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The Imperial Press
| Article
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13971 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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2 / 1988 |
1,096 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
The press has been coming in for its share of attacks recently, and I think deservedly so. If freedom of the press is the glory of America, the accomplishments of the press are its despair. The state of public communications in the United States is hardly worthy of the world's greatest democracy.
Most of what the public knows about the political process is gleaned from commercial television. But that medium is show business. Little serious discussion of public issues could survive the accountant's axe. And public television is largely the preserve of the ideological Left.
Newspapers, which no longer serve as the major carrier of information, must struggle for circulation with sports, the comics, and ads. But with the notable exception of a few "national" newspapers, the press no longer takes public issues seriously, although it pretends to do so.
Why then speak of an "imperial" press? The press may not be serious, but it has power, as is evident in the process by which the press (ant TV) anoints or demotes political pretenders. The recent fates of Senators Hart and Biden are cases in point. Few senators or congressmen would be foolhardy enough to take on the Washington Post or NBC, for instance. They know that they would be photographed in the most ridiculous poses and that their comments would be taken out of context and made to seem imbecilic.
Examine what the press did with President Reagan's comment into a supposedly dead mike about bombing the Soviet Union. The remark was supposed to be funny precisely because it was so incongruous with
... (1998 of 6475 Characters)
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