“The Free Press”    Sept. 9, 2018                           Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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From JFK on April 27, 1961

"No President should fear public scrutiny of his program. For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary. I am not asking your newspapers to support the Administration, but I .am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people. For I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed.

I not only could not stifle controversy among your readers--I welcome it. This Administration intends to be candid about its errors; for, as a wise man once said: "An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors; and we expect you to point them out when we miss them.

Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed-and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian law-maker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment--the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution--not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply "give the public what it wants"--but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion."

                               

   

I grew up in a Christian Puritan household. You may think that you did but I can tell you, I grew up in a home where happiness was suspect and we called “Devil’s Food Cake” “white cake,” and “deviled eggs” were called “dressed eggs.” I wish that I was kidding, but I am not.

But even Puritans have to go to the grocery store and when my mother took my  brother, Billy, and me to Houchens on the way home from school, I was exposed to salacious gossip rags in the check-out lane. I don’t know that anyone in Glasgow, KY actually had what could be called an Enquiring mind, but as soon as I could read, I was reading the headlines out loud and asking my mother, “Is that true?” 

My mother didn’t have a day of college education in her background and she was not above going for a deep dive in the local gossip in the beauty shop she made us wait in every two weeks, but she looked at me as if I had been brain damaged in birth when I was drawn in by the fantastic headlines of the Enquirer. “Momma were those people really probed by aliens?” “Roger Lee, go wait in the car.” 

But the tabloids evolved into being less about movie stars, the Kennedys, and space aliens. The editors took a decidedly right-wing perspective and published outrageous lies about the political opponents of Donald Trump. You would think that when people had seen headlines about Obama being gay, about Oprah having months to live, or Bill Clinton hiring an intern with 3 breasts . . . and no, I’m not making any of that up, that even the most jaded of right-wing nuts would realize that this is not an actual source of information. 

I think, though, that they went too far when they claimed Ted Cruz was having affairs with five women. That’s just nuts. There are not five women anywhere so desperate as that. 

But you know who does take these gossip rags seriously? It is humiliating, but President Trump has not only said that they are a major news sources but that the Enquirer should receive a Pulitzer Prize. This would make Charles Darwin blush but the facts coming out now is that the Enquirer bought and killed stories about Trump’s marriage infidelities as well as what has been called a “safe full” of stories they have conspired to keep secret which might reveal his illegal connections to Russians and organized crime . . . all this while Trump has called such main stream news sources as the New York Times and CNN “fake news.”

The advent of the internet and all of the related social media platforms it has provided has done both good and bad things to the universe of journalism. On the one hand, the internet is unfiltered, preventing corporate media from censoring our news and feeding the public only what they want the public to know. But on the other hand, the internet is unfiltered, like a giant, digital, Enquirer, allowing all manner of conspiracy theories, foreign propaganda, and lunacy to appear in our Google searches as if they were all the same as legitimate journalism.

Fifteen and twenty years ago I had to lecture my college students about sources. They all, simultaneously, forgot how to use the library and refused to be guided to primary sources over secondary or tertiary sources, or sources that were not sources at all but the academic equivalent of what stands under an ordinary outhouse. We no longer have a Walter Cronkite on the TV news and we don’t have a thoroughly trustworthy Encyclopedia Britannica in the reference room of the library. 

However, fifteen years ago, if one of my students cited Wikipedia as a source in a paper, I gave them a chance to re-write the paper. Wikipedia was no more a reliable source of information than a bulletin board in college frat house. But Wikipedia has changed. They have raised their standards and have recruited an army of reliable editors of which, I am one. Face Book and Twitter are having to go through the same process of getting better at filtering out foreign propaganda, lunatic conspiracy theories, and hate mongers. 

The internet and the 24-hour news stations have changed the way that we get news. 

As recently as 10 years ago, I had almost no anonymity in the town because most people read the newspaper and people on the street recognized me from my picture in the paper. I could count on 40 to 50 thousand people reading each column that I wrote. I now meet people who tell me, “I used to love reading your columns when you wrote for the NewsLeader,” and I tell them, “I still write for the NewsLeader,” and they reply “you do?” Because no one reads the papers anymore. More people read my column from my Face Book page than read it in the city newspaper which is supposed to serve a city of nearly half a million people. Print journalism has died a rapid death.

We have called the media the “fourth estate” because they are neither voters nor elected officials. They are a disinterested party that is necessary to keep the government in check. Some very clever people came up with the title

“the fifth estate” for their 2013 movie about the explosion of influence from Wikileaks. Frankly, I think that I know as much as I want to know about Julian Assange, but I can never resist a Benedict Cumberbatch movie. But, it is an appealing idea. The corporate media have been a disinterested, neutral, free 4^thestate but lately they have gotten a little too biased . . . not as liberals or conservatives but as corporate propaganda arms. 

We need for the media to be a watchdog on the government and on corporations but both tv and print media came to rely too much on government sources and corporate dollars and so a literal fifth estate has arisen to take over some of what we once depended on newspapers to do. 

The fifth estate is not like the fourth estate. They don’t have corporate sponsors, but they also don’t have editors or anything that smacks of journalistic ethics. I am both grateful for and suspicious of Wikileaks. The Obama administration tried to mess with Assange on a personal level and Assange has struck back against an insufficiently guarded nation. He has done bad things though I think that I can understand why. 

He exposed bad things that our government was doing and our government tried to trump up fake criminal charges against him which sent him into hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and from there he apparently colluded with Russia to retaliate by hurting the whole world by helping Trump into office. The fifth estate will not be easy to control so we will get both blessings and curses from it for the foreseeable future. 

The world is changing. I miss the days when newspapers were ubiquitous and the people you know around town were likely to have read the same articles you had. You could immediately launch into a conversation about current events or, more importantly, insightful opinion columns; but whether it is newspapers, television news, podcasts, or the internet, we cannot do without access to free and unbiased news reporting and we must hold ourselves up to the standard of being informed. 

When our nation was in its first decade, Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that if he had to choose between a nation that had a government but no newspapers or a nation with newspapers but no government, he would not hesitate to choose the later. 

But he added, people have to read the newspapers. Jefferson regularly shocked readers with his comments about how to curb government abuses. He helped to create our government and he was one of our first presidents, but he knew that governments can only be kept honest if the population remains informed. As soon as citizens refuse to read, to be informed, and to question their government, then they are holding the door open to government corruption.

It is journalism’s check against corruption that makes our current president hate the media so much. Dictators and tyrants always hate the media. Labeling the media as the enemy of the people is a phrase that was used by some of history's most vicious thugs — Robespierre, Goebbels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao — they vilify reporters and as NPR’s Scott Simon observed, many of these were often murdered.

In the middle of last month many news agencies tried to fight back against Trump’s constant reference to the media as “fake news,” and now his more serious charge that the media is the enemy of the people. This is a guy who now averages more than six lies per day in his tweets and statements, who watches Fox News and declares that the Enquirer deserves a Pulitzer and he calls the New York Times and CNN “fake news.” It would be laughable if there were not so many gullible people who fell for it. Just as the radio hate-mongers have always referenced the media as being the “liberal media.” 

Folks, TV news and newspapers are owned by for-profit corporations. They are by their very nature, extremely conservative. Honestly, it seems to me that conservatives seem to think that facts are both inconvenient and, by nature, liberal. 

They remind me of that Lily Tomlin, one woman show, the Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe, in which Tomlin plays a schizophrenic homeless woman who believes that she is talking to space aliens. . .

Trying to explain to them the difference between a can of soup and an Andy Warhol painting of a can of soup: This is soup, this is art…..

No, art is not soup, soup is not art,

This is soup, and this is art.

I’m trying to tell people: This is news, and this is uninformed hysteria.

This one helps you to make good decisions, this one makes you the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving. 

4^thEstate – Twilight Zone. Critical thinking – zombies eat your brains.

The founders of our nation were rebels and non-conformists. It took them eleven years to write a constitution and even then only eleven of the colonies were willing to ratify it. Two years later, they drafted 12 amendments, a bill of rights, in order to assuage the fears and doubts of Rhode Island, and North Carolina. It was the bill of rights that united the 13 colonies into the United States of America.

The first of those amendments offers indisputable protection to the rights of freedom of religion, an individual’s freedom of speech, a free press, and the right to assemble to protest the government. 

The church and the news media are the only two institutions named in the constitution and bill of rights as being specifically protected from government interference. 

We are protected from government regulation because we are deemed to be vital to the maintenance of a democracy but only if we both speak truth to power, only if we both strive to keep the citizenry informed about both current events and moral deliberation about those events. 

Profit driven news media gave Donald Trump disproportional attention in 2016 because he was shocking, comical, and controversial and that drove viewers and readers. Churches with educated, progressive clergy, were nearly silent out of fear of alienating any of their precious donors. And with the media and the church simultaneously fail to do what they were given constitutional protections to do, you end up with a tyrant. So I have a modest proposal:

Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights. . .