The digital information tools for citizen journalists today enable us to effectively pull the covers off the sordid details of public malfeasance, corruption, the self-dealing and aggrandizement of public officials, and the broken state of traditional media.<\/p>\n
Conservatives, by the hour, chronicle details of the broken, politically captive and insular mainstream media.\u00a0 Alarming as this is, why do we assume that the mainstream media was ever objective, non-political, or an effective 4th-estate check on government power?<\/p>\n
On the contrary, a better case exists for the proposition that the essential nature of mainstream media is unchanged today from in the past.\u00a0 Organizational cultures simply don’t invert their behavior over time.\u00a0 They tend to persist in the characteristic behaviors of their organization.<\/p>\n
Rather than get overwrought about how wrong the mainstream media is, and thereby lose focus on solvable mainstream issues, perhaps we should just admit that the mainstream media is as it always was, and that we’re just coming to see it in a more objective light for the first time.<\/p>\n
Alternative media showed that traditional media did not live up to the potential the Founders gave it in the Constitution.\u00a0 Now we can move on and consider what the Founder’s were actually trying to accomplish.<\/p>\n
The Federalists contemplated a constitutional objective for the country to have a legally protected free press, and this became the 1st Amendment.\u00a0 As we have seen, allowance for it did not guarantee it would be practiced.\u00a0 A free press, apparently, remains an ideal objective today.<\/p>\n
The order of freedoms protected in the 1st Amendment – religion, speech, press, assembly, petition government – is significant.\u00a0 Subsequent rights build on preceeding rights.\u00a0 God gives us our fundamental rights, and from there the Constitution guarantees our rights to speak, to publish our speech, to get together publicly to discuss our speech, and then to take our conclusions to the government.<\/p>\n
Nothing within the 1st Am., however, guarantees the quality or content of that protected speech.\u00a0\u00a0 Nothing protects us against ignoble motives of a speaker.\u00a0 Nothing protects us against speech that promotes the interests of one, a few, or a subset of citizens, at the expense of the majority of citizens.\u00a0 Nothing protects us from organizations, whether it’s the press or other groups, who promulgate self-interested speech at the expense of the majority.<\/p>\n
Sound speech is the only means we have in America to offset unsound speech.\u00a0 If we don’t practice it, we have only ourselves to blame for the tyranny that will ensue, and has ensued.<\/p>\n
Absence of hyperbole, adherence to generally accepted facts, absence of personal attacks and diminutions, adherence to observable causation, language that narrows into rather than leads away from both the intent and form of the subject, these are some indicators of sound speech.<\/p>\n
The supported conclusions that come from fairly represented facts fed through the prism of logically sound reasoning, are for us to discover, not dictate.\u00a0 The Left is as subject to founded conclusions as the rest of us, and that’s the reality the Founders intended for Americans to practice. Ultimately, it’s not a politically determined reality, it’s a reality discovered in the nature of all things.<\/p>\n
The Founders were essentialists.\u00a0 The Constitution protects the essence of matters, in this case, the essence of public speech.\u00a0 They gave us a legal framework for us to accurately discover and respond to the true nature of reality.\u00a0 They avoided the hubris of determinism.\u00a0 They knew that freedom would serve us much better in our self-government experiment than a futile mechanism for one group to control another.\u00a0 They’d had enough of that sort of government.<\/p>\n
Today, however, the Left never stops working to replace the Constitution in America with political action.\u00a0 The Left think that politics can and should determine reality.\u00a0 This unrealistic, reverse causal direction of theirs — that attempts to dictate the nature of things rather than respond to the nature of things — never seems to give them a moments pause as they control, regulate, modulate, temper, fund, defund, and serve the higher masters of their agenda.<\/p>\n
But it’s a free country.\u00a0 If the Left want to blind themselves to the true nature of reality with a blizzard of determinism, they are free to do so.\u00a0 Fortunately, the rest of us are free to avoid those pitfalls.<\/p>\n
For too long the Left dominated public speech in America.\u00a0 With a complicit media they’ve built massive bureaucratic and regulatory structures at every level of local, county, state and federal government in America.\u00a0 Across the land thousands of pages of new regulations get added to the books every day<\/em> by a cadre’ of lawyers, bureaucrats, public servants and assorted do-gooders — a happy class of jovial elites ever ready to congratulate each other on their magnificent regulatory creations.<\/p>\n The Founders gave us a tool to change all that, to unwind this enormous Gordian knot, to take back our lives.\u00a0 All we have to do is use it.<\/p>\n B_Imperial<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The digital information tools for citizen journalists today enable us to effectively pull the covers off the sordid details of public malfeasance, corruption, the self-dealing and aggrandizement of public officials, and the broken state of traditional media. Conservatives, by the hour, chronicle details of the broken, politically captive and insular mainstream media.\u00a0 Alarming as this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[42,48,11,86],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3467","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-constitution","7":"category-free-speech","8":"category-planning","9":"category-zoning","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}