15
Jul
Good News, Bad News
It was too good to be true.
The Romanian Senate recently and unanimously voted in favor of a law that would require fifty percent of the news reported by media outlets in that country to distribute “positive news.”
Senators said the law would help to fight against “the extraordinary harms of negative news and their irreversible effects on health and people’s lives,” and left it to Romania’s National Council for Audiovisual Broadcasting to decide what constitutes good or bad news.
But no — the Council was not content to leave enough good alone, and swiftly denounced the new law. “News is news,” noted Council president Rasvan Popescu. “It is neither positive nor negative, it simply reflects reality.” Press freedom groups such as Reporters Without Borders also criticized the proposal, calling it “unacceptable for a member state of European Union,” and comparing it to similar laws in countries such as China and North Korea.
Faced with this summary of discontent, Romania’s constitutional court ruled last week that the law infringed freedom of expression and was thus unconstitutional. The ruling blocked the government’s effort to require radio and television stations to broadcast good and bad news in equal proportions. “Romanians have a right to doom and gloom,” concluded Agence France-Presse.
The aim of the law, according to two senators who had proposed it, was to “improve the general climate and to offer to the public the chance to have balanced perceptions on daily life, mentally and emotionally”. But as Audiovisual Council president Popescu concluded, “I don’t believe that the introduction of such a quantitative criteria can work. Events cannot be programmed, nor can minds.”
It’s easy to make fun of this brief Romanian rollout of media-mandated happiness, of course. Sophisticated media savants, after all, are always quick with a quip about the naïve natives… But judging from this week’s hysterical outcry over the controversial New Yorker cover illustration showing a “Muslim, flag-burning, Osama-loving, fist-bumping Obama,” and the resulting calls from the media that the media restrain itself from such “tasteless and offensive” displays, maybe we’re not as sophisticated as we claim. Maybe we don’t believe that “Events cannot be programmed, nor can minds.” Instead, maybe we fear that they can.
If so, is anyone else ready to cowboy up for some more happy news? If so, maybe we can sponsor legislation that will in the future forbid all such “arrogant, indulgent, derogatory, incendiary, shocking and (maybe) racist” acts of journalism?
Oops — you’re right, that would be unconstitutional, wouldn’t it?
The real problem with news reporting in this country involves the main stream media, the big television corporations who only report what they want and slant it in ways the government approves. I don’t watch national news because it makes me sick but yesterday evening my wife insisted she watch the CBS national news on my tv. I had to listen to a young woman reporting on the Fannie/Freddie scandal and blathering tripe that was blatantly untrue. She probably didn’t even know it herself. If she could have told the truth, she wouldn’t have been allowed to do so. Nowadays, mainstream news means repeating what the government says. That’s not news, it’s propaganda. I don’t listen to it. I end up screaming at the tv, wholly unproductive for me.
July 15th, 2008 at 12:56 pmI don’t watch most major news networks because the majority of them are pushing a liberal agenda which is pessimistic, or at least negative, demeaning, and most often incomplete. Half the truth is a lie and I’m sick of watching commentators who’ve taken on political agendas. They support one candidate over another, one position over another,and it all appears to be the kind of government they push is what we’ve spent the years since WWII trying to defeat.
July 15th, 2008 at 2:14 pmRory:
July 15th, 2008 at 2:42 pmyou opening discribes you completly– are they going to ban you?
The cover just exemplifies the racial stereotypes that Jackson says is still a reality. So, what is the truth? How do the citizens really view African-Americans, Muslims, Blacks and fellow citizens? Is every person of color a terrorist in our midst. Are we scared to death, or is the righ fear mongering, and the press cheering this on?
July 15th, 2008 at 2:52 pmSince I like writing with the sharp edge of the hatchet, I don’t mind a bit of blood on the keys, except my own.
July 15th, 2008 at 3:04 pmI thought the drawing on the New Yorker cover was slovenly and the art direction sophomoric but it sure sold papers. Then again the artists etch a sketch might have been low on gas.
The New Yorker is a magazine of limited interest to a limited number of people. Their cover amounts to the same strategies used by the likes of Don Imus and Howard Stern. The newsmedia are the ones who should be faulted for endlessly screaming about this. They are only giving millions of dollars in free advertising and plugs for The New Yorker.
July 15th, 2008 at 5:48 pmIt is already clear to the dullest mind, product of public schools, that n”on-fictional information must be regulated somehow. But how?. Markets, of information as of anything else, I suggest can only be operated where categorizing definitions–a science that separates realistic from unreal behaviors, within that sphere–applies equally to everyone’s actions, in order to forbid crimes and toallow the participant access to rights after he/she has satisfied fundamental regulations of “how to proceed”. In other wrds, participatiuon in non-fictional speech, publishing, commentary, eytc. is a right–but it must be claimed under regulations whereby one safeguards the rights of others in a non-negligent fashion.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:07 amThus, the three fundamental distinctions here shou;ld be clear: one cannot regulate content of freedom of speech practiced by non-criminal, non-collectivists. What one can and I assert must govern, confine within rational limits, is the form by which one claims levels of non-fictional rights hrough–what needs to be included and what exluded and the nature and limits of the rights claimed thereby.
This means non-fiction must be confined I suggest by three basic rules:
1. Attested facts can be claimed as “facts”; myths cannot be retailed as anything by unspported beliefs, labeled as “in my opinion”, “I feel”, “some claim”, “these persons suggest”, etc.
2. Standards-based evaluations, achieved by defining a scienific definition of good (in full form) and then applying its standard of measurement to an individual case or to cases
must be differentiated from attitudes–from discontexted positive or negative claims made by anyone upon no reality basis necessarily at all. The former scientific procedure then once suplied gains the speaker accesss to value terms–good, bad, excellent, terrible, great, awful, valuable, harmful to be applid to the subject under discussion; failure to provide such a full categorizing standard of value leaves one with opinion level words only, thisrestriction to be enforced by moderators or editors–”I like”, “I dislike”, “prefer”, “I don’t prefer”, “I find better or worse”, “I approve or disapprove of”–but denies the user of such hazy stuff access to the words think, know, prove, understand, evaluate, argue, have proven, and the terms stated above.
3. A full scientific proof, a categorizing definition drawn upon 5–6 prioritized internal definitions of the essentialsof of how anything works to be normatively what it is in reality–a full definition of science–is required…. Anything else as “information” refers to unsupported, incomplete or unprovable beliefs, and must be relegated to such terms as “I believe”, “in my opinion”, “I feel”, “I suggest”–but deny the user of such bases the words prove, think, assert, profess, by this theory it is true, etc., etc.
This leaves generic headlines, easily enforceable, the supplying a title as condign context for any images, identifying the difference between real versus manufactured footage, distinction between documentary information and any other sort, fitionalized-dramatized versus true biography, fiction versus non-fictiion, and the difference between visual and audial space-time informations, their necessary labeling and conduct.
But with these threedefinitions firmly in place in our formerly nonexistent Constitutional approach to information, true marketplaces can be set up and operated–by those following rules and watching out for their own and others’ rights; elections become possible again by applying equal treatment to all candidates; critics can be distinguished from opinion mongers and hack career assassins, the stars in TV Guide’s editors savagee approach disappear, the Leonard Maltins of the world have to watch the film themselves and define what a fictional film is before employing value terms; and actors will no longer talk about their old pal Sadie as”a good, great, excellent actress” etc. without reference to something other than “we made a film togther and I liked her.” Oh, and by the way, John Kerry becomes a tested military leader, and John McCain is a guy who served honorably in the military and got shot down, nothing else, Barack Obama lacks specific military experience, and George W, Bush becomes someone served in the military in peacetime and refused for suspicious reasons to pilot an aircraft in Vietnam and was excused under still-unexplained circumstances from his former commitment to the military. No longer will “Obama Hope for Victtory in West Virginia” while his oppponents get no mention; and no longer will four
or six newstwisters of zero philosophic training and experience sit around for an hour telling us what the candidate justwas permitted to say for ten minutes. Opinion polls will be regulated; the Republic can be restored–and every man’s reputation will be safe from flannelmouthed boobies, slanderers, attackers with a shadow agenda and public-corporate. character assassins.That’s what regulations do for anyone–they provide the rules of the game according to which facts can be asserted, value can prove itself, the normative prosper and the sub-normative, failed, non-scientists and and criminal must be revealed and shown the exit from the stage of world affairs.
RIGHT, there you go, completely twist the issue and spin the discussion wildly into some crazy area…
Who the heck ever said anything about Laws to Regulate cartoons or magazine covers?
Who the heck is trying to deny the First Amendment rights of anyone in this matter?
No one, nobody is doing or suggesting such nonsense: the New Yorker magazine has it’s opinions and First Amendment rights, and so does everyone else… and that’s exactly what people have been expressing, when they’ve expressed criticism of the New Yorker cartoon.
BUT SURE, twist the argument into something strange and non-existent, twist it and spin it into an argument you can’t possibly lose…
Make it out as though someone somewhere were trying to enact a Law against cartoons, or against the New Yorker…
Make it out as though someone somewhere was trying to deny First Amendment rights to the New Yorker or anybody else.
That’s a lie: no one nowhere is doing any such thing.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:23 amI agree with the New Yorker magazine. That’s the wake up call for the American people before it’s too late. Barack Houssein Obama is not an African-American, but an Islam Black. The Muslim transplanted him like a virus to our government as VC did it during Vietnam war that could not be detected even CIA. So, we better prevent than cure the problem in the future. Besides, it’s our First Amendment rights that’s needed to be protected.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:14 amTypical rightwing lunatics using blatant lies thinking it’ll give them any credence to the subject. Get a grip man! YOU are so out of touch with reality it’s scary. You must be the one Bush and McCain were talking about when they mentioned “psychological.”
July 20th, 2008 at 4:41 pm