Limiting the Power of the Press

When my daughter was a junior in high school, she took a class in psychology. One of the choices for her final project was to play the role of a psychologist in studying the mind of a serial killer.  The purpose of the project was to understand what made these individuals do the horrible things they did. I did not allow her to choose that option on the grounds that the subject material was too disturbing and she didn’t have enough maturity or objectivity to deal with it appropriately and I didn’t want what she learned to have a negative effect on her psyche. 

At the time, she felt that I was unfairly censoring her choices, but later she told me the teacher herself reported being seriously affected by the content of the papers.  Ironically, a few months ago, one of my students had to do a project on a current event and I suggested she write about the Las Vegas shooting by Stephen Paddock, which had been featured in the news.  To date, no one has been able to come up with a motive for the shooting, although the case has been extensively studied by psychologists and law enforcement experts. My student was taking a class on American government and chose to talk about the incident in the context of the Second Amendment and the interpretation of the right to bear arms.

I wrote my own version of the article, in which I said that one of the motivations behind the actions of mass shooters is that the Internet has allowed news to reach a larger audience than ever before through many different platforms. The horrific deeds of these mass murderers are subject to endless commentary and publicity, which creates a twisted fascination which may inspire emulators, eager for their share of the spotlight.

The larger issue was not about the Second Amendment, but about the scope of the First Amendment, which protects the press and media from government interference except for threats to national security.  The movie Zero Dark Thirty grossed over $95 million dollars in the US when it came out in 2012 and was nominated for Best Picture, attesting to its popularity. One of the scenes showed the torture of al Qaeda terrorists by the US military in an effort to get information from them that would lead to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. We were supposed to understand that this is fictionalized violence and therefore give it artistic license.  But paradoxically, the movie seemed to desensitize us to the fact that content has meaning, and violent and vulgar content goes against the standards of moral and acceptable behavior. 

When Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, the book was banned by many high schools in the US despite vigorous protest for its use of vulgar language, sexual and sometimes violent content.  It was easy to limit readership since the Internet did not exist at that time. Almost 30 years later, Mark David Chapman attributed his shooting of John Lennon to the book’s influence, showing the impact of such content can be on easily impressionable minds.I believe that some censorship of visual and print media is necessary. First, because the potential audience has gotten bigger through the Internet and the global reach of social media,  second because it limits the glorification of morally reprehensible acts by not publishing them,  and third because it benefits the public welfare by not exposing them to harmful or dangerous behaviors.  Canadian psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson suggested that if we are ever to stop such incidents from repeating it may be more advisable to get the press to voluntary restrict what it reports about  violent crimes. Since such individuals are characterized by attention seeking behavior, he believes that negative reinforcement should result in extinction.

According to an article in the Op Ed section of the January 8^th edition of the Wall Street Journal, the 1931 Supreme Court case of Near v Minnesota, denied a petition by the state of Minnesota to limit the exercise of free speech and freedom of the press. The background for the decision was the passage of a gag law in the state in 1925 to combat the spread of yellow journalism.  J. M. Near was the publisher of The Saturday Press, a Minneapolis newspaper which reported on corruption in city politics. The county attorney filed a lawsuit against the newspaper, alleging that the reports were defamatory and false and violated the gag law. The lower courts supported the suit and prohibited the newspaper from publishing such articles in the future. Near took the case all the way to the Supreme Court where in a 5-4 decision the Supreme Court declared that the lower court ruling was a violation of the First Amendment. Chief Justice Hughes explained his reasoning by saying that the Founding Fathers felt that the public should be aware of anything the government did wrong and the press should not be restricted from publishing such information simply because it portrayed government officials in an unfavorable light. This was a defense of accountability journalism, which reports on the actions of powerful people.

Writer Barton Swaim has written a book review of Michael Wolff’s book, The Fire and The Fury, a tell all account of the goings on in the early days of the Trump administration in the same edition of the Wall Street Journal. Trump has threatened to sue the publisher of Wolff’s book for libel in an attempt to block publication but it is unlikely that he will win his case.Wolff’s book falls under the category of access journalism, characterized by the website  https://theoutline.com/post/1604/access-journalism-is-not-for-you-or-me as  journalism that “too often reports bullshit without identifying the source of the bullshit.” It is more gossip relying on hearsay and interpretation of events rather than factually based reporting and therefore not guilty of libel as Trump would imply. Trump's case is further weakened by the fact that any news he doesn't like is automatically considered fake news. The standards of responsible journalism have declined over time, but the media still has an undeniable effect on the shaping of public opinion and perception, and if it has been reduced to reporting that is either factually unsubstantiated or unnecessarily sensationalized, perhaps the time has come to re-visit its limits.