Who the President talks to...

Reading Salon over here at Freeman's Pub while I eat lunch downtown, I came across yet another piece regarding the Obama Administration's "war" against Fox News. The Administration, if you've been sleeping under a rock, basically called Fox News out for being nakedly partisan--which is, of course, completely true--and announced they weren't going to treat Fox as a news organization anymore. Which, I have to admit, makes a certain amount of sense--I mean, isn't it some of the best-known faces at Fox News, Beck and O'Reilly, who like to insist they're entertainers, not journalists, whenever they get their fingers caught 'neath the lid. Anyway, it seems that some of the other media outlets have gotten their knickers twisted over this one, and are rushing to the defense of Fox News, refusing to agree to interviews themselves unless Fox is allowed to play, too, etc. Salon's general take has been that the purportedly-liberal MSM outlets are wrong and that the President's Fox boycott is justifiable, if perhaps ill-advised as a matter of policy. My take is who the fuck oughta care?

Seriously. One of my little peeves is the delusion the media is under that they're special, they're the Fourth Estate and all that rubbish. The First Amendment doesn't say anything about the press being special, it says that their freedom won't be abrogated by Federal legislation (a limit on Federal power that is expanded to State legislatures--who used to be able to censor the press as much as their individual State constitutions permitted--by the Fourteenth Amendment). Specifically:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Nowhere in the text does it say that the President of the United States has to give access to any journalist, pundit, camera crew, commentator, editorialist or anybody. The President can damn well deny access to Fox News--or to NBC, CBS, ABC, C-SPAN, Tommy Perkins from the Winnsleydale Junior High Informer, or to anyone else he damn well pleases. It might be stupid of him to do so as a matter of policy or public relations, but y'know, whatever.

The press does this kind of thing all the frickin' time and it frankly pisses me off. The press doesn't have privileges as a matter of law, rather it has the same exact rights as every other American citizen combined with a pseudo-special status that accidentally arose from the high bars to entry caused by the technological limitations of the actual media being used to communicate and their forms of distribution. That is, a printing press is a big heavy machine that costs lots and lots of money to feed and maintain and then you have to actually figure out how to get the resulting pages out to people. Similarly, a television camera used to be a big heavy thing that you had to have an entire truckload of gear to support unless it was anchored in a giant expensive building, and broadcasting the results to everyone in your vicinity a daunting technical process. So it was sort of inevitable, really, that there would come to be a professional class of reporters and their support system--e.g. editors, publishers, typesetters, circulation managers, deliverymen and so forth in print journalism. (It follows, at least somewhat, that the Internet, in removing barriers to entry, makes those in traditional journalism less special since they're no longer unique in their ability to deliver information; the major remaining exception being that news corporations are better suited to fund international travel for news reporting. Further, none of this says that there's no role for specialists or for those willing or able to pay specialists for their time; i.e. not every blogger, for instance, will have the time or resources to spend days and days gathering information and assembling it into a polished, informative communication. On the other hand, anyone who's willing to take the time can, theoretically, assemble a perfectly good news story, film it on an inexpensive-but-quality digital camera and, say, post it on YouTube for instant international distribution.)

Getting back on topic--I fear I've digressed a bit into something else I wanted to write sometime: I suspect the President would be a bit more "presidential" if the Administration sucked it up and pretended that Fox gave a crap about arcana like facts and truth, and shutting Fox News out may not be particularly sustainable or wise. But that really doesn't have anything to do with the wagon of donkey crap that is Fox News, or the other wagons of donkey crap in the caravan like NBC or CNN and all the rest of them. They aren't special and nobody has to talk to them, not even the President.