Machan's Musings - Journalism vs Business
by Tibor R. Machan
Here are two perfectly normal, familiar professions – journalism and business. Yet the former is treated with kid gloves by many intellectuals, politicians, academics, while the latter routinely condemned en masse.
Consider that when the Enron corporate scandal broke, the mantra of most commentators was how it is all due to the fact of deregulation. If only the federal government took it upon itself to rein in all those allegedly greedy corporate executives, if only it never yielded to the call for lessening the meddling it used to perpetrate, if only we returned to the feudal practice of mercantilism – whereby the king’s court routinely micro-managed the country’s business – we would be a much more just, decent society.
But now consider CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes fiasco, involving anchorman Dan Rather. Not only do these folks get away with stonewalling about what happened, not only does Rather issue but a lame "I am sorry" – which, by the way, isn’t necessarily an apology but could well be a mere "it’s too bad it happened" – but no one is calling, as indeed no one ought to, for re-instituting the age-old practice government regulation – censorship – of the press.
This is very interesting. To begin with there is an inconsistency in our federal constitution. It authorizes the feds to regulate nearly every profession except for journalism and the ministry. The First Amendment, while a great principle, is plainly discriminatory. If two professions of vital importance to a society are protected from government intrusion, it is rank injustice to subject other professions to such intrusiveness.
But in the case of Dan Rather & co., it gets more complicated – television operates on "public" property and is, therefore, not fully protected form the Feds, after all. This is why the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is empowered to impose various rules on radio and television broadcasters, say, about advertising, "appropriate" language, running of public service announcements, children’s programming and so forth. The news divisions are excluded from FCC interference mainly as a matter of tradition, not law. Strictly speaking, the FCC could make rules for them, also, since they, too, are using "public" property – the electromagnetic spectrum which was nationalized by the US Senate back in 1927.
Yet, despite this power of the Feds over broadcasters, no sane person is demanding that the FCC issue government regulations over broadcast news. We all know that this would violate a most cherished aspect of what is left of our free society. Censorship of the press is simply too Draconian a form of tyranny for the government to risk – it might show just where exactly governments are so often inclined to go!
Still, just because it would look bad to call for it, it doesn’t follow that logically speaking that isn’t exactly what many commentators should be calling for, given how readily they call for government regulation of people in business, industry, and other professions when something goes amiss there. Alas, consistency is deemed to be the hobgoblin of little minds. (Actually, however, it is "a foolish consistency" that Emerson was talking about, not consistency, plain and simple, which really amounts to integrity, nothing less.)
Journalists, sadly, are deemed to be some kind of select elite, not deserving of the disdain in which people in business are held – or perhaps it is the other way around: people in business are held in low esteem, as a class, while journalists and ministers – can you really grasp this in our day, what with hundreds of members of the clergy being exposed as out-and-out scum – are treated as simply normal folk some of whom will be bad apples now and then. In fact, however, members of all professions, educators, scientists, artists, business folks, journalists and you name them are all pretty much the same. They are all capable of going bad, being corrupted.
In a genuinely free society this is a risk we ought all to accept and we should not assume that government is populated by saints who should be entrusted to be the armed guardians of us all.
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