America The Beautiful. Where You Can't Speak Your Opinion Unless The Press Lets You Speak |
Conservatives gasped with horror when Twitter banned President
Trump’s account and Google, Apple and Amazon banned Parler.
Why is anyone surprised? Media outlets have been censoring
conservatives for decades in America.
Back in the days before iPhones and social media, the only way for
politicians to communicate with the public — i.e. “voters” — was through
old-fashioned, traditional means: like newspapers, television, radio and the
US Postal Service.
In 1984, former Congressman Alex McMillan of Charlotte (R-NC9)
won a squeaker of a race over Democrat D.G. Martin by the slimmest of
margins, 321 votes out of over 225,000 votes cast.
To provide historical perspective for Millennials, Apple introduced the
MacIntosh personal computer in 1984. A decade later, the internet was
developed. Two decades later, along came social media. There were very
limited avenues through which conservatives could communicate directly
with their constituents without filters from editors and journalists who
disagreed with them and essentially suppressed their free speech.
I was chief of staff to Congressman McMillan when his 1986 re-election
race was the #1 targeted campaign in the country. In an attempt to build
mutual trust with the Charlotte Observer, we allowed their quite capable
political reporter, John Monk, full access to our office for four months to do
an in-depth story about congressional life in general.
When the article came out in the Charlotte Observer, it painted
McMillan in an unfavorable light right in the middle of a tight re-election
campaign. After blowing out John for writing such a hatchet job, for which
I had to apologize later, he sent me the full article as printed in the Augusta,
Georgia, paper which was part of the same Knight-Ridder chain that
owned the Charlotte Observer.
No one in Augusta, Georgia, voted for McMillan in Charlotte, North
Carolina.
It was fair and balanced, just as John said it would be. But the Observer
editors had selectively edited the story down about 30%, ostensibly for
space concerns. It was blatantly obvious they did it to help D.G. Martin
in his rematch against McMillan because they agreed with him on every
issue, not McMillan.
We submitted numerous opinion pieces to the Observer over the next
decade only to see most of them rejected. The Observer was owned
and operated by staunch liberal Democrats who simply did not want to
allow conservative Republicans a forum to air their political views and
philosophy.
As a privately owned company, they were entirely within their right to
deny access to anyone they did not want to publish. It was just infuriating
to conservatives to be constantly told the press is “fair, neutral and
impartial,” when in actual practice, they are not.
We went around such editorial roadblocks by mailing out eight million
newsletters, town hall meeting notices and congressional updates to
250,000 households at taxpayer expense via the congressional franking
privilege. Not proud to have to admit such a wasteful government expense,
but the franking privilege and about $1.5 million in campaign ads, an
enormous amount in 1986, were the only two ways we could get past media
censorship and biased reporting in North Carolina.
It worked; Alex McMillan won re-election by 4,221 votes, a virtual landslide compared to his 1984 win.
Not much has changed in the media world politically since then except
for the rise of Fox News, which used to be the news outlet of choice for
conservatives for 30 years. Subscriptions and circulation have plummeted
at large newspapers, but they still are echo chambers for such partisan
political narratives as “Russian Collusion” and “Moderate Joe Biden.”
The most troubling thing is how elite liberal media editors use the
freedom of the press guarantee in the First Amendment to pound out the
free speech clause of the same amendment for others.
Be completely fair to
all points of view or be honest enough to admit a specific bias so readers can
make up their own minds about whether they agree with you or not.
Conservatives have to stop whining about the liberal bias of the media
and start owning their own news outlets. Conservatives should figure out
what is going to replace social media and get ahead of the curve, not be
smashed by it.
There were thousands of newspapers and pamphlets, all of them
partisan to the federalist or anti-federalist point of view at the beginning
of the republic, many virulently so. America is going to be far better off as
a country going forward with a cacophony of opposing views instead of the
silence that follows dictatorial censorship of views that media chairmen,
publishers or editors don’t like.
(first published in North State Journal 1/27/21)
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