Selective Scrutiny – The Death of the Fourth Estate
When the British Parliament first opened its House of Commons to press reporting in 1787, famed orator and Member of Parliament Edmund Burke described the press as the fourth estate, the other three being (in that country) the Church, the ruling classes in the House of Lords, and those representatives in the House of Commons, itself. Since that time, it has been deemed essential in representative democracies that a free press be the watchdog of all things governmental, so that the people remain informed of the powers they elect. In the United States, this notion was codified in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, indicating that freedom of the press shall not be infringed upon.
In order for a free press to properly keep the people informed, a covenant of trust must exist between the press and the people it serves – essentially that, in its reporting, impartiality takes precedent to the personal opinions of its reporters. The degree to which this covenant of trust is violated is directly proportional to the deterioration of the people’s right to be informed, and when this violation extends into the extreme, the fourth estate of a free press dies under the weight of its own excess.
This week has witnessed the final throes of death for the free press as we know it.
On Wednesday, June 1st, State Department spokesman and former rear-Admiral John Kirby admitted that the footage of former spokeswoman Jen Psaki, conceding that the State Department under President Obama makes it a policy to occasionally lie to the press in order to conceal secret negotiations with regimes such as Iran, was intentionally excised on orders of an unnamed senior official with the State Department. Kirby also indicated that the individual making this decision will remain unnamed, and that investigation into this decision will not take place. Can anyone imagine the outrage the press would voice if these were the actions of a Republican administration?
Compare for another instance the draconian degree of scrutiny that the major media has unleashed on Donald Trump, regarding the $ 5.6 million he raised when he skipped the debate on the eve of January’s Iowa caucus, to the complete and total lack of scrutiny on the financial dealings of the Clinton Foundation and its related Clinton Global Initiative. On the one hand, the desire to raise money for the veterans comes under the microscope of insinuation and aspersion when, in the end, 100% of the money raised by Donald Trump has been itemized and distributed to twenty-two organizations, having been thoroughly vetted since that time, who serve the needs of wounded and disabled veterans across the country. On the other hand, the most charitable and favorable reports have indicated that only 10% of the money contributed to the multi-million dollar Clinton Foundation has actually been given to the organizations it claims to support. Add this revelation to the growing scandal associated with Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while Secretary of State, and the two ongoing FBI investigations related to this, as well as Hillary’s suspected selling of State Department favors to contributors to the Clinton Global Initiative, and one easily can see the hypocrisy of the major media when it comes to the comparative coverage of the two presumptive nominees to the presidential election.
The message? The media will rake a Republican nominee over the coals in attempt to de-legitimize his candidacy, regardless of who he happened to be, while a Democrat nominee can violate the law, peddle influence on a massive and felonious scale without a peep from the major media.
In a September 22, 2015 essay entitled The Gotcha Game- How the Media Controls Elections ( http://www.drewnickell.com/?p=312 ), we elaborated how the media plays an active role in determining the actual results of elections across the country in its practice of excessively-biased reporting. Label this effort to bring down Trump, from all supposed sides of the major media, “Exhibit A” as proof of this reality.
Perhaps Donald Trump has been less than artful in describing the media in his diatribes against what has become increasingly partisan and preferential to Hillary Clinton, but in these inartfully-stated diatribes lies the truth that the major media is largely nothing more than a sleazy slate of reprehensible reporters, all in the tank to elect Hillary Clinton president of the United States, and also cover-up the considerable corruption that exists in the Obama Administration.
Hence, the death of the fourth estate of a free press, as we have come to know it.
-Drew Nickell, 2 June 2016
© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.