Columnists — bloggers excepted[?] — should exercise sound editorial judgment in composing their thoughts for the public. Far too often columnists express what is good for them is good for the rest by explaining only what is bad about the alternative without ever analyzing what is good about their own. It is dishonest to say that the New Deal was bad for the country because it interfered with private enterprise and intruded on the individual without citing what it was back then that caused private enterprise to let the country go down the tubes in '32, consequently giving birth to the New Deal's launching a more planned enterprise to give direction to the whole. If indeed the columnist perceives government interference as bad, he/she should readily support it with its deleterious effects, rather than simply stating that it is a violation of individual freedom to assess what is good for the self is therefore good for the nation. For if a kind of philosopher king unto oneself was thus assigned, there would be no need of social interaction; however, what is really meant is that, as with Plato, only a chosen few are so endowed and by definition decide what is good for the rest. This is no different from what big government does but with the a most significant exception: there are checks and balances in governance to insure that at least some good in the end prevails.


Of course, it is the reader and viewer's duty to do their own thinking when subject to glaring omissions designed to limit the right to know, but under the lights of slick machinations of presentation and glowing credentials of reputation, the reader and viewer easily succumb to deception behind the lines of print and lights of the camera that effect the action of sound and fury signifying political malaise. Freedom of the press is linked directly to the public's right to know in order to give substance to freedom of expression. But just as all freedom under the Constitution implies, in virtue of its very creation, with freedom and rights come responsibility. The right to know presses the responsibility to learn and hopefully in order that freedom of speech grows in intellect. Freedom of the press and, of course, now all news media, implies the ideal design of full and objective disclosure when it does not conflict with the right to privacy, nor harm the rights of others.


The founding fathers were oriented to conceive in the political context when framing these freedoms in order to preserve an open democracy. They did not have a crystal ball that showed the ensuing influx of the penny press and yellow journalism, much less the explosion of today's media. They would be appalled by the spread of information reduced to theater at the expense of public absorption of practical and political information and knowledge. The founding fathers had expressly included this amendment to prevent the government from violating political integrity; the thought would never have occurred to them that the very institution and individual the amendment was designed to protect would themselves be the source of duplicity!


The right to know and freedom of speech is very different from idle, often prurient, curiosity and what Plato coined "divine madness." There is a dual responsibility here: journalists are not to lose sight of their primary function to inform the public on the state of the union and states; and the public must meet them halfway by upgrading its perception of the spirit and intent of the First Amendment.


That one dismisses serious news and analysis as simply matters of taste or worse ideology is tantamount to saying that not voting is just as much a right as voting. The citizen who takes his right to information lightly by settling for lies, deceptions and half truths is lethal to the endurance of democracy and effects just such slothful thinking and faulty expression that is overrunning the nation: witness the pathetic ignorance and uncontrollable emotions of most of the calls on talk shows, many letters to editors and cable news e-mail — not to mention blogs. The press, too, has a responsibility to exercise editorial judgment that does not jeopardize objective disclosure; nor on its editorial pages should it reflect a single bias only. However, the traditional press, owing to the decline in responsible readership, is rapidly becoming academic in light of the popularity of television that has brought to dramatic fruition—as did and still do the yellow journalists—the mind-set of news as primarily that of entertainment and crude theater.


Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: February 19, 2004.