Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Media Revisited" In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 198-200). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, Winter 1977
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
In my last column, "A Message to the Media," I described the product of a press conference I called to announce a victory in an employment discrimination case involving on-the-job civil liberties.
I described the shallow and rushed treatment afforded the story on television, and the personalized slant adopted by the morning paper.
I expressed my admiration for the working press, and annoyance at conservative editors who use words and pictures to afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable.
Even though the capitalist-owned media is a private enterprise rather than a public service, it still has no ethical right to deprive workers of the elementary information needed to survive in a world where knowledge is power and lack of it is crippling.
•••
A case in point is the superficiality of TV news. The once-over-lightly treatment of vital affairs is so superficial that it turns frivolous and finally becomes contemptuous of news itself. The newscasters make a mockery of the news. Nobody can object to newscasts that are clever and visually arresting—conflict, especially, can be well-portrayed.
But the most dramatic confrontations — the clash of ideas — are handled like hot potatoes. The facts spoon-fed to the viewer are too sparse and distorted to convey the nature of an ideological dispute authentically. The lack of impact cheats the audience.
Newspaper articles lend themselves much more to in-depth analysis than do video news flashes. But stories in the press are often slanted out of perspective by the political bias or dollar-sign opportunism of the editor/publisher.
•••
The press won high public favor when it finally found the nerve, during the Watergate deluge, to admit the truth about government that most of us already knew or suspected anyway. But the lords of the press exploit this new populist glamour to perpetuate their untouchable, sacrosanct status.
There are no publicly-adopted canons of ethics to govern the press, no public tribunals to offer recourse to aggrieved readers, no legislative committees to investigate the investigators. There is no public relations person, no ombudsman, no equal rights official at any newspaper or TV office whose job it is to mediate with or represent the consumer.
Would regulation violate freedom of the press? No. Press freedom isn’t the only principle around. What about fair play? Social responsibility? Truth-in-packaging? These are interlocking principles, and highly endangered ones.
The problem is that "freedom" is reserved for the owner of the medium, and not for the subject or person under discussion, or the reader, or the reporter. The First Amendment shelters all speech, but its prime beneficiary is the giant information industry dominated by corporate moguls who are no mean slouches at the game of intensive labor exploitation. Translated into economic terms, freedom of the press becomes sheer license for millionaire publishers and network czars to lard their own preserves and preserve their own class.
•••
No, there is nothing sacred about their right to mold and twist public opinion at our expense, especially when we have no equal access to their technology and pervasive influence.
The airwaves belong to the people, not the networks, and immeasurably more workers than entrepreneurs buy the dailies. We should affirm our rights to the opinion makers, those henchmen of privilege who trample the equal time ethic into the mud.
Readers and video viewers of the world, Arise! You have nothing to lose but show-biz news accounts, and the dynamic world of reality to gain!