A telling statement is spoken by the “reporter” in the Lafayette Park video as he obediently retreats. While back-peddling along with the other media people, he says this to someone on his cell phone:
It’s one thing to be pushing the public back, but to not let the media film is just ridiculous.
It’s “ridiculous,” this trained wordsmith said. It is, but not as he meant it.
That one sentence summarizes the state of the legacy media today. They are sheep, whose attention is easily directed by governmental authorities toward where they would have them look. When it’s not in the authorities’ interests for the media to know or see something, they are not shown. And they seldom ask to know. Today, they are stenographers, more than reporters.
So what does it matter to we the people that the media are so easily controlled? The man in the video just followed orders from an armed Capital Hill officer of the law. Doing what he was told…backing away from a protest event that the authorities did not want to become an embarrassing media event. But what does it matter in the greater scheme of things?
It matters greatly.
The essential prerequisite for tyranny is a docile and compliant media. On the flip side, the essential requirement for sustaining a free Republic is an independent press that fears no governmental authority, bows to no special interests, and dedicates itself to learning and speaking – in print and with voice – the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It is their obligation to do so.
Had the reporter said “I’ve backed up as far as I’m going,” he might have been arrested. Today, his editor probably wouldn’t have liked that — although thirty years ago, the reporter likely would have gotten a raise for standing up for the First Amendment. But we the people would have applauded.
Unfortunately though, the journalist who said “it’s one thing to be pushing the public back” doesn’t understand his role in a free society. His legitimate interests are not primarily his own. He is there for us. He is not a member of the elite among hoi polloi; he represents our Constitutionally-protected right to know.
Richard J. Evans authored a widely-heralded three volume series on the Third Reich. In volume two, entitled The Third Reich in Power, he writes:
In the 1920s and early 1930s there was no doubt which newspaper in German had the widest national and international reputation. The Frankfurt Newspaper (Frankfurter Zeitung) was renowned the world over for its thorough and objective reporting, its fair-minded opinion columns and its high intellectual standards… Politically liberal, the paper had long remained independent of the great press empires that had grown up around figures such as Alfred Hugenberg or the Mosse and Ullstein families…
Under the Weimar Republic, however, it got into financial difficulties and had to make over a controlling interest to the massive I.G. Farben chemical concern, which soon began to compromise its editorial independence, above all in questions of economic policy. By 1932, its editorials were arguing that it was time to bring Hitler and the Nazis into a coalition government and to rescue Germany from the crisis by reforming the Weimar constitution in an authoritarian direction.
…In 1938, realizing that it no longer needed to influence public opinion, since there was effectively no public opinion left in Germany, I.G. Farben secretly sold the firm to a subsidiary of the Nazi Party’s Eher Publishing House without even troubling to inform the paper’s editors or staff. On 20 April 1939 the Nazi Part’s publishing mogul, Max Amann, formally presented the newspaper to Hitler as a birthday present. Its function as a vehicle for free, if disguised, comment was over; its readership declined further, and it was eventually closed down altogether in 1943.
America is not the Weimar Republic. Nor is America ruled by a ruthless dictator. And the American legacy media are not… courageous.