Wilson: Hi, everyone. My name is Wilson Shirley.
And welcome to the American Enterprise Institute's
the Bradley Lectures on the AEI podcast channel.
The Bradley Lectures, given for over a quarter-century
at AEI beginning in September 1989, were sponsored
by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.
AEI senior fellow Karlyn Bowman and I hope
to bring new life to this series by releasing
them as podcasts for your enjoyment.
In this episode, we're revisiting what's wrong
with the media and how to put it right by
the British journalist and historian Paul
Johnson, originally delivered at our headquarters
in October 1994. In 1979, Paul Johnson was
named AEI's first-ever Dewitt Wallace fellow.
This lecture predated alternative facts and
fake news, and most importantly, it was given
before the internet became part of the media
landscape. Yet Mr. Johnson's contrast between
the ideal and the reality of American media
stands the test of time.
Drawing on the Book of John, Thomas Jefferson,
Milton, and Daniel Webster, Johnson asks his
audience to demand moral media aware of its
moral obligations to society. With that goal
in mind, he offers his own guide in the form
of a new list of 7 deadly sins and 10 commandments
for a media that even in 1994 often fell short
of its essential role in the success of a
Republican government. It's a missionary role
to seek the truth and to educate the public
through information regardless of what the
public might think it wants to know. And with
that, here's Paul Johnson on what's wrong
with the media and how to put it right?
Paul: I've entitled this talk, "What's wrong
with the media and how to put it right?" But
I've also added a subtitle, "Can the media
make a moral contribution to our culture?"
Because we expect large groups in society
to make a moral contribution, we expect the
churches, for instance, quite rightly, we
expect in our own way the government to make
a moral contribution to our society in the
sense that we expect it to try and improve
the ethics on which our society is run.
But we don't always see the media in these
terms, and I think that is wrong. And therefore,
when I'm asked the question, can the media
make a moral contribution to our culture and
our society? I say, not only can it do so
but it must do so, and we must ensure that
it does so. It is potentially a great secular
church, a system of evangelism for dispersing
the darkness of ignorance, expelling era and
establishing truth. I don't know whether any
of you have recently read St. John's Gospel,
but it could be described as a celebration
of the importance of truth. The word is used
again and again, in all its meanings, the
importance of truth, and the need to convey
it. It is in a way the gospel of the media
and the Jesus of Nazareth presenting it might
almost be called the first journalist bringing
the good news to mankind.
He spoke in the temple when he was allowed
and in wayside places if need be, anywhere
where he could collect a crowd. And he aimed
his words at the masses, not just the elites,
indeed principally the masses. Can anyone
doubt that the man who once preached to the
5,000 would today use all the resources of
the mass-circulation newspaper and above all
TV if he could? I am the way, the truth, and
the light. Those are the words of the dedicated
reporter he who brings the news which sets
the people free.
Now I say that because it's to remind you
that earlier ages had no doubt that the media
had moral purposes and moral duties. John
Milton in his great prose polemic "Areopagitica"
defending the right to print and publish,
which he addressed to the parliament of England
in 1644. In that book, it brings from start
to finish with the poet's exalted conception
of the writer's role in elevating and purifying
society. The freedom to publish, Milton asserted,
is the foundation of all civil liberties.
As he puts it, "Give me the liberty to know,
to utter, and to argue freely according to
conscience above all liberties."
Freedom of the press produce and ought to
produce a variety of views, he continued,
"Where there is much desire to learn, there
of necessity will be much arguing, much writing,
many opinions; for opinion in good men is
but knowledge in the making." But added Milton,
"Where there was freedom to publish, we could
be confident of the outcome. Though all the
winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon
the earth, so truth be in the field, we do
injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting
to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood
grapple, whoever knew truth put to the worse,
in a free and open encounter." That's the
words of John Milton.
Now "Areopagitica" might be called the foundation
document of the right of the media to be free
and its duty to arrive at the truth, but the
media's function was enormously increased
and still more exalted by the creation of
the United States of America. It is impossible
to conceive of the American Revolution or
the process whereby the Declaration of Independence
was written, the United States Constitution
agreed and ratified and amended by the Bill
of Rights without the interplay of Congress,
newspapers, and public opinion.
Almost from the start, those who created America
as a free society believes strongly in the
natural good sense of humanity. The people
would be virtuous and take the right courses
so long as they were fully informed of the
truth and the truth reach them essentially
through the newspapers. One of the most striking
characteristics of the early United States
was the rapidity with which newspapers were
set up as the frontier expanded. Cincinnati,
for instance, got its first newspaper in 1793
when it had fewer than 500 citizens. In 1808,
St. Louis got the first paper west of the
Mississippi when less than 1500 people lived
there. And Leavenworth in Kansas got his own
paper in 1854 when the town consisted of four
tents.
Noah Webster, who created the American dictionary
and might be described as the ideologist of
freedom of printing in America as Milton was
in England, argued in the first issue of the
newspaper he founded that the press was essential
to the success of Republican government because
it was the only way, the only sure way, to
correct its abuses. The best-informed people,
he wrote, are the least subject to passion,
intrigue, and the corrupt administration.
Newspapers, the source of information, should
therefore be encouraged by the authorities
just as schools were. Like schools, he said
they should be considered as the auxiliaries
of government and placed upon the respectable
footing, they should be the heralds of truth,
the protectors of peace and of good order.
This was the prevailing view and government
deliberately helped to finance newspapers
through printing contracts and special postage
rates. All editors exchanged papers in those
days because it was their main source of news
in other communities and this traveled posts-free.
In the publisher's home territory, all local
papers went free through the post. America
got the strongest, the most widely dispersed,
and the most decentralized press in the world
because for most of the 19th-century government
subsidized it by these means. Thomas Jefferson
himself, the third President of the United
States and the key man, in my view, in the
growth of its democracy laid down in the same
year as the United States Constitution was
drawn up. "Were it left to me to decide whether
we should have a government without newspapers
or newspapers without a government, I should
not hesitate a moment to prefer newspapers."
Amazing words.
Yet it was the same Thomas Jefferson, who
20 years later in 1807, 20 years later and
wiser, rewrote, "The man who never looks into
a newspaper is better informed than he who
reads them in so much as he who knows nothing
is nearer to the truth than he whose mind
is filled with all sorts and errors." Here,
neatly encapsulated in Jefferson's conflicting
judgments is the contrast between the ideal
and the reality of the media.
In the garden of Eden, where truth and freedom
grow, the media, not as we want it to exist,
but it is actually does exist, is the serpent
which introducing mankind to the tree of knowledge
bids this eat of the fruit which is evil as
well as good. Like Adam and Eve, we can't
do without the media apple, we feel we must
eat it whatever the consequences. Electronic
printing and global satellite communications
have transformed it since Jefferson's day
but the dilemma remains, we need the media
to make democracy work at all, but we rightly
fear the damage and corruption its frailties
inflict on our society.
How do we maximize the good and minimize the
evil? The state can't do it. Of course, the
media is subject to the same laws as everyone
else to the monopoly laws, the laws of liable
for instance, but we can't impose a special
legal regimen on it to compel it to be good.
As Milton argued 350 years ago, such laws
would be wrong in themselves and they wouldn't
work anyway. You can impose censorship for
a limited purpose and for a limited time,
in war, for example. But in peacetime society,
it damages more than it protects, and it always
breaks down in the end.
The only sure way in which we can have a moral
media serving moral purposes is by having
people work for it who subscribe to moral
codes of conduct. How can this come about?
I offer no perfect solution tonight indeed,
there is none. Instead, I have some hints
and guidelines based on over 40 years spent
in the media all over the world, newspapers,
magazines, TV, radio, in lecturing, pamphleteering,
and publishing. And the first necessity is
acceptance by those who work in the media
of the power they dispose of. A man or woman
sitting in a newspaper cubby hole behind a
console or in a broadcasting studio in front
of a mic or a camera may not be conscious
of the exercise of power. He may never even
set eyes on readers and listeners and viewers,
but the power is there often enormous and
fearsome power wielded through print and airways.
Will it go the duties which the exercise of
power impose?
People who work in the media are often insufficiently
aware of the obligations of their position
much less so than politicians. For instance,
they even see themselves as part of the entertainment
industry operating in the frivolous margins
of life. But that is false, more so than politics,
the media stands right at the center of human
activities. There are many aspects of life
with which politics does not and should not
concern itself. We live not in totalitarian
societies but in democracies where government
is rightly limited, but there are very few
sides of life with which the media does not
deal. It is omnivorous, ubiquitous, uncircumscribed,
and comprehensive. There is no nook or cranny
in the world, scarcely a hidden area of the
human spirit which it doesn't seek to penetrate.
And most of us want it that way because our
own curiosity is infinite, but this means
that the journalist, and I'm using this term
as a generic term for all who hold responsible
positions in the media, the journalist, even
more than the politician and perhaps even
more than the clergyman come to think of it,
needs to be a moral person and see with moral
as well as professional eyes. Now the journalist,
I need hardly say, is not regarded in this
light. It is in many ways a disreputable profession
or trade more highly regarded perhaps here
in America than in Britain and more highly
in Britain than in most of the continent of
Europe, but nowhere held in particular esteem.
Words we associate with it are scribbler,
hack, penny-a-liner, sensationalist, puff,
blurb, boost, ballyhoo, jargon, cant, slang,
rag, tabloid, foot in the door, Grub Street,
gutter press and so on.
In fact, journalists vary in moral probity,
more perhaps in almost any other calling,
from the high minded and the idealistic to
the ineradicably [SP] grubby. But it is important
to identify characteristic weaknesses which
lie behind the general condemnation if we
are to improve or eliminate them. There seemed
to me to be seven, what I call the seven deadly
sins of the media.
The first and in some ways the most important
is distortion. I don't say lying because the
outright publication of material known to
be false is rare in journalism certainly in
our world that Britain, America, and so on.
Though there is in France today, actually,
a so-called newspaper, which specializes in
printing invented stories about the British
Royal family. One would have thought it would
have been put out of business recently, there
are so many true stories about the British
Royal family that's what it exists for. But
distortion, deliberate or inadvertent, is
much commoner and it can take many forms.
The only safeguard is that resourceful journalist,
Dr. Samuel Johnson pointed out, is eternal
vigilance, a positive desire to convey the
exact truth.
Boswell records him saying, "Accustom your
children constantly to this; if a thing happened
at one window and they, when relating it,
say that it happened at another, do not let
it pass, but instantly check them; you do
not know where deviation from truth will end."
Mrs. Thrale thought this was too harsh saying,
"Little variations in narrative must happen
a thousand times a day, if one is not perpetually
watching." To which the doctor replied, "Well,
Madam, and you ought to be perpetually watching.
It is more from carelessness about truth,
than from intentional lying, that there is
so much falsehood in the world." That is well-observed,
and Johnson's words ought to be posted in
every newsroom and TV studio.
Distortion can occur by tendentious selection,
by unscrupulous editing, particularly of tapes
and TV documentaries, what is called I believe
bending, by deliberate suppression, nuances
and qualifications, by exaggeration and hyperbole,
by misplaced enthusiasm, unjustified criticism,
not least by misuse of evidence, almost the
commonest form of journalistic misrepresentation.
I like to apply to journalism as indeed to
the writing of history Karl Popper's law of
proof. Writing of scientific hypothesis, he
argued, that the true scientist looks not
just for evidence which proves it but with
the same eagerness for evidence which disproves
it. How many journalists apply this test to
themselves? Karl Popper's law requires a kind
of heroism in the pursuit of truth but like
most advice, which is hard to follow, it is
the best.
The second deadly sin, I call worshiping false
images. It applies particularly to TV journalism
where the image captured on tape is allowed
to dictate the shape and sense of the news
story or indeed whether the new story gets
into the program at all. This particular form
of falsity is dictated by the axiom that the
viewer is easily bored and must be held by
vivid and preferably violent images. The words,
the justification for the image, are a secondary
consideration, Thus, the tail wags the dog.
We have here the commonest form of distortion
on TV and one which is cumulatively of huge
importance for it means that the imageless
story, whatever its intrinsic importance,
is treated as almost a non-event.
Newspapers too worship false images when they
play down stories which cannot be well illustrated
by photos but also when they create stereotyped
images, the clichés of the news desk, as
an almost irresistible urge especially among
tabloids, to create an international soap
opera of goodies and baddies with the Castros
and the Gaddafi's, the Saddam Hussein's and
the Pol Pots making up the villains and constituting
a stock of character, a stock cast, who behave
predictably and in type. The accretion of
these images, which developed lives of their
own, acts as a kind of opaque screen between
the public and reality. The news media must
be a sheet of plain glass through which we
see the truth clearly.
The third deadly sin is the theft of privacy.
Intrusion into privacy is the most pernicious
media sin of all time and it seems to be growing.
Every mortal man and woman has an inalienable
right to some degree of privacy. However privileged
like royalty, however successful like entertainment
superstars, however powerful like heads of
government or rich or celebrated, all require
some privacy for mental and physical health.
Even animals need it.
Any ornithology will tell you that some birds,
if aware they are constantly watched, will
pine and die. Human beings also have fragile
psyches which intrusion may maim. Even holders
of public office require residual privacy
to function effectively. So phone tapping,
staking out, impersonation, telescopic lenses
all can be instruments of theft as surely
as a burglar's bag of tools. Defending toleration
in religion, Queen Elizabeth the first said,
"I seek not to carve windows into men's souls."
How right she was. The private lives, even
if the famous, are not open to inspection
by the public as of right.
The editor or TV producer, before overstepping
the clear line which divides public from private
life, must always ask the question, is this
disclosure, this intrusion, clearly in the
public interest? Not, note well, interesting
to the public, but in the public interest,
a very different matter. And the key word
is clearly not marginally or ambiguously or
arguably or possibly. The onus of proof lies
with the intruder carving windows into the
lives of men and women, especially the humble
and defenseless, who are brought into the
media spotlight by the sheer accident of events
is a form of assault or vandalism and a barbarous
misuse of media power.
Related to this is the fourth deadly sin,
murder of character. The media has always
been used for this unconscionable purpose.
One of the most powerful of British press
lords, Lord Beaverbrook was notorious for
his hate list of public personalities and
also of his non-person list, those would never
be mentioned in his newspapers under any circumstance.
His journalists waged these vendettas with
servile order. As Arthur Christiansen, editor
of his paper the "Daily Express," put it,
the policy is where Lord Beaverbrook, the
presentation mind. He was the mere executioner
of a callous judge.
Proprietorial vendettas are less common nowadays,
fortunately, though they still occur. What
is more prevalent and far more dangerous is
the tendency of the media to assassinate the
characters of public men and women from a
generalized suspicion of authority. In America,
for instance, the quest for public scandal
in the aftermath of Watergate and the appointment
of special prosecutors to investigate government
has become a kind of disease which is debilitating
the Republic and inhibiting good people from
serving it.
In an important recent book, Suzanne Garment
calls this the culture of mistrust and she
shows how law enforces and journalists cooperate
in creating what she calls a self-reinforcing
scandal machine. She writes prosecutors use
journalists to publicize criminal cases while
journalists, through their news stories, put
pressure on prosecutors for still more action.
The media is a loaded gun when directed with
hostile intent against an individual. Those
who pull the trigger must always search their
conscience to ensure that they have the right
target. Otherwise, it is murder by media.
The fifth deadly sin is the exploitation of
sex to raise ratings and circulation. Newspapers
have employed salacity since the 18th century,
but has never before been so systematically,
unscrupulously, and shamefully flaunted as
a selling point, upmarket as well as down
market. It is significant that the recent
Gadarene rush in the British press to exploit
the marriage difficulties of the Royal family
was led by the supposedly serious broadsheet,
"The Sunday Times." In the United States,
explicit sex is most frequently shown on the
upmarket Public Service Broadcasting network.
And in Britain, there's two so-called minority
choice channels, "BBC Two" and Channel 4"
both upmarket and the same goes for other
European countries.
At the other side of the spectrum, popular
tabloids devote an extraordinary amount of
space, a third or more, to material which
could be classified as soft pornography. Editors
and TV producers may think long and hard about
whether exploitation of sex will invite sanctions
from such regulations as do exist. But I doubt
if 1 in 20 ever considers the possible corrupting
effect on viewers and readers. In this area,
they have developed a thick-skinned moral
neutrality.
And that brings me to the sixth deadly sin,
the soiling, one might almost say the poisoning,
of the minds of children by what they see
and hear and read. It is in practice impossible
nowadays, for parents, however, conscientious
to sensor the reading and viewing habits of
children except by excluding newspapers and
TV from the family home, and that's a drastic
step, which deprives children of information
they need. Regulatory measures such as broadcasting
unsuitable material only after 9:00 PM what
used to be known in Britain as the Toddlers'
Truce are derisory, they don't work. The only
safeguard is the moral sense of those who
take the decisions on what to print and broadcast,
but this is usually lacking.
Few media executives now recall that the Judeo-Christian
ethic condemns almost without reservation
those who corrupt the young. Jesus of Nazareth,
his most blood-curdling threats are directed
against them. There is in the media, a general
unawareness, a moral blindness that to a huge
extent, it dictates the values and sensitivities
of the future generation. But these things
are rarely, if ever considered, at scheduling
or editorial conferences.
Hence to the seventh and last deadly sin,
the abuse of the enormous power the media
possesses. Ever since Macaulay termed the
phrase, "the fourth estate," there's been
awareness of the political power the media
disposes off what might be called the Citizen
Kane syndrome. William Randolph Hearst tried
to start a war. Northcliffe tried to overthrow
the Lloyd George government. And I, myself,
well remember the occasion 40 years later
when his nephew Cecil King attempted to destroy
Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The Watergate
scandal was exploited by "The Washington Post"
and "The New York Times" and other media giants
to reverse the verdicts of the electors and
destroy a president.
I sometimes get the impression that in the
United States those who control the editorial
policies of the media feel that they are the
final repository of the nation's honor rather
as army generals feel this in some Latin American
countries. And that, if a regularly elected
government strays off the rails, they have
the ultimate right to get rid of it by a media
push. All these are abuses of power, less
obvious, but more insidious is the abuse of
media power to alter public attitudes and
behavior. Media bosses are not always conscious
of the degree of power they exercise and of
its corrupting nature. For Lord Acton's dictum
that all powers tends to corrupt applies at
least as much to the media as to politics.
Long exercise of great power produces even
in those who are immune to financial temptations,
a general coarsening of the moral sensibilities,
a certain careless reckless approach to momentous
decisions, which is a source of much evil.
In a sense, this final deadly sin, abuse of
power, subsumes all the others.
Now you may say it is easy to specify and
list these failings of the media, but how
are they to be corrected? Can they indeed
be corrected by any scheme of reform? And
can a mere correction enable the media to
make its proper contribution to mass culture
in an era of growing global interdependence?
The answer to this last question is no. Just
to list the don'ts is not enough and something
more positive is required.
What I would like to see is for all those
who hold the levers of power in the media
- publishers, TV bosses, editors, producers,
writers, executives a like - to consider and
recognize the vast extent of the influence
they hold it in the world over the day to
day behavior of countless millions of people,
as well as the actions of government and in
consequence accept the awesome responsibilities
which go with it. The moment they begin to
do so, the instant they perceive the magnitude
of their ability to mold the future world,
they must see that their duties cannot be
exercised in a moral vacuum.
A newspaper or a TV station is something more
than an objective fact recording organization
which doesn't make moral choices. And that
is a point forcibly argued in Tom Stoppard's
remarkable play about the media "Night and
Day." Those who work in the media are moral
human beings first and professional second.
Indeed, if they're not moral human beings,
they can't be good professionals either, and
that means they must have positive moral objectives
as well as negative prohibitions. A moral
media, making a creative contribution to our
culture, cannot be legislated into existence
or bullied into existence for that matter.
The most that someone like myself can do is
to point the way. Having described the negative
side of the media, it's grievous habitual
sins. Let me now look at the positive qualities,
those who constitute it should possess. So
here briefly are my 10 commandments, my rules
of moral conduct, which apply with particular
force to editors and TV producers but are
addressed to all those who exercise power
media and influence.
The first imperative is an overriding desire
to discover and tell the truth. And this is
much more than a purely negative command not
to lie or distort or bend because the truth
is often difficult to discern it's hidden
or evasive, it's slippery, it's dangerous,
it's complex. Even in the end, it's sometimes
undiscoverable. What is required is huge energy
in search of the truth, objectivity in recognizing
it, scrupulosity in telling it, and a willingness
to make clear to readers and viewers that
it isn't always simple. Energetic, and positive
truth-telling must be balanced by a sense
of responsibility.
The second commandment is a journalist must
always think through the consequences of what
they tell. When a riot breaks out in one town,
will certain forms of coverage make it likely
riots will occur in other towns? What will
legitimately inform? And what will needlessly
inflame? What will warn and what will corrupt?
Those in charge of the media must always be
totting up these moral balances. And while
they may not get the answer right every time,
the process of evaluating consequences must
be both informed and instinctual.
That leads directly to the third commandment.
Truth-telling is not enough, indeed it can
be positively dangerous without an informed
judgment. We all have opinions, too many of
them perhaps, so I stress informed. Journalists
should be educated, more important, they should
be self-educated to lifetime process. They
should be reading men and women, taking advantage
of the unrivaled opportunities which work
in the media brings to broaden and deepen
their knowledge of the world and its peoples.
Those who own the media must do all in their
power to encourage journalists to study and
think and sharpen their judgments and to see
and analyze events, not merely in their immediate
impact but in their long-term implications
to see them even subspeciate [inaudible 00:34:02.920].
An educated media is essential because its
primary function is to educate through information.
This is the moral imperative, it's principal
contribution to the improvement in our culture
and society.
So the fourth commandment is that journalists
should possess the urge to educate the missionary
spirit. They shouldn't be content to tell
the public what it wants to know or what they
think it wants to know but what it ought to
know and needs to know. The great American
editor Horace Greeley in creating the "New-York
Tribune" in 1841 insisted that his paper would
not merely record congressional domestic and
foreign news, but also, "Whatever shallow
peer calculated, right to promote morality,
maintain social order, extend the blessings
of education or in any way serve the great
cause of human progress to ultimate virtue,
liberty, and happiness." That is an ambitious
aim. And I wonder how many editors would have
the self-confidence and hardihood to endorse
it today, but they should.
The fifth commandment is in some ways the
most difficult one of all to follow and the
most important. Those running the media must
distinguish between public opinion and its
grand historic sense, which creates and molds
a constitutional democracy and the transitory
volatile phenomenon of popular opinion. James
Madison, primary author of the American Constitution,
argued that in a republic, it must be the
reasons not the passions of the republic which
sit in judgment. That is why he thought the
revision of the constitution should be possible
but should not be easy.
Editors and TV producers, in that quest of
readers and ratings, find themselves the captive
of mass emotions, which are no more than moods,
rather than genuine necessary public needs.
Northcliffe put up in his office the mystic
slogan, "It is 10," meaning the mental age
of "Daily Mail" readers. H.L. Mencken laid
down no newspaper ever lost circulation by
underestimating the intelligence of its readers.
But these are the slippery roads to media
delinquency. A moral media conducts a reasoned
dialogue with its public and avoids an emotional
one like the plague.
At times too, the media must show the willingness
to lead and that is the sixth commandment.
Power entails responsibility, responsibility
means leadership, it is inescapable. A TV
network must be prepared to take a moral stand
and stick to it in the face of pressures and
criticism. A newspaper must not only give
its readers news they do not wish to hear
but urge them to do things they find uneditable.
The risk of losing readers and viewers must
be taken and can, I believe, be taken with
confidence. It is hard to recall any great
newspaper which has been permanently damaged
by taking an unpopular but principled decision.
Leadership, which is informed reasoned and
consistent, is always respected and it is
usually followed. But to exercise leadership
requires courage and to show courage is the
seventh commandment. The older I get, the
more I see public life and events, the more
convinced I become that courage is the greatest
of virtues and it's the one most lacking in
the media. It is required at all levels from
the humblest reporter, who must always evaluates
his orders morally, to the richest tycoon,
risking his fortune to create new media outlets
or make existing ones better and more responsible.
My old colleague Nicholas Tomlin who was killed
on journalistic duty on the Golan Heights,
Syria was once asked what quality journalists
needed, he replied rat-like cunning. He might've
added lion-like courage, which he himself
showed in which all journalists of necessity
sometimes must show.
The eighth commandment indeed is also a form
of courage and that is the willingness to
admit error. All media organizations inevitably
make appalling mistakes of fact and judgment
and are egregiously reluctant to correct them
except under the fiercest legal pressures.
But where a great power is exercised accuracy
is paramount and judgment of taste must be
refined and sensitive to criticism. A willingness
to apologize is the mark of a civilized person
and a contribution to the culture which is
always seeking to purge its grossness and
imperfections. The handsome and unforced admission
of error is the best of all proofs that a
newspaper or a TV network has a corporate
sense of honor. And possessing such a sense
is another way of saying that it has a conscience.
But admitting error is not enough. My ninth
commandment enjoins something more positive,
a general fair-mindedness. If ever there was
a moral quality, it is the ability to be habitually
fair because it involves so many others. The
imagination to see other points of view, tolerance
of them, temperance and restraint in expressing
your own, generosity and above all a rooted
sense of justice.
Fair-minded newspapers stick out a mile because
they are so rare. All TV networks make a display
of their balanced approach and hardly any
display fairness when they wish to make a
point. Yet fairness is one of the deepest
human yearnings. It's almost a first moral
point a small child recognizes and lack of
it is the commonest complaint that public
flings at the media. And conversely, nothing
is more likely to build confidence in the
media than the public's awareness that it
prizes fair-mindedness.
My last commandment is the most positive of
all - respect, value, treasure, and honor
words. The media, even the image media is
essentially about words, for words are inseparable
from truth, the only way in which it can be
conveyed. In the beginning, was the word,
so it's John's Gospel, which I commended to
earlier opens. The media has to use words
in haste, sometimes in excitement, that is
his nature, but it must also and always use
them with care, with respect for their precise
meaning, nuance and with reverence for that
power. Words can kill in countless different
ways, they can destroy characters as well
as possession. But words can also enlighten
comfort, uplift, and inspire. They are the
basic coinage of all culture, the essential
units on which a civilization rest.
Those who work in the media should always
have a good dictionary at hand, not merely
to be sure of the significance of their verbal
tools, but to acquire new ones. They should
amass words in the banks of their minds for
future use and spend them with judicious generosity
and scrupulous regard for their value. They
should also rejoice in their richness and
power, a richness which is one form of wealth
available to all humanity and a power to make
that humanity better, happier, and wiser.
Respect for words and love of words are two
sides of the same coin and that coin is the
currency which will enable the media to make
a decisive contribution to weld culture in
the coming century. But it must be a moral
media conducted by people with a strong sense
of their moral obligations to society. Is
that too much to ask? No, it is not. And we
should not hesitate to ask it. Thank you.
Wilson: Thank you for listening to today's
Bradley Lecture. I'm Wilson. And I surely
hope you enjoyed it. Tune into the AEI podcast
channel for more and be sure to review us
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Until next time, see you again.
