More than two hundred years ago, the drafters of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution gave "the press" a unique, privileged status among American businesses: freedom from government censorship of its editorial content, formally guaranteed in the language of the Constitution. Two hundred years later, we hardly speak anymore about "the press;" instead we speak of "the media," a term which is technically a Latin derived plural, but is more often not used in the singular. "The media is ..." in part what used to be called the press newspapers and magazines but it also includes radio, broadcast and cable television, movies (in the theater, on TV, and at your neighborhood video store). "900" telephone toll number services are a recent addition to "the media," and others are no doubt in store.
The mass media are our window on the world; in fact, our window in virtually everything outside our own neighborhood. Was open use of crack cocaine and other illegal drugs on the rise even "out of control" during the last few years? Was the real estate market booming, at least in most of the country, until last year at any rate? The media assured us that both of these things are true. Few of us could easily check these stories directly; if you live in a neighborhood with crack dealers at the corner, it is unlikely that you saw house prices shooting up by $100,000 every few months, and vice versa. Was Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuwait extraordinarily brutal? Was Operation Desert Storm a virtually bloodless (for Americans) triumph? Is Saddam still in power, and crushing Iraqi dissidents with the same brutality he showed in Kuwait? Few of us know any of this at first hand. We learn it from "the media."
The Founding Fathers presumed that a free and independent press would act as a check on the government. Today, the media are still independent of government, and in some ways freer of overt interference than e...