Rights you lost, Rights you don’t care about, And some whole other thing completely

Americans love options. Case in point, we’re doing our grocery shopping last night—online, of course, because that was a great option even before The Rona. Type in “cereal” and decision-paralysis sets in when we are confronted with 14-pages of choices running from sugary Fruit Loops to high-fiber Stix-and-Twigs.

Because we’re option-loving Americans we seemingly need multiple ways to cast aside our rights as well. We’ll go to the First Amendment for today’s examples. That excellent document outlines three categories of constitutional rights, each with two components (nifty, isn’t it? Follow the commas and semi-colons).

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The first way to lose your rights is to simply have them removed from you by law or decree. The loss-by-decree way is lately all-the-rage in the U.S. Sure, there is an ongoing debate over whether the widespread restrictions on our ability to practice our religion or peaceably assemble is justifiable as a response to the virus dominating the headlines. Perhaps I’ll tackle the justification topic in a future article.

The largely undisputed point here is that you currently have fewer rights related to assembly and to religious practice than you did in January, and those rights were removed from you by someone else.

Another long-popular way to waive your rights is simple lack of interest. The guy who doesn’t want to go to church neither cares nor notices when <<insert your favorite governor here>> tells him he no longer has the right to go. The introverted gal who isn’t inclined to be in the same room with you doesn’t especially care when you remove her right to assembly, peaceably or otherwise. (These folks are baffled you could use the words “assembly” and “peaceful” together in the same sentence.)

There is a third way to have your rights removed, and I have a hard time precisely defining it. It conveniently refers to part of the third category that we haven’t discussed yet: freedom of the press.

I don’t know anyone who would say that the press-at-large is predominately objective. I suppose that has always been true to a degree, but it seems worse now. Whichever side of the political spectrum you find yourself on, you have likely noted that nearly every news outlet has a bias.

That bias blurs their lines between news and editorial opinion. Editorial opinion then blurs into outright activism. We used to be blissfully ignorant when the news outlets moved to activism, but they are not even hiding it anymore. A good many of them will come out a say something equivalent to “We believe X is bad (or good) therefore our institution will report news that reinforces that stance.”

Oh, for the happiness of the feigned objectivity of yesteryear.

Those who enshrined the importance of a free press in the First Amendment did so with good reason. The press was to be the disinterested watchman; giving us the facts-and-just-the-facts so that a free, thinking population could assess the importance of those objective facts as they intersect with their own lives. A great majority of the press has abandoned that approach.

So where does that leave us with the freedom of the press? Do we still have it? I guess, in name. It is not, however, something that functions the way that was intended. It would be analogous to our country suspending elections but still leaving us the right to vote. It is great to have the right to vote—meaningless if we never hold another election.

The freedom of the press has not been stripped from us (yet). Neither are we disinterested in it—media outlets abound and we are all on them. Yet this wholly different dynamic of a press that increasingly neglects its primary function has resulted in a removal of the function of that First Amendment right—albeit not the right itself.

I am uncertain what the American public can do about this, and I welcome ideas.

Perhaps there are news outlets whose format is to report strict facts, then follow-up with an editorial blurb from two opposite sides of the question—much like our voter guides give us for ballot initiatives. “Statement For” and “Statement Against”

Another approach is to embrace the bias. There are going to be outlets that lean right and outlets that lean left. It is not hard to find ones that are honest about their perspective. A discerning reader could find one of each and get the news from both sources. The outlets may not be balanced, but this approach at least brings the results closer to it.

I would recommend staying clear of any media outlet that claims to be 100% impartial but shows through their actions to be anything but. Someone who informs you of their political bias as they report the news is at least being honest. Someone who claims impartiality while disseminating obvious bias is lying to you—and if they would lie about that, they would also lie about the facts they are reporting on in the first place.

It is a tough nut to crack. The notion of freedom of the press is only going to be meaningful to society at large if each person values it and takes active steps to keep the press honest–probably by no longer frequenting the outlets that are proven habitually dishonest. It is up to all of us to keep close watch on this right or it will be gone forever.

In that way it is like the rest of them.