The GOP Takes Aim at the First Amendment

In 35 years of newspapering and teaching, I developed a quiet amusement over the general public’s almost total ignorance of how the news media does its job. Then, last year, I received the following email from a reader, one Stuart Jewell, complaining about media content: “It’s strange to me, that almost all columnists and reporters assume the talent of being able to define what ‘the people’ want to know and how urgently they want to know it.”

His words struck not my newspaperman’s heart, but my media educator’s brain. I thought: “It’s not strange at all. Columnists and reporters don’t assume anything. They go to journalism school, where they learn the definitions of what the people want to know, and how urgently they want to know it. The study of journalism, and all the other media forms, is as black-and-white as learning English. The media uses definitions, rules and values that are as clear-cut as the conjugation of verbs.”

Suddenly, and clearly, I understood that Stuart Jewell’s problem was not ignorance. It was illiteracy. Media literacy is not a required subject in American schools, from kindergarten to university. Jewell had offered a judgment of a vital democratic institution without any sort of a knowledge baseline. With his focus, I expanded my ongoing research into the media-public relationship, and I found a gap, between the media and the public.

This gap has always been there but it really started to open in 1950s America.

David Halberstam, in his comprehensive history, “The Fifties,” noted it: “It was in the fifties that the nation became wired for television, a new medium experimented with by various politicians and social groups.” Only 10 years later, “television had begun to alter the political and social fabric of the country, with stunning consequences.”

It was a literacy gap. All the knowledge about the new medium resided with the experimenters, knowledge to which the general public had no real access. At the heart of the gap was a code, centuries old, but simple and easy to learn in college and university media degree programs. I teach it to 200 new students a year. It should be taught to everyone.

Never before have I seen that gap more apparent than in the Republican convention and the events surrounding it. In May 2007, U.S. Dept. of Labor statistics indicated 1.07 million media professionals in an adult population (15 and over) of 240 million. In 21^st-century America, if you are not a media professional, you are, like Stuart Jewell, essentially media-illiterate. In this illiteracy, Americans accuse the media of bias, irresponsibility, moral decay, Hannah Montana. And many of those accusations are true, because media professionals, in a media-illiterate world, know they can get away with it. The gap has become a wedge. The result is an American crisis, creating fear and mistrust, even loathing, of a media institution that is the life blood of democracy.

At the Republican convention were thousands of Stuart Jewells (with millions more watching) and a handful of media professionals, most notably a Republican strategist named Steve Schmidt. So notable was Schmidt’s presence in the proceedings that he is the subject of a long profile in the Sunday, Sept. 7, New York Times. Using media tools, Schmidt manipulated public response that brought the audience, who had no idea why, to a frenzy. Democratic media professionals did the same thing last week at Denver, but in St. Paul, there was an ominous difference. Schmidt attacked the media, again and again, in ways that were not legitimate. He did not do this viciously; he did it as a professional using media tools to evoke a response.

If the public understood that, all would be well. But they didn’t and don’t. In their media illiteracy, Schmidt the media pro knew he could get away with it. And that is a huge part of the American crisis, going forward from this convention.

The public doesn’t understand, because they have never been taught, that people are the authors of the media code that the professionals use, and thus are the source of all media, particularly journalism, or what Americans have always called a “free press.” That connection is consistently revealed by professionals seeking to define exactly what journalists do. In a 1987 speech, Jeff Greenfield, now of CBS, laid it down nicely: “The bedrock theory of the free press is that once society decides to invest ultimate power in the people, they must have access to the widest possible range of information.”

Thus the source of the power of the press must be the power of the people, who can access their power through only one source, the power of the press. The natural, enduring strength of this circularity is acknowledged by the deliberations of the nation’s founders. The place for their guarantee of a free press was not in the Constitution, which established the government, but right at the top, No. 1 in the Bill of Rights, which protected the governed. The press belongs not to the Constitution, but to the people, who created it. Journalists, educated in these realities and principles, write to it, write to the people, as if through a window which no power, natural or man-made, can close.

Steve Schmidt is trying, though. If he succeeds, he will have succeeded in pulling the plug from the First Amendment. Somebody needs to get him to talk about that. But for Sunday’s New York Times profile, he declined to be interviewed.