TV, Conservatives, and the First Amendment
Efron, Edith
Edith Efron TV, Conservatives, and the First Amendment I'd like to consider a question that is often raised by conservatives: Should broadcasting have the same First Amendment freedom as the print...
...In fact, I'd like to see government expelled totally from broadcasting —no regulation whatever of commercial TV, cable TV, pay TV, etc., save perhaps, for the functions of electronic traffic cop, to keep signals from jamming...
...The Federal Communications Commission should pack its bags and go home...
...The ideology of the Left consists of a handful of pathetic little slogans: "Rich is evil, poor is good...
...In other words, the medium is not the message—and one must not view both as a package...
...statism...
...Today, it is the anti-statist advocates of freedom who are the dissenters...
...Let me remind you of one simple thing: throughout the whole history of the human race, no other social system has fed, clothed, and housed the common man so well as the individualistic, private-property, competitive free-enterprise or capitalist system...
...Obviously not...
...But that is precisely why I cling with passion to the First Amendment and wish to see no weakening of it...
...Which is to say that it is not sensible at all...
...The broadcast medium, as a technological instrument, should, like the printing press, be immaculately free...
...And anyone who claims to be a humanitarian, who claims to be concerned with the material well-being of the common man, and who is not an advocate of capitalism, is one of two things: he is ignorant or he is a fraud...
...But any intervention by the state into intellectual or artistic areas should be fought...
...The danger is that these ideas are going largely unopposed...
...It is, of itself, just what it is called, a medium of communication—in the case of broadcasting, a medium through which communications, or propaganda, are transmitted electronically...
...I am totally unconvinced that speed of communication is, of itself, a threat...
...I think these questions are based on some faulty perceptions...
...He either genuinely does not understand the capitalist system which has given birth to this torrent of wealth, which has tripled man's lifespan and incalculably multiplied his standard of living—or he doesn't really give a damn about the well-being of the masses...
...And such philosophical trends are not restricted to the airwaves...
...The problem of the message being broadcast, however, the problem of a growing trend towards statist and collectivist philosophies, is an absolutely separate issue...
...And certainly they had heard no one link its liberty with its capitalism...
...But compassion and humanitarianism are not the goals of all this determinist, racist, collectivist, statist, anti-capitalist, anti-technological poppycock...
...But where are the voices saying this with eloquence and ringing conviction...
...I hold no political value higher than liberty...
...And there you have the contemporary liberal and leftist repertoire today...
...This clamor for state rule over our economic existence is the dominant philosophy on every major American campus...
...The destructive impact is coming from the ideas themselves...
...The genius of the First Amendment is that it protects dissent...
...How can they avoid looking like the leaning tower of Pisa when no important alternative to the silly anti-freedom bromides is readily available in the political world that they cover...
...Violating the rights of the Left cannot create intellectual potency on the Right...
...I believe that the reason for the growing impulse to interfere with the freedom of broadcasting emerges, in part, from a failure to differentiate between two problems of a very different order...
...And I'd like to explain why I am both so strong a critic of bias and so strong an advocate of total deregulation of broadcasting...
...Many conservative critics of media bias say they have been desperately disappointed by the caliber of the appointees to the FCC...
...What's more, I think that by virtue of that very orientation, they constitute a growing menace to our liberty...
...And by that I mean no government intervention at all...
...Imagine that it passionately reinforced the concepts of individualism, individual responsibility, voluntarism, free enterprise, and liberty from the state...
...It is not the freedom to express such blatant junk which is the danger...
...I agree thoroughly that broadcast news departments are giving us a shallow, outof-context, distorted, and often biased view of American political life and of world events—a view that is often nihilistic, hostile to this country, and increasingly statist and collectivist...
...The medium (technology, words, pictures) is innocent...
...No attack should ever be leveled upon the First Amendment from the conservative side...
...Imagine that in the myriad ways it pushes for more government power over our economic lives it were pushing against such power...
...And don't kid yourselves, ladies and gentlemen...
...I cannot, therefore, advocate any form of statist control to solve the problem of the growing advocacy of Edith Efron is a contributing editor to TV Guide, and author of The News Twisters...
...The ideological message of this medium which is shrunken, mediocre, and destructive should be challenged in ideological terms...
...My reason is this...
...Top this off with a little nonsensical egalitarianism: ignore such differentiae among individuals as character, intelligence, effort, discipline, and competence, and shriek for equal results in life for all...
...This inadequacy strikes one quite forcibly when one looks clearly at the caliber and quality of the ruling statist ideas...
...Take an entirely fanciful hypothesis...
...The real catastrophe is that the alleged guardians of the so-called American way of life so often imagine that wearing flag-pins in their lapels, or sicking the FBI on the Socialist Workers Party, or collecting tape recordings of Martin Luther King's sexual activities, or spying on the New Left are ways of fighting ideas...
...Only ideas can destroy ideas...
...Could the rapid and incessant transmission of such a philosophy threaten our liberty...
...Thus, it is clearly neither the technology nor the speed of transmission of ideas which is causing the destructive mischief...
...We are virtually voiceless in our own ideological self-defense...
...In fact many of the people who might be expected to oppose these ideas recite them imitatively, out of some prepos28 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/ September 1976 terous fear that they will be thought lacking in compassion and humanitarianism...
...What is needed to fight poverty at home and abroad is more capitalism, not less...
...The medium itself is guiltless...
...Or, in the cultural version: "Rational technological civilization is evil, and irrational primitivism is good—so attack reason, destroy science and technology to make the primitives feel less inadequate...
...Imagine that the philosophical bias on the airwaves were not liberal—that it consistently opposed big government...
...Usually, the answer given is "yes," but a certain number of conservatives are so distressed by the superficiality and bias of broadcast news, particularly network news, and by the apparently disastrous impact of instantaneous nationwide communication, that they are beginning to question the applicability of the First Amendment to this medium...
...If it is government strangulation of the individual we wish to oppose, we cannot ourselves turn into advocates of government strangulation...
...Edith Efron TV, Conservatives, and the First Amendment I'd like to consider a question that is often raised by conservatives: Should broadcasting have the same First Amendment freedom as the print press...
...And we should strenuously avoid any system which creates such beings in a free country...
...It is their own ideological inadequacy which is the enemy...
...In fact, it dominates much, if not most, of the intellectual world today, both at home and abroad...
...Where are the politicians who know how to explain and defend America's unique social system...
...Just about nowhere...
...It is in the name of political liberty—freedom from control by the state—that I conduct my own private war against the increasing bias on the airwaves in favor of big government...
...If advocates of individual freedom find themselves impotent before the collectivist and statist ideas of the Left, it is their own intellectual impotence which they must examine and against which they must wage war...
...Such anti-intellectualism cannot solve an essentially intellectual problem...
...And that, when you get to the bottom line, is why the liberal media are biased...
...We desperately need the First Amendment...
...Coercion, guns, cops simply do not destroy ideas...
...This does not imply passivity in the face of the bias problem...
...But if one wishes to combat an ideological movement, one can only combat it with a counter-ideological movement—not with force...
...Steal from the evil rich, give to the virtuous poor...
...Her article is adapted from a speech delivered last April at a journalism conference at Pepperdine University...
...There is no such thing as a good cultural commissar...
...First, there is the issue of what is often called "the communications revolution," the technology which gives us great speed of communication...
...They had heard no one defend our system with intelligence and passion in years...
...Such intervention is a manifestation of the statist disease, not a cure for it...
...If so, why oppose the statists in the first place...
...And to deprive this particular medium of its First Amendment rights is exactly as sensible as chastising a printing press...
...And that is why the capitalist nations are being devoured from within...
...I say that nothing else should have been expected...
...When Daniel Patrick Moynihan defended our system with ringing rectitude to that grab-bag of vicious little totalitarian satrapies that infest the United Nations, it was like an electric shock for millions...
...Or, in the racial version: "White is evil, non-white is good—so steal from the evil white and give to the virtuous non-white...
Vol. 9 • August 1976 • No. 10
