Snow Sees First Amendment Threat from Media Practices
By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 10/17/2007 8:32:00 AM
Former White House press secretary Tony Snow said there is a threat to the First Amendment, and it comes from within.
"There is an ideological sameness to major news organizations, and that makes for bad journalism and bad business, and it's bad for the First Amendment," he said, "which was designed for ferocious competion of ideas and not orthodoxy."
Accepting the Freedom of Speech Award from The Media Institute Tuesday night in Washington, D.C., Snow was initially too overcome with emotion to speak after thanking his wife for her support through his bout with cancer. "Unlike Ed Muskie," he said, "I never would have made it in politics." But when he got his bearings, Snow lit forcefully into the media over what he saw as their bias, smugness and technology-driven shallowness and more.
He said he loved journalism, otherwise he wouldn't have been a journalist for 28 years. But he added that the threat he was talking about "doesn't come from the government, doesn't come from wackos, doesn't come from organized groups on the outside, but instead it comes from the media itself."
Snow said the press has gone from wild and untamed in its beginnings to a "period of consolidation and gentrification," with control in a handful of elite institutions like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, as well as the major TV networks that "shaped and defined not merely what counted as news but what counted as acceptable opinion."
Now, he said, news has returned to the Wild West. "Ideas and controversies are erupting from every pore of the body politic," he added, a particularly graphic image. Technology may have democratized the media he said, but politcal rhetoric has turned nasty, childish and personal, and people are "sick of it."
He said the reason why newspapers are losing readers and TV viewers is not because there is less appetite for news, but because the media aren't delivering it.
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