The negative impact of the law cannot be overstated. The law, which was the first major reform of telecommunications policy since 1934, according to media scholar Robert McChesney, “is widely considered to be one of the three or four most important federal laws of this generation.” The act dramatically reduced important Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations on cross ownership, and allowed giant corporations to buy up thousands of media outlets across the country, increasing their monopoly on the flow of information in the United States and around the world.

Twenty-two years later the devastating impact of the legislation is undeniable: About 90 percent of the country’s major media companies are owned by six corporations.

At the same time the massive increase in mergers was taking place the pace of technological change was becoming greatly accelerated which substantially increased the cost of maintaining a prominent position in the media market.

It may seem hard to believe, but when President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 there was no such thing as live television feeds from remote locations like Dallas.  By the time Neil Armstrong landed on the moon just six years later field reporters and remote production crews were hastily dispatched to cover the live and breaking news.

Video technology was changing every year and huge investments were required to keep pace with the innovations.  To the huge conglomerates, who considered their media acquisitions an investment, not a public service, profits were everything and slowly the corporate bean counters took control.

In order to be successful a media outlet had to be profitable which meant a substantial increase in advertisers and ad revenue. To generate income advertising prices increased while news services were cutback.  Media market share enticed Wall Street to invest in the corporate giants, not the quality or honesty of the news operations, and profits soon became the guiding light to success.

Suddenly the evening news morphed into a series of news shows and specials like 60 Minutes and 20/20, shows with the time and financial resources to do in depth investigative reporting in prime time where the battle for market share raged.  New morning news shows joined the Today Show in the quest for creating even more revenue and soon they shifted from being news driven to entertainment driven.

The anchors for all these variations of news shows were the key to ratings success in terms of public perception so the faces and personalities of the television hosts made them the celebrities of TV news and news spinoffs.

It was only a matter of time before the on-air reporters joined the celebrity parade and soon the ratings began to reflect the star power of the anchor with little regard for the news content.

Ted Turner, the pioneer of cable television and twenty-four-hour news coverage. through his radical experiment with CNN shocked the financial analysts and experts with his CNN success and suddenly Wall Street opened the floodgates to expansion of cable TV, another nail in the coffin of traditional media.

Quietly, while the broadcast news media fought off the bean counters and the vicious competition from cable news, another technology was being launched that would soon become the dominant force in worldwide communications.

Technology continued to find new ways to process information and a quantum leap came in 1975 when Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft, and 1976 when Steve Jobs started Apple.  The digital processors were now in place, only some form of network needed to be established.

A largely unknown government agency called ARPANET adopted TCP/IP on January 1, 1983, and from there researchers began to assemble the “network of networks” that became the modern Internet. The online world then took on a more recognizable form in 1990, when computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

The world would never be the same again.

The access to information and transfer of information reached throughout the globe almost overnight.  People could communicate within the United States and with every country in the world without phones.  Libraries throughout the world shared their collections, and the gateway to culture, history and language barriers between people were shattered.

It was a noble purpose that was embraced by an unlikely group of allies, each with their own agenda.  Agencies involved in education, communications, history, science and culture became bedfellows with much more secretive and often sinister agencies involved in national defense, national security, and intelligence, all classified and top-secret functions.  

However, the participation of the secret agencies was paramount to success as they had the billions of dollars needed to invest in building the worldwide web to bring together the people of Earth.

Somewhere along the way key decisions were made to keep this exploding technology free of government regulation as it recognized no geographic boundaries.  With the backing of the defense and intelligence agencies and the commitment to keep it from government regulation Wall Street jumped on any new venture willing to find a way to profit from the Internet.

As the skies were being filled with thousands of communications satellites bringing the world closer and closer together and the Geek generation was figuring out endless ways to create a dependence on the Internet through Artificial Intelligence and apps, and an addiction to the social media side, the news media were losing control of everything they spent hundreds of years to develop.

Internet innovations came at lightning speed as new apps and programs were becoming obsolete in less than a year.  Among the unrestricted, unlicensed new applications emerged social media, when Facebook was founded in 2004 by yet another group of Harvard dropouts.

With no threat of government regulation, no taxation for services, and no moral or ethical code to follow, social media became the rage and laid the groundwork to undermine the traditional news media and quash any need to search for the truth.

Now those pushing the scope of the Internet had the most unfair market advantage in modern history and led to the greatest disruption in the economy, invasion of privacy, identity theft, promotion of illicit activities like drug dealing, prostitution, sex trafficking, human bondage and trafficking, drug distribution, illegal international drug shipments, and piracy of intellectual property including DVDs and CD in world history.

Every year billions and billions of dollars are lost to such activities through hacking, scams, cell phone and credit card theft, hacking bank accounts, and who knows what else.  Tragically, what was once a sacred right of people, privacy and protection, are becoming an acceptable risk of doing business.

As programming and crime grew and became more sophisticated the ambitions of crooks and conmen became bolder.  Not content with stealing things, they wanted to destroy existing institutions like movie studios, record companies, and yes, control of the news since the Internet was the new delivery vehicle for the globe.

Internet innovators walked a fine line between right and wrong, legal and illegal, and often the potential for fabulous wealth tilted the action toward illegal.  Existing industries and institutions were sitting ducks for the profit-driven Internet gunslingers.

It was only a matter of time before the gunslingers set their sights on taking control of the distribution of news in order to influence the billions of Internet users.  Free of the threat of prosecution, independent of government regulation, and generating billions and billions of dollars profit from the Internet activities, they gobbled up company after company with reckless abandon.

When you are free of liability and accountability for your actions, the sky is the limit.  When you function in a virtual world owned by nobody, the unsuspecting citizens of sovereign nations become targets.

Eventually the greed mongers, whose profits were dependent on how many website hits could be generated to justify higher and higher advertising rates, saw being a news provider as a new way to penetrate and profit from their users.

Instead of trying to duplicate the expensive infrastructure of news organizations and compete fairly, they simply offered to provide news access to their powerful user base to media who were never exposed to such astounding numbers of viewers or readers.  Thus, the news aggregators of the Internet were born promising a fair processing of the news.

Of course, with the ability to hide behind complicated algorithms there was no way to ascertain the real intended use of the news information or how the news content was sorted and made available.

Political parties, foreign countries, and who knows who else were enticed to spend billions through social media advertising though they were doing things illegal, unethical, and immoral like trying to influence presidential elections.

When the real news did not provide enough controversy to stimulate conversation and arguments between users, fake news was substituted.  The more bitter and hateful the arguments the more comments came piling on bringing untold wealth by increasing the hits.  Not even the users seemed to care about truth, facts, or outcome, they just wanted to vent hatred.

Think about the impact.  A major television network nightly news show might draw six to eight million viewers nationwide.  The best newspapers reach several hundred thousand readers.  But the Internet news aggregators, they could reach hundreds of million, even billions of people with each news update, regardless if it was true or not.

Traditional media tried making their broadcast anchors and reporters Internet celebrities as well but the familiar faces only reminded the Internet users of the proliferation of advertising on television, which drove them to seek alternative news sources in the first place.

The reporters and news personalities became more editorial or opinionated to try and appeal 

to the Internet radical fringe while the algorithm got more and more efficient at censoring media that did not boost hits, and promoting fake news that generated controversy.

With no regulations, no requirement to validate facts, and no liability for fake or false news, the Internet and social media forums became money machines using social media preferences for determining news, not truth in reporting.

That is where we are today, trapped in a malaise of our own making.  Honesty, facts, truth 

and honor have been cast aside in news operations.  Biased reporting is prevalent in spite of the failure to met journalism ethical standards.  Fake news purveyors, like Russia and China or the Democrats and Republicans, flooded the Internet with fake news and the social media suppliers with millions and billions of dollars of blood money.

All the while we keep moving farther and farther away from the truth.  If you are seeking the truth in news, look to the small towns and populations where greed does not rule and laws are made to be followed, not ignored.  It is still there but you have to look hard to find it.

Who is to blame for our quagmire?  First Congress and the four most recent presidents for underestimating the potential damage such an unregulated behemoth could cause.  Politicians had their own selfish purposes for ignoring the regulation because of what they wanted from the Internet or the millions in campaign contributions from the virtual companies.

Blame also must be shared with the Main Street media who felt attacking Trump was a much more profitable endeavor than trying to harness the lawless digital empire builders behind the collapse in media credibility.  Long ago the media should have been investigating, reporting and screaming about the reckless and abusive actions of the Internet darlings.

There is no freedom of the press today.  It is all bought and paid for by some unregulated special interest intent on destroying whoever might oppose it.  The same special interests arguing for freedom of speech and press are using the Internet to manipulate their causes.

While most traditional media were signers of the Code of Ethics for Professional Journalists, none comply with the code.  If it were enforced, none would be left working.  So, who is it that represents “the press” and deserves the Constitutional protection of our government?

The unbiased, fair, honest, balanced, ethical, moral and transparent deserve it.  Good luck in your search for them.

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About the author Jim Putnam

My journalism career started very early, in high school, thanks to some intense nudging and guidance from a nun who taught creative writing, English and literature to me in sixth grade and then in high school.  Sister Louis Marie, one of just a handful of teachers who had a positive impact on me.  We grew to become close friends for life, and hers ended in 2013.

Thanks to her ruthless prodding and inspiration I became a regular contributor to the prestigious Des Moines Register newspaper whose stellar reputation remains intact today.  She also convinced me to be editor of the year book and writer for the school newspaper.

But that was just the beginning of her contributions.  Years later after she parted from the world of nuns and was called Pat McGuire Rock, she taught graduate school at the prestigious NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study where this inspirational soul was one of the first recipients of the School's Excellence in Teaching Awards.

NYU was the dominant supplier of talent to America’s television industry based in New York, while UCLA and USC played a similar role in the movie industry of Hollywood out west.

Pat created many unique and stimulating classes on Shakespeare and other literary giants and her classes included many aspiring actors, actresses, directors, producers and writers for television movies and prime time series, and even Broadway plays.  She loved to help people find their talent and niche in life.

I was one student she never gave up on.  When politics took me to our nation’s capital and eventually to the governor’s office in New Jersey and Madison Avenue in NYC I was able to see Pat often.

It was because of her I wrote two books of poetry, became a speech writer for political and corporate leaders, and became a reporter for the Omaha World Herald in the heyday of journalism, the Watergate era.  In fact, my career has spanned the service of twelve US presidents from Eisenhower to Trump.

She convinced me to keep journals of everything I did, and to always be searching for new creative outlets.  Best of all for me, I was one of few of her students to get her to be my editor on several books I authored, fiction and non-fiction, and screenplays for television like Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies among other shows.

From the time I was ten years old Pat Rock was my mentor, taking a stubborn and self-confident kid and awakening me to the worlds of creativity, magic, imagination and fantasy along with a search for truth with no limits, no barriers, and an in depth understanding of the power of words.

Thanks to her words became my best friends and my imagination my “upstairs playground.” Of course, she also recruited me to help her create on of the most pioneering teaching games to teach people proper Grammar, called The Great Grammarian used by The New York Times and many Fortune 500 corporations to help reporters and executives communicate better.

In summary, I have been a journalist all of my life from newspaper reporter to poet, author of books, composer of songs (words and music), speechwriter for politicians and corporate executives, policy developer, script writer, creative consultant to National Geographic Television, and member of two Emmy winning creative teams among other things.  Even today I publish an online newspaper, since 2006, and was a contributor to the Huffington Post.