By Shawn Paul
It’s very unlikely that the traditional media we know today at all resembles the entity our founding fathers wished to protect in their day.
It’s not even very likely that it resembles the group admired by Edmund Burke when he is said to have coined the term “the fourth estate” in reference to the press in the middle of the 19th century.
Based on their writings and the documents they co-authored, our founding fathers wished to preserve a free press for the purpose of preserving a free people. The current remnant of a once-free press is now simply an extension and arm of the government, which means that they aren’t really a “free press” at all. They have come to be, knowingly or not, for the state, or the current ultimate powers of the U.S. federal government.
To put Burke’s term into context, it’s necessary to look at the history of medieval “estates of the realm,” which formally recognized the three “estates” of the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners. Burke and Thomas Carlyle, who popularized the term “the fourth estate,” recognized the press as a group of distinction that played an important role in lending a democratic voice to the people of a true republic. It now seems, unfortunately, that those days are gone and that once again, only three estates are represented, with the press, or media, being encompassed by the estate of the nobility. In more modern and recognizable terms, those in our government and “media” are often referred to as “the elite,” even if only in terms that denote the self-perception of many in this estate.
Sean Hannity declared in 2008 that “the media is dead”; but in a historical sense, it was already dying long before then.
Ever since Cronkite’s field coverage of the Vietnam War, the mainstream media has continued on a downward spiral. The difference between the journalists of that era and the so-called “journalists” of today is that the inquiring public news consumers’ sense of objectiveness and sincerity from these anchors has now been decimated. Many journalists of the recent past at least seemed sincere in their dedication to reporting truth. Today, the messages of the media mainstream are blatantly and admittedly laden with hearsay, inaccuracy, half-truths, and whole lies.
Still, Hannity seems to be on to something, as the media has continually sunk to new lows over the course of the last five years. It can be seen in Newsweek’s post-print fake cover honoring Obama’s second inauguration as “The Second Coming,” penned by Evan Thomas, who once described Obama on MSNBC as “sort of like God” in being above the traditional political fray. We should also remember CBS Political Director John Dickerson’s plea in a January 2012 Obama-Biden ad to “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party”… and declare and wage he has.
The legendary CBS reporter Bob Schieffer, after an Obama gun control speech, suggested that “the president is going to have …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Western Journalism