Did you know that in the United States, the mainstream media has more power than the Constitution?
The framers of the Constitution set it up that way, at the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787.
By 1787, newspapers had been in business more than 200 years, long enough to give publishers at least a chance to discover the media codes and how they worked. Whether they had, or not, nobody knows. You have to understand, mass media at the beginning arrived as a complete mystery. Batteries not included, some assembly required. Johann Gutenberg, when he chose the Bible as his sales tool, only knew that the Bible had a proven audience. He didn't understand why. He was a goldsmith, a tinkerer, and an entrepreneur. His role in media history was mechanical. He was a printer, not a mass media professional. There were no mass media professionals in 1452.
What Gutenberg did was establish the first link between media codes and mass media audiences. In the last half of the 15th century, and well into the 16th, that link must have been as mysterious an object as black holes have been in modern times. What is it? Why is it there? Where did it come from? What is this thing, this link, that persuades people to learn to read, just because the material is there?
It's a fascinating question, because general audiences still don't understand the link, why it's there, what it is, where it came from. The early publishers learned as they went. They didn't need to understand the codes. They only needed to know that this mysterious link rolling off their presses had great power. The politicians recognized that power almost immediately. Rulers and church leaders enjoyed reading about themselves as much as anybody, as long as they agreed with what was written. When Martin Luther, and other pesky critics of those in power, starting publishing challenges to that power, and readers gathered around those challenges in disturbing numbers, rulers and church leaders started shutting the presses down. It begged a very big question: just how great was the power of the people, in the new age of print?
Newspapers, with their popularity, followed the European migration to the Americas started by Christopher Columbus in 1492. By 1732, a stable landscape of British colonies was in place in North America, and friction had developed between the governing and the governed. The New York colony that year acquired a new governor, William Cosby. By 1733, a New York newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal, was publishing unfavorable editorials that accused Cosby of election rigging, land appropriation, and tax embezzlement.
Cosby had the Journal publisher, Peter Zenger, arrested on charges of seditious libel, "sedition" being defined as "the stirring up of discontent, resistance, or rebellion, against the government in power," and libel being "anything false published about a person that damages that person's reputation or ability to make a living."
With Cosby controlling the judges and the attorneys, Zenger appeared to have no chance. But Zenger's backers retained noted Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton, who conceived an argument that the editorials had to be confirmed as libelous, or false, before they could be judged seditious. Since the editorials were based on known facts, they could not be seditious. The truth could never be libelous. The jury agreed, Zenger was acquitted, and truth as a defense against libel provided the press a freedom it had not previously enjoyed.
The colonial leadership thought about this. Here was a newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal, so popular that it attracted advertisers, who would actually pay to place their products in the pages of the newspaper. This suggests that publishers, and merchants, by 1735 knew something of the existence of the media codes; advertising is nothing but the manipulation of media codes.
And now, after the Zenger verdict, the Journal was not only popular, it was free to print anything it wanted to, as long as it was the truth. It meant the public had an unchecked access to the flow of any information they might want, or need. The free press after the Zenger verdict democratized information, and democratized power. This was an astonishing development, in an American colonial society already forming the thought that some truths are self-evident regarding the rights of men, and can only be obtained through the consent of the governed.
That change, in the status quo, was the primary media code in this huge story, but whether the publisher or the public realized it, the other codes were there, too, all of them, as they always are, in every story, each with its own strength scale of zero to 10. Readers of the Zenger verdict story felt them as excitement, or exhilaration, or hope or fear or challenge. Very strong feelings, and very real, the same kind of reaction people have today, when they read a big story.
The stature of the newspaper as a landmark democratic institution became a daily factor in the American mood in the decades leading to revolution, war, and independence. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, acknowledged that stature early in 1787, just before the Constitutional Convention, when he wrote: "The basis of government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and 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 the latter."
John F. Kennedy during his presidency said a famous thing about Jefferson. In 1962, President Kennedy invited 49 Nobel Laureates to the White House. Kennedy said: "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
It is tempting to think that a figure of Jefferson's intellect and perception may have been among the first to become aware of, and understand, the power of media codes, and to do so at such a critical time in his country's history. He obviously believed that newspapers were the vehicle for the opinion of the people, and of course opinion – what people think and why they think it – is pure media code.
But when the framers were finished with their work in September of 1787, and offered it for ratification, you could read the Constitution all the way through, and not come across a word about newspapers, or "the press." Happily, the Constitution is brimming with the media codes themselves, which has a lot to do with the document's effectiveness and durability. It is a document that, after all, describes the laws that will apply when a free people give their consent to a democratic system of government.
Word of "the press" does not appear until the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, and it is a famous Amendment: "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 redress of grievances."
Edited down to the scope of media literacy, it reads: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press."
Freedom of the press! Not a cornerstone of the Constitution? Just something thrown in out of left field, into an amendment? Where is the power in that?
There are three answers.
The first is in the Constitution itself. Making no mention of the press, or its freedom, the Constitution does nothing to create a free press.
The second answer is in the First Amendment. By including it there, we see it is clear that freedom of the press was in the minds of the Constitution's framers. When in the amendment they acknowledge its existence, after ignoring it in the Constitution, it must mean the framers understood that freedom of the press preceded the Constitution, and was as self-evident to them as, in another well-known Jeffersonian phrase, certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The third part of the answer is provided by the word "abridge." Defined by Webster, it means "to reduce in scope, extent, etc." This must mean that the framers saw a free press as so fundamental to a democratic society that it preceded any laws they could create, and that the laws they did create could never be used to reduce the scope of that freedom.
They gave the press permanent, vast – almost absolute – power and then placed that power in the hands of the people. They made the people the overseers of the republic. Why did they do that? What leap of faith was required?
And so we arrive at another position where it is useful, once more, to run history backwards. If you ran all the lines of United States of America history backwards, would they converge in the Constitution, or in freedom of the press? If the Bible begat mass media, did mass media beget the Constitution? Are we really a nation of the opinion of the people? Eighty years after Jefferson's quote, Abraham Lincoln spoke famously of a "new birth of freedom," of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, not perishing from the earth.
Such a government was wonderfully tailored to the newspaper business. Newspapers let the people know what the government was doing. And newspapers let the government know what the people were thinking. The role of democratized information empowered Lincoln to get into Bartlett's with another quote about the American system: "It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
At the time, Lincoln was talking about political credibility. He was also, with those words, anticipating, 150 years in advance, the media business model of the early 21st century. And the message in the next half-century is only going to make bigger headlines.
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