 Chapter 7, the media, government, and politics. Okay, so what national role do the media have? And by media I mean all the big transmitters and information that the public has access to. So what I mean by transmitters of information, television, radio, internet, newspaper, so all the places that we get news from every day is what we call collectively the media. Okay, so what national role do the media have? It's twofold. First of all, the main function of the media is to inform the public, to inform us. To inform us about what is going on in the world, what is going on here in the United States, what is going on with the government. And the idea of that is to allow us to make better choices when we make decisions about government, when we express our political opinions, and when we vote. So we need to know what government is doing, we need to know what certain political candidates believe in before we vote for them, before we decide whether to vote for one particular candidate or not. We need to know what's going on to make a decision about whether a president who's been in office running for re-election should be re-elected or not. And so all of that information comes from the media, newspapers, radio, internet, wherever you get your news from. Secondly, the media is there to serve as a watchdog in government. So not just to disseminate information, but actually to dig deeper and find out what the government doesn't want us to know. Often it's the government's secrets that we really need to know, things that the government doesn't want us to know because usually those are things that are bad. If Donald Trump, if there's something, if there's good news that Donald Trump wants us to know, or any president wants us to know, they'll come right out and say it. You know, it's very easy for us to get access to that kind of information. But if the government or a president does something bad, does something wrong, they usually try to hide it, right? That's just human nature. You try to hide your secrets. You try to hide bad information. And so the media isn't just there to inform us about things that are going on, but also to uncover these secrets, uncover bad news to let us know. Because again, in order to have a really good functioning democracy, we need to have access to as much information as we can get in order to make good decisions in order to be good citizens. So the media also serves as a watchdog on government. And some of the biggest government scandals were uncovered by the press, by the media. One of the most famous examples of the media uncovering a huge scandal was in the early 1970s when the Washington Post, one of the biggest and most famous newspapers in the United States in Washington, D.C., uncovered the Watergate scandal, which actually led to the first ever resignation of an American president, Richard Nixon, in 1974. So the Watergate scandal started when Richard Nixon was president, and it began in 1972, two years before Nixon resigned. And at that point in 1972, Nixon was running for reelection. He became president in 1968, four years later in 1972. He's running for reelection, and his campaign was doing a lot of illegal things in an effort to make sure that Richard Nixon was reelected. And one of the things they wanted to do and tried to do but got caught doing was to break into the Democratic Party's national headquarters to try to steal information, secret information from the Democrats that could help them in their own campaign to reelect Richard Nixon. So the Nixon campaign, and there's no evidence that Richard Nixon knew about it when it was happening or actually directed it to happen. It's not as if you ordered somebody to do it, but the campaign, the Nixon campaign, broke into the Democratic Party's national office, which was in the Watergate Building, a famous office and residential building in Washington, D.C., which is why the scandal has been called the Watergate scandal. And the robbers were seen breaking in, they turned on the light it was seen, and the person who saw them called the local police. The police came, caught them in the act, caught the burglars in the act and arrested them. And so the Washington Post began to cover the story and look into it, first only as a minor local robbery, a local crime story. But then as the reporters at the Post began to dig deeper into this, they discovered that the Watergate burglars, who first was assumed this was a local burglary, had connections to the White House. They had the phone numbers on them of people in the White House who were working for the Nixon reelection campaign. So as they began to dig deeper and deeper, two young reporters at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who ended up becoming very famous, because they uncovered the story and they ended up writing a book, which was made into a very famous movie. They began to find more and more connections between the supposedly local burglary and the White House and the campaign to reelect Richard Nixon. And in the end, they were secretly given assistance by an anonymous source who at the time was only known as Deep Throat but who we now know was actually a high level official in the FBI who knew all about what was going on and helped the Washington Post uncover the scandal. Now, Richard Nixon probably didn't know about it when it was happening, but when he found out about it, instead of helping law enforcement deal with this case, he actually tried to stand in the way of law enforcement and tried to use the CIA and FBI to prevent law enforcement from investigating this crime. Now that is a crime in itself. That is what's called obstruction of justice. You cannot impede a lawful criminal investigation and that's what he did. And because of that, because he broke the law, Congress began to move toward a process for impeaching him, trying to remove him from office. And right before he was actually impeached, he decided to resign because he saw that there was no way he would be able to survive impeachment. And so rather than be kicked out of office, he decided to resign. So this Watergate scandal is a great example of how the press, because of its ability to do what it does and what it's supposed to do, is able to uncover scandals like this in a way that other American institutions cannot. So because it has such an important role, the media has very powerful constitutional freedoms that are built into the First Amendment. The First Amendment, for example, guarantees freedom of the press, guarantees the ability of the press to perform its two major goals, to inform the public and to serve as a watchdog in government, in a way that cannot be prevented by the government itself. Freedom of the press is designed to protect the nature of democracy. It's designed to protect the ability of the public, me and you, from having access to information, protect us and our ability to access information from the media. The First Amendment prohibits government from passing laws that prevent journalists from publishing facts and conducting investigations. So the press is allowed to report on stories as long as they're true. The press cannot openly lie, but they cannot be prevented from publishing facts and true stories, no matter how bad those facts and true stories would be to the government or whoever else they're writing about. The First Amendment also prohibits government from engaging in what's called prior restraint. Prior restraint means to prevent a publication that the government does not want to become public. So if the government discovers that a newspaper or internet news institution is about to publish a story that is going to make the government look bad, the government cannot do anything to stop it. The government can't pass a law to stop that from happening. The government cannot threaten a news institution against publishing, to not publish a story. A very famous example of this, where the government did try to engage in prior restraint, but was prevented from doing so by the Supreme Court, occurred in 1971, a little bit before Watergate, and that case had to do with something called the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers were an analysis of the Vietnam War that was conducted by the American government and the Rand Corporation, which was a private corporation that the U.S. government hired to conduct this analytical study of America's involvement in Vietnam. America was involved in the Vietnam War pretty much from the 1950s to the middle of the 1970s. It was up until Afghanistan. It was America's longest war. And so in the 1960s, the war wasn't going so well, so the U.S. government decided to conduct this major study to see how the war was going and to try to determine whether the U.S. should keep fighting in the war, whether the war was renewable. The study came back and was very critical of America's involvement in the Vietnam War, and basically said that America shouldn't be involved in the war, that the United States military and government had made a lot of bad choices, and that it really wasn't going to be prepared to do the kinds of things that were necessary to win the war. But despite the Pentagon Papers, despite the study having said that, what the government was publicly telling the American public was the exact opposite. The U.S. government was telling the American public that the war was going well, that America was winning and that America just needed to be in it a little bit longer and it would win. So in essence, the American government was lying to the American people. Why? Because they didn't want to admit that the war was not going badly. And the American government at the time in the 1960s, starting with Lyndon Johnson and then going into Richard Nixon, neither of those two presidents, Johnson or Nixon, wanted to be the president who gave up on the war. They wanted to have to take the blame and have people criticize them for giving up and losing the war. So because of that, both the Johnson administration and then the Nixon administration openly lied, knowingly lied to the American people. So in 1971, one of the people who was working at the Rand Corporation, who was involved in putting together this study, this report, was fed up with the fact that the American people were being lied to by the public. He took a copy of the Pentagon Papers, smuggled them out of his office because this was before the Internet, before email. So if you wanted to have a copy of a document, you really needed to have a hard copy. So what he did was he photocopied a copy for himself and he smuggled it out of the Rand building, his office. And he gave it to the New York Times. And so the New York Times started to write a big story about these Pentagon Papers. And one of the things that newspaper like the New York Times and Washington Post will do when they're writing a big story, like this involves the government, is they will inform the government that they're writing a story and that they have these Pentagon Papers and ask the government for its side of the story in order to have a balanced newspaper article you need to have both sides of the issue have an opportunity to give it a say. So when the government found out that the New York Times had a copy of this top secret document, they first warned the New York Times that they would use the law to punish the New York Times if it posted a story and then they tried to go to court. And so the New York Times back down, but then the New York Times decided to give a copy of the report to the Washington Post and the Washington Post then started publishing one story, two stories, and then the government then tried to go after the Washington Post and they sued the Washington Post and the case went all the way up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did not allow the government to do what it was doing. And the First Amendment said that what the government is trying to do here is what's called prior restraint and that's not allowed. So this Pentagon Papers established the Supreme Court precedent that says that the government cannot engage in prior restraint. It cannot stop the media from publishing a story that hasn't published yet that just because the government doesn't want it to. So just like every other civil liberty, there are two basic limitations on the freedom of the press. So there's no civil liberty that is completely unlimited. You can't yell fire in a crime movie theater, right? So there are two basic limitations on freedom of the press. One is libel, which is very similar to slander, which I talked about when in my lecture on civil liberties. Remember that slander means that you cannot knowingly lie about someone with the goal of hurting their reputation, hurting their career, hurting them. Libel is pretty much the same thing except that instead of saying something, it's written. So a newspaper, for example, cannot knowingly write something that's a lie about somebody with the intent to hurt them. You cannot use the media to lie about someone with the intention of hurting them. So that's libel. Another limitation includes certain instances where the protection of individual privacy is considered more important than the public's right to know. So for example, many states have laws that prevent the media, that prohibit the media from publishing the name of a rape victim. Most states also have laws that prevent the publication of the name of a child who's been the victim of sexual crime. During a trial, for example, the media is not allowed to publish the names of people who serve on juries. So these are limitations on freedom of the press and we have these limitations because in these instances that I just gave you examples of, the individual's right to privacy is more important than the public's right to know information from the media. Okay, so what is the mass media? And as I said before, media is a news source that reaches a lot of people. So mass media is a news source that reaches a mass of people, a lot of people at once. So let's talk about the evolution of mass media in the United States and in what stages people were, what certain mass media, what types of mass media people had at their disposal to get information from the very beginning of the United States. So the first real mass media outlet news source in the United States are newspapers which have existed as long as the United States itself has existed and there were even more newspapers back then than are today. Here in New York, we've only had a handful of major newspapers, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New York Post, The Daily News, and other smaller newspapers that exist back 100, 200 years ago there were even more newspapers in New York City. So newspapers at first and for a very long time were the only real news source that people had at their disposal. So most people got their news, well all people got their news from newspapers and even people who couldn't read would get access to the news because people would go to coffee houses or bars in New York City and read the newspaper out loud so that people who couldn't read could hear the news. So newspapers have existed all the way back to the very foundation of the United States in the 1780s. In the early 1920s radio emerged as another mass media source in the United States so since the 1920s people have also been able to get news from radio. And before TV radio wasn't mostly music, which is what it is today, it was actually more talk radio people and one source of talk radio was news reporting. And so radio existed since the 1920s and in the early 1940s you had network television the very beginning of television and at first when television really started to pick up in the 50s and 60s there were three major channels ABC, NBC and CBS and each of them had their own nightly news show which they still do but back then that was the only news on TV. Every night people would watch TV and watch TV for the news. And then cable television then came about adding to network television in 1980. Cable television news at least began in 1980. Cable TV itself was around for a few years by then in the mid 1970s, mid to late 1970s when you first got cable TV like HBO for example and other cable TV channels and there were very very few back then unlike today where there were hundreds. The very first cable TV news channel, 24 hour news channel was CNN which was started by a guy named Ted Turner in 1980. And that was a really big thing I mean imagine well first of all television the idea of 24 hour television kind of knew itself when I was a kid most TV stations cut out at 12 or 1 a.m. and started up at like 5, 6 a.m. the next morning and it's not like now where there is 24 hour TV almost on every channel. So the idea of a 24 hour station that would be devoted completely to news was quite a remarkable thing and it really did change the way news was reported because you not only had straight news on CNN but you also had analysis and political analysis that could be that often became skewed either in favor of conservatives or favor of liberals so you had the beginning of partisan news on TV at least. Partisan news has existed all the way from the beginning in the United States newspapers for example were very partisan major political parties had their own newspapers that often printed the news from their perspective. Radio also the same but the first real partisan cable news happened with CNN network television was pretty much straight forward just facts not really any political analysis or politically tinted analysis that really only started with CNN cable television. And then so CNN started off and then about 10 years later in the 1990s you had MSNBC that got created and then CNBC which was devoted to business news and then Fox News which came about because Fox News rubber Murdoch the Australian billionaire who started Fox News here in the United States felt that the American media was too liberal than the American television cable TV media was too liberal. So he decided to create a more conservative news source to cater to sort of viewers and that's where you that's where we we came up with Fox News. And then in the mid to late 1990s you had the beginning of the Internet Internet 1.0 which was based on just sort of static websites that weren't very two dimensionals only one dimensional you got on the Internet you read your news and that was it you were able to read the Internet but you weren't able to interact interacting and a more two way street that gave people not just the ability to read information on the Internet but also to publish their own information on the Internet came about with Internet 2.0 and the dissemination of news with Internet 2.0 became more fluid and in some ways more democratic meaning more open to everyone where anybody could publish their own news their own opinions very easily Internet 2.0 because what Internet 2.0 basically was is social media Facebook Twitter Instagram Facebook was created in 2004 Twitter came about in 2006 two years later and then four years after that in 2010 you had Instagram and now you also have Snapchat and all these other social media sources that allow people to interact with new sources to comment to engage to publish their own opinions on Facebook on Twitter and have it reach in some cases 100,000 people millions of people even Barack Obama for example has millions of followers on his Twitter account so when Barack Obama decides to post something political on a political opinion on Twitter it's instantly seen by millions of people who then can retweet it which means even more people can see it I have a Facebook account so if I want right after this lecture to get on and publish something on Facebook I can do that very easily in a way that I couldn't do in the age of network television radio newspaper or cable TV because I'm not wealthy enough to start a newspaper I'm not wealthy enough to start a radio station I'm not wealthy enough to start a network TV or cable TV station but I can I do have the access to post my pins on Facebook or Twitter whether true or not which is where the bad aspect of this comes internet 2.0 social media can be great but it can't be bad because all these other news news media sources have safeguards to make sure that they don't publish anything that is false that is misleading or intentionally misleading especially if it's intentionally misleading however the social media companies have always been very reluctant to play referee to decide if something is accurate or inaccurate Twitter has only recently been starting to do this Facebook has only recently been starting to do this and it's caused a lot of political tension because conservatives believe that social media is more apt to censor them than they are liberals and that may be true so conservatives think they're being picked on by the social media companies so internet 2.0 is a great thing because it allows people like you and me to publish news and to publish ideas or to create a podcast on YouTube for very little money but it's also bad because what if that podcast is designed to purposely mislead people that can cause a lot of harm physically emotionally politically it can cause a lot of harm now so you know as I sort of got into this just a second ago when I said that conservatives believe that the social media and really all media is too partisan is too anti-conservative the media is often criticized especially by conservatives for being too partisan but as I said before the American media has always been partisan newspapers have always been partisan since the beginning of the republic since the beginning of the United States so yes the media is partisan but it's always been like that this is not as if it's a new problem but in some ways you could argue that the media has now become even more partisan and that's because cable TV and internet cable TV and internet have changed the way news is delivered have changed the way people get their news because there are now so many more avenues for news because of this democratization of news that I talked about in the last slide if more and more people have cheap or even free access to publishing in the media you're obviously going to get more media sources and those media sources are going to be partisan some are going to be pro-conservative some are pro-liberal some are pro-socialist some are pro-anarchist and so because people have so many choices and because the choices are so partisan the media has become even more partisan because more people are quote narrow casting and what that means is that people are only getting their news from the kind of sources that they agree with from the kind of sources that gives them the news they want to hear not necessarily a balanced and non-partisan view of the news but the news from the partisan angle that they agree with so people are only hearing what they want to hear they're not getting necessarily a full perspective or the opposite perspective of people who might disagree with them who might get them to look at the news or a certain issue a different way and so it means narrow casting means more closed-minded more blinders on where you're only looking at news in a narrow way rather than a more open way of being exposed to different opinions one other big change in the media today is that there's more corporate ownership of the media newspapers radio stations and television news stations and even internet news stations news websites are more and more being bought by big corporations who then will manipulate and use that news source in a way that they want in a way that pushes their agenda so let's go back to the example of Rupert Murdoch and Fox News when Rupert Murdoch bought Fox News he was already a very wealthy man who owned other news stations around the world who owned and still owns other types of media entertainment companies like movie studios, TV studios, a TV Channel Fox here in New York, Fox News Network Channel 5 these are part of 20th Century Fox which is owned by Rupert Murdoch and so Rupert Murdoch created Fox News in a way to push his own political beliefs his own corporate beliefs which are very conservative and also to make money and in the attempt to make money these news networks will shape the news in a way that helps the corporation that owns them make more money now because of this, because of corporate ownership because of the explosion in the number of news sources, media sources there's also now a propensity for a feeding frenzy to occur whenever there's a big story and what I mean by feeding frenzy is a big huge competition between news outlets to be the first to report on a story because if you're the first to report on a story and you can continually advertise that your newspaper, your radio station, your TV station always gets the newest news first, the biggest news first than more people that watch your station and if more people are watching your station that station can charge more for advertising and that's how they make money through advertising that's how Facebook makes this money from advertising Facebook doesn't charge and does never charge people to join so how do they make their money? advertising so all these media outlets make their money through advertising so the more people are watching means the more people who are watching advertisements and that means that the stations, the TV stations, the newspapers, radio stations can charge more money for the advertising minutes and the more money they can charge, the more profit they make the more money they make so the feeding frenzy is designed as a reflection of this desire to be first but the problem with that is that in the desire to be first many times news outlets will report information that has not been properly verified and so they will report things initially that may not be true not because they're lying but because they haven't checked it out for example so for example on 9-11, September 11, 2001 there were lots of rumors going around lots of stories that were reported that turned out to be false so for example there was a story early in the day not long after the World Trade Center in Pentagon were attacked that the State Department, that a bomb went off in the State Department there was also a rumor that a car bomb went off on the George Washington Bridge that didn't happen but it was still reported in news media because some reporter heard the story and went on TV and reported it as though it happened even though they hadn't properly checked it because they wanted to make sure that no other reporter got the story first, reported the story first so in the race to be first you can often make mistakes and that's what's called the feeding frenzy like pigeons that will run after a piece of bread if you throw it from a park bench they all want to be the first to get to the bread same way that newspaper reporters, TV reporters, radio reporters want to be first that is the end of this lecture I will see you for the next one