The State’s Assault on Press Freedom the Fourth Estate Ignored

An assault on the First Amendment occurred this past week. What journalists touted, and what they ignored, as the government’s infringement on their rights demonstrates that their left-wing bias supersedes their loyalty to a freedom-of-the-press ethos.

As you may have heard once, twice, or 20 times, Donald Trump banned CNN, MSNOW, and Politico.com journalists from the White House. This strikes as, if characteristically uncouth, uncharacteristic for a president who exchanges with journalists far more than any recent predecessor. (RELATED: Does the Press Understand the First Amendment?)

What it’s not? Unconstitutional.

Trifling? Sure. Spiteful? Yes. Petty? Definitely. It does not amount to a law abridging the freedom of the press. Not every outlet gets a seat in the White House press room. Conservative outlets understand this better than liberal ones who offered no protest when the Biden, Obama, and Clinton administrations avoided interactions with reporters from conservative outlets. (RELATED: The President Gets It)

Trump’s prohibition on the most strident of the adversarial press highlights not the president’s contempt for law but instead his self-destructive streak.

Thirty years ago, the First Lady — the one who later described her opponent’s supporters as “deplorables” — could simply dismiss this publication and others like it as operating in a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to a more-poodle-than-pitbull Matt Lauer, who earlier in the interview had wondered if the adultery accusations against her husband amounted to the worst smear of the 20th Century.

Trump’s prohibition on the most strident of the adversarial press highlights not the president’s contempt for law but instead his self-destructive streak. A decade ago, he baited journalists to expose their naked partisanship. All these years later, he takes their bait to expose his thin skin. Why not just allow the activists disguised as journalists to continue to undermine the credibility of their profession?

The real infringement on the First Amendment occurred as Democratic politicians sought to block a media merger because they feared that the one company gobbling up the other might result in less favorable news coverage toward their party. On Monday, 12 Democrats — the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington — dropped their litigation against Paramount Skydance. In exchange for the Democrat law enforcers letting it purchase Warner Bros., the media giant agreed to, among other stipulations, allow an Orwellian “editorial independence board” to hover over both CNN and CBS. (RELATED: Paramount’s Hollywood Exit Could Trigger an Avalanche in Los Angeles)

Why must a private company include a board that operates independently from it, even with members appointed by its executives, to dictate the “independence” of the news and editorials it produces?

Because David Ellison, chairman of Paramount Skydance, inserted Bari Weiss, an Ivy League-educated, pro-choice lesbian who voted for Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden four years later, to oversee CBS News. Remarkably, the depiction of her as a right-wing neanderthal at CBS owed, according to many journalists, not to the far-left extremism prevalent for decades at CBS but instead to the status of the Ivy League-educated, pro-choice lesbian who voted for Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden four years later as a right-wing neanderthal. The politicians seek to squelch Ellison’s influence over the news outlets that he now owns.

The agreement empowers the board to adjudicate “any disputes between CBS News employees, CNN employees, and management of the Combined Entity regarding alleged reporting bias or failure to meet agreed reporting fairness standards” and inspect “adherence to ethical journalism as defined by journalism industry best practices and to editorial independence, including from the Combined Entity’s ownership and shareholders.”

Smart media magnates know enough to allow writers to write and reporters to report. At the same time, when you own the company, then you possess the right to guide it in the direction that you desire. Recent generations of the Ochs-Sulzberger family published a New York Times that mirrored the left-wing outlook that prevailed among its members; the Loebs who ran The Manchester Union-Leader predictably printed a newspaper echoing their conservatism, and the Straight-Whitney family’s New Republic so imposed its anti-anticommunism on the magazine’s editorial line that it installed Michael Straight, a spy for Stalin’s Soviet Union, to hammer home the self-serving point that accusations of domestic subversion amounted to a witch hunt.

After Spiro Agnew described the press as “nattering nabobs of negativism” 56 years ago, Mike Wallace asked Lowell Thomas, the journalist who showcased “Lawrence of Arabia” to the world long before the movie of that name, for a reaction. “I have spent my life in the communications world,” Thomas told Wallace, “and I have discovered—and I wonder if you have—that perhaps 95 percent of all those who are in the communications world, reporters, editors, and so on, are definitely to the left.”

The moment leftists see their grip slipping to something below 95 percent, they sic the powerful upon the press. The 12 attorneys general who forced an “editorial independence board” on ostensibly private press organizations highlight their obsession not with freedom of the press but with control of it.