The Corrupt Evolution away from Self-Governance

It was never perfect, our Republic. 

We zigged and zagged our way through the obstacle courses thrown up by human nature.  We made collective mistakes, most of which were corrected by the very system that allowed the mistakes to happen.  As the system worked to self correct there were bad laws thrown out, bad policies reversed, and changes made to the Constitution.  It seemed like a continuous, if slow-motion, response to public will. 

Our self governance, flawed and sometimes cumbersome, was worthy of our trust.  We had some short-term frustrations and had some yet unfulfilled long-term goals.  But it was our best way forward.  Our checks and balances were unique in the world and the basic goodness of our people was unmatched. 

We do not have a pin on the map designating the exact time and circumstances for the demise of the Republic. 

Since the beginning, there were always the ambitious, the power-hungry, and the anarchists-for-profit.  There were always thieves, liars and cheats who would willingly harm the country.  There were always the enemies foreign and domestic. 

The framers of the Constitution understood human nature very well.  They knew all about the usurpers of freedom and democracy.  They also knew that a culture of justice and morality was needed in order for the Republic to survive. 

We now live in a [non] culture where an action is only wrong if one is detected.  Much of the derision heaped upon a criminal or a cheat is not for the transgression, rather for getting caught.   In an extension of the “I didn’t get caught” mentality, there is mock outrage for tiny offenses, based on the public mood of the day. 

We have evolved from a culture of basic honesty to a culture of basic dishonesty.

This culture of “basic honesty” was mildly flawed.

The old culture of basic honesty (morality) was our heritage as a society.  There was a herd mentality of morality that was quite powerful.  We were self-regulating, to a large degree, because transgressors were often ostracized or at least treated differently by their peers. 

The system of “basic honesty” was also a system of duplicity.   We have always had adultery.  We have always had theft.  We have always had murder.  These transgressions are universal and part of our human nature.   It would be foolish to think there were fewer transgressions in the old culture.

The true father of our Republic, Thomas Jefferson was known to be an adulterer with his deceased wife’s half-sister.  She was also his “legal” slave.  The salacious story was bandied frequently by the press.  Jefferson never suffer any real consequences.  He pretended the stories were beneath him to answer.  Hypocrisy.  The larger (unanswerable) question is this:  “Is the nation better off because his immorality never stuck?”

Note:  This example using Thomas Jefferson is a metaphor for all moral failings by the Statesmen of our country.  When considering adultery, we should conclude that our forebears were neither worse nor better than today’s politicians. 

This essay uses adultery as an example of the misbehavior committed by politicians.  It is not a metaphor for worse transgressions such as bribery, graft and abuse of power.  Those higher sins have grown in a fashion inverse to the decline of our culture.   

The hypocrisy of the old culture was partly beneficial to society. 

Hypocrisy has, in today’s non-culture, unfairly garnered a classification as a deadly sin.   People sometimes use it as the ultimate insult.  Often, the ‘H’ word is been used against the Madoffs and Epsteins as if that is the deciding factor on their unworthiness in society.  We should think carefully about this.  Which is worse, raping underage girls or pretending to be a nice guy?  Again, which is worse, stealing the life savings of thousands of people, or pretending to be a financial wizard?  Still, you will hear some people decrying the hypocrisy of these criminals and forgetting the criminal acts themselves.

Human nature makes hypocrisy a useful tool in both families and democracies. 

When your 13-year-old is failing math, how should you address the situation? 

A.  You could say “I was disappointed to see your math grade.  I always liked math and I’m pulling for you to improve.  Let’s get you some help from a tutor.”

B. Or you could say “I was never any good at math.  Fractions are still a mystery.  I almost didn’t graduate because I kept failing math.  Sorry for the bad DNA.”

Which course of action is the least hypocritical?  Which course of action helps your son the most?  Hint:  If you chose answer ‘B’ as best for your son, you just gave him permission to fail miserably in his studies. 

Not to leave out the girls, Mom was (most certainly!) a virgin when she got married.  No specific example given for this one.  Sorry.

In a self-governing society, that society eventually becomes what it first pretends to be. 

People traditionally vote  more morally than they lead their own private lives.  They are deciding how others should live, not just themselves, right?  This led to (again, slow-motion) improvements in our civil liberties.

So what are the imperfections of the Basic Honesty culture?

• It required a well-informed populace
• Improvements to society came at a snail’s pace
• Hypocrisy isn’t pretty.  It is something we universally dislike seeing in others.

The Culture of Basic Dishonesty Dissected

Does this Dress Make me Look Fat?

We lie 2 or three times every day, on average.  Human nature forces us to sometimes deceive others, and like all talents, some are better at it than others.  Some seem to lack the ability to ever tell the truth.  And, of course, there is a bell curve at play here.  Have you ever known someone who was congenitally unable to lie?  Some people are forced to live with this dreadful condition, and they are not happy.

Earlier we covered a simplified definition of Truth.  The difficulty of knowing the truth forces a conundrum:  If knowing the Real Truth is difficult, would a lie not be similar in complexity?   

We reverse our simple, flawed definition of the Real Truth to give us a thumbnail definition of a lie.

In this country, we have always been subjected to people wanting to sway our opinions.  Early on, we had newspapers, books, and pamphlets on both sides of the issue of loyalty to Great Britain.  The literacy rate was 95%.  We were a well-informed populace, being pulled in opposite directions by the information providers.  

There was a brief suspension of the writ of habeas corpus during the Lincoln Presidency and some newspaper editors found themselves behind bars without benefit of trial.  It was fortunate that this repugnant jailing of journalists lasted just a brief time. By the end of the Civil War, the push-pull of printed information delivery returned to its previous position. 

Information delivery changed at a moderate pace for decades.  There were occasional technical advances, such as the telegraph, telephone, and first-generation fax machines that we consider to be valuable upgrades but not necessarily game-changers. 

Radio, as a delivery system to the population had a fairly lengthy evolution, compared to the rapid-fire technological changes in our more recent history.  The print tug-of-war, partially abetted by the addition of radio, was the status quo until World War II, and served the country well.  Every major issue the country faced was sliced and diced in the same fashion.  There were hawk vs. dove, liberal vs. conservative, slave vs. abolition newspapers and periodicals.  People usually knew the partiality behind the publication. The opinions of the editors were largely kept on the editorial pages.

The weekly news magazines flourished.  Time and Newsweek were co-masters of the domain.  Those magazines started off trying to encapsulate weekly events into summaries for the busy, modern well-informed citizen.  They had strict pressures of schedule–their publications needed to be written and distributed quickly–in a time frame that allowed them to still be relevant when they hit the newsstands.  They succeeded and thrived.  The newsweeklies also evolved; containing more in-depth reporting and background.   The evolution toward more in-depth writing carried a tiny amount of baggage:  Many of the stories had to be written in advance of the outcomes of the stories.  Then, at the last minute, editors could make the required changes and fill in the proper ending to the story. 

By the mid-1930s radio news was taken as Real Truth to the degree that anything sounding like news was instantly believed.  (There was panic when Orson Wells broadcast a reading of War of the Worlds.) By the 1940s, people clamored for radios and happily plugged themselves in to the networks.  A radio was standard equipment on a new tractor in the 1940s.

Biases faded in the pro-America media during and following WWII.  Radio newscasters Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite (in addition to many other foreign correspondents) held the public trust like few others in history.  That public trust was well-founded.   Perhaps the radio broadcasters expected the public to dissect every story and parse every sentence sent out over the airwaves?  Perhaps the radio networks heeded the weight of their responsibility to the public?  Truth in media seemed “purest” as WWII concluded. 

The government shared the same trust as the public in those information providers. The War Department never set up a mechanism for direct censorship.  The military set guidelines that were voluntarily followed by newspapers, periodicals, and radio.

The culture of Basic Honesty peaked. — Along with our national pride, sense of security,  and perceived honesty among our leaders.  

It probably started by accident.  Perhaps in the 1940s some reporter(s) disseminated inaccurate information and nobody noticed?  Or if it was noticed, there were few consequences?  During the 1950s, the veracity of the news began to fall under tiny criticisms.  The easiest to see were rumblings about the way the media reported on the Korean War.  Especially controversial was the firing of General MacArthur by President Truman.  The media had inserted themselves into the top story of the Korean War.  The end result was business as usual with small, impotent push-back.  The asymmetrical skirmish was between the entirety of the media and the few “purists” who criticized the behavior.  The public trust in the media was unshaken, however.  Our information providers, with newfound power, thrived under this new normal.  

The ‘Glossies’ began to sensationalize stories to sell more magazines. (The Glossies were “Look” and “Life” Magazines and their imitators.)  The grocery store Scandal Papers (National Enquirer being the top seller) began to sell more and more copies.  As the entertainment value of the news went up, the appetite for news also rose.  Thus, it was in a news outlet’s best interest to provide the most entertaining product they could–without losing their credibility.

By the late1950s, media authenticity was eroding at the same time the public appetite for information was mushrooming.   Oddly, public trust in the veracity of the news media was at an all-time high.  Perhaps it should not have been.  A candidate for President could benefit greatly from a “puff piece” in one of the glossies.  On the downside, the glossies could sway the public with an unflattering photograph.  The news weeklies, Time and Newsweek, tended to be careful about showing their cards.  There were a few complaints from Senators and Presidents directed at the news weeklies, but nowhere near the number directed at the glossies and newspapers. 

What about Hollywood?

The motion picture business went through their own convoluted history.  The most important safeguard against Hollywood’s undue influence to the collective psyche was the Motion Picture Production Code (the Hayes Code) instituted in 1934 and lasting until 1968.  This act of self-censorship was not intended to prevent the Motion pictures from taking partisan stances per se, but that was indeed a by-product.  Mostly, the Hayes Commission wanted to prevent teenage boys from seeing female nipples onscreen. The partisan urge for movie makers was at least partly neutered as a byproduct.

Just when information delivery couldn’t get better, it did.

Baird Television Development Company broadcast the first experimental transatlantic television signal, between London and New York…. in 1928! 

<Fast forward to 1941>

WNBT in New York carried the first paid advertising to appear on American commercial television.   The first commercial was on the afternoon of On July 1, 1941,  before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies.  Now, there was a method to pay for the ever-increasing stream of information that would dominate the collective consciousness.

In 1947, there were an estimated 44,000 television receivers in the U.S. The number grew quickly and soon there were more television sets than bathtubs.    (The George Orwell novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four was written in 1949.)

In the 1950s, television news was boring. 

Local stations would “read the news” for 15 minutes in the evenings.  Competing stations were forced to make sure they all broadcast TV news at the same hour, otherwise their entire audience would vanish.  Television news was the broadcast version of a rice cake.  Local TV stations were required by their FCC charter to broadcast a certain amount of news and public service.  The network news was only slightly better.

The broadcasters initially saw TV news as a necessary requirement of their FCC charter.  They locked into thinking of the news as simply the latest edition of the local newspaper.  Producers presented news as if the TV was, for those few minutes, a high-priced radio.  The weather maps were drawn on poster board, and the TV weathermen adroitly drew cold fronts with a felt tipped marker.  Nationally, the news writers reworded the latest edition of the New York Times and the Associated Press news feed.  There were not a lot of on location reporters.

In the 1950s, the limited technology also served to constrain the entertainment value of TV news.  Television news had a more difficult path than the radio model of having remote satellite reporters delivering a story.  The 1955 TV cameras were large and heavy.  (One man could not pick up a 1950s vintage TV camera–they were permanently mounted on wheels.)  The camera’s imager required extraordinary lighting and there was no method for quick relocation of a broadcast point.   Transistorized devices were still a decade away from common usage.  Lower-light and color TV cameras were a far-off dream in the mid 1950s.

The use of 16 and 35 mm film allowed some entertainment shows to be archived for later re-broadcast.  To a lesser degree, the news shows were able to use film in a similar fashion.  It was fairly easy to film a few seconds of the local Christmas parade, develop, and edit the film in time for the evening news.  Recording video to magnetic tape was still a difficult technical feat.  Film was the best workaround.  The local stations also made an effort to “mobilize” their studios, after a fashion.  Lets imagine that same, local Christmas parade preceded past the TV station. Whether the routing was by chance or by design, the cameras could be lugged outside the station and placed along the parade route.  Voila!  The remote TV broadcast was born.  It whetted the appetites of the broadcasters and viewers alike. The purse strings could be loosened for investing in smaller, lighter technology as it came available.

Note: This essay will skip 2 historical events for television
A. The rich history of blending color TV signals into the existing black-and-white
B. The introduction of HDTV.
However interesting those histories might be, they were only an incremental improvement to a medium that had already proven its worth.

1950s – Welcome to my living room.

The FCC granted TV stations a license to broadcast on a specific AM frequency.  The sound portion of the signal was broadcast on a corresponding FM frequency.  There were 12 VHF channels available, numbered 2 to 13.  There were more than 6o channels in the UHF band, numbered 14 to 83.  (Some UHF tuners could not receive channels above 75.) It was 1962 before all new sets were required by law to be capable of receiving UHF signals.

CBS, to become a viable network, had an uphill battle early in the history of Television.  One of CBS’s early strategies was to concentrate their efforts on acquiring local stations in the UHF band.  (Perhaps they could get the licenses easier and cheaper?)  This meant that most brand-new television sets would not be able to receive CBS broadcasts.  Ouch! 

CBS realized the mistake and frantically acquired some more TV licenses and stations in the VHF band as quickly as possible. CBS was also forced to sign some less-than-ideal contracts to feed their signals to unaffiliated stations.  It was a desperate fight for survival.  Still, in many markets, they had only their crippled UHF signals, physically limiting their viewership.  It was well into the 1960s before CBS had anything close to a level playing field.

1956 – Good Night, Chet.  Good Night, David.

Chet Huntley and David Brinkley were put together as a news anchor team in 1956 in a ‘radical’ experiment to increase viewership. The then-current news anchor replaced by Huntley and Brinkley was John Cameron Swayze, who had a loyal, if shrinking viewership. The experiment almost failed.  Initially, the ratings went further down. Even President Eisenhower complained about the new duo.  NBC could not find a sponsor for almost 2 years.  In spite of the mediocre start, NBC stuck with the pair, Huntley in New York and Brinkley in Washington.  The public came to appreciate the co-anchors, and viewership rose steadily. 

The two made something of a Felix-and-Oscar pairing–Huntley being stodgy and serious with tired, worried eyes;  Brinkley always appeared to be stifling a laugh.  Perhaps it was no surprise that Brinkley outlived Huntley by almost 30 years.

Uncle Walter, the Most Trusted Man in America

Shortly after Walter Cronkite first joined CBS Television in 1950, he was assigned to read the 11:00 PM news on a 15-minute Sunday night newscast.  He had already been a veteran radio broadcaster, with a reputation for excellence as a war correspondent.  He was recruited by CBS multiple times, starting in 1947, by Edward R. Murrow, CBS’s vice president and head of news.  After turning down offers for years, Cronkite accepted Murrow’s offer with mild reluctance in 1950.

Cronkite held a variety of positions at CBS prior to becoming the Evening News anchor. Most of his announcing positions were placeholders and name recognition spots. Cronkite became better known to the viewer during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

He did have one show that failed miserably: The Morning Show . The Morning Show was meant to compete with the morning NBC hit, Today. Cronkite himself could hardly be blamed for the failure.  They often had a current events segment where Cronkite would interview a lion puppet named ‘Charlemane’ (A lion has a mane… get it?) Ever the company man, Cronkite afterward insisted that he found the puppet interviews to be “highlights” of the show. One shudders to imagine the “low-lights”. 

Walter Cronkite became the news anchor for CBS Evening News in 1962.   CBS News had been losing in ratings steadily; NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley was the gold standard for the evening news.  CBS and Cronkite went to work.  In September of 1963, CBS expanded their 15-minute news slot to a half-hour.  Never mind the fact that Huntley-Brinkley followed suit less than two weeks later,  CBS had painted themselves as leaders in “in-depth” news.  NBC was tainted by the “copycat” label.  It was a small, but significant victory. 

Remember CBS’s UHF faux pas?  In spite of a frenzied acquisition of VHF stations, CBS still had the UHF albatross around their broadcasting neck.  Even though the UHF-receiving hardware had been mandated for new TV sets in the early 1960s, many living rooms still received just the VHF signals.  It took much of the 1960s for the legacy TV sets to fade away. 

By 1967, NBC and CBS News were close in ratings.  CBS News outperformed Huntley-Brinkley for brief periods.  Just as CBS was drawing close in ratings, NBC News made the dubious corporate decision to cut their news budget. By 1969, CBS captured the highest ratings for the Apollo moon landing and found themselves equal to NBC in viewership and reputation.

July 31, 1970 marked the final broadcast of the Huntley-Brinkley report.  Richard S. Salant, president of CBS News, and his beloved anchor, Walter Cronkite, must have been delighted.  The budget cuts to NBC News and retirement of Chet Huntley set the stage for CBS to dominate the news ratings for almost 30 years.

Read more…

 

The subject is lying.  Why mention these trusted non-liars?

 

The framers’ challenge was putting into place a system of self-governance that would allow individual self interests in a way that did not conflict with the collective interests. 

Imagine trying to pull that rabbit out of the proverbial hat today. 

Thought exercise:  Starting from scratch, make a plan that is better than the framers’ plan. 

 

The new powered elite are not starting from scratch.  They have the luxury of a healthy economy and contented (if somewhat self-absorbed) population.  The powered elite consider themselves to be enlightened and not subject to the same set of rules they are inflicting on the majority. Even worse, there is no longer a desire to make sure the individual can choose his best way forward.  Some doors have closed “for the overall good” and will never reopen.  But there has never been a simultaneous shutting of multiple doors.  When a door does go shut it is often shut very slowly, taking tiny increments that largely go unnoticed.