I'm going to put off several commentaries I’ve prepared because of what just happened to the public broadcasting budget.
My legal career was as a litigator. It would never have occurred to me to bar the other side from the courtroom. Nor would judges have allowed it. It's the jury that decides what’s right and what’s wrong. We don't decide for the jury by forbidding it to hear one side or the other. That's garbage, not due process. And judges squelch occasional attempts.
It's the jury’s job to figure out who's correct, not just whether they're being honest but whether witnesses drew right the conclusions from what they saw, or what witnesses’ memories add up to. Again, that's the jury's job. We don't decide it in advance.
Public affairs can be even more complex because there are often many sides to an issue which may be true at once. We often have to figure out what we’re trying to accomplish, at what cost, and what’s the best way. That’s why there are many perspectives on public issues which can often be true at the same time. The question then becomes how to put all of that together so that it makes sense and we, as the public, can support the result. Especially since there isn't just one side, news without competing perspectives can be highly misleading.
Of course, everyone, newscasters included, makes mistakes. I objected, in a recent commentary, to a broadcast that treated insistence on due process for everyone, before we decide whether they did something wrong and should be penalized, as if Democrats were somehow supporting criminals. That's nonsense and that newscaster should have known better. She was actually promoting official lawlessness. Due process is part of the Constitution to protect all of us, and everyone is at risk without it.
But that doesn’t mean everything on her network is nonsense. It's a side of the story, often a side I disagree with, that needs to be balanced but nevertheless accounted for in the political system. Competing perspectives are part of the story. But when an administration tries to cut off part of the story, they're depriving us of information and a better solution. There’s no justification for that.
Public officials are often the self-interested objects of reporting. The architects of our system of public broadcasting tried to protect its independence from their political interference by putting the power over programming and content in local independent stations and individual contributions. But this Administration hasn’t been satisfied either with the protections for fair and accurate reporting on public broadcasting, or with the fact that it has its own mouthpieces. It’s been trying to control all news media, has threatened private broadcasters over news the Administration doesn’t want aired, and, so far, succeeded in getting some private broadcasters to cut popular public affairs programs out of their schedule, apparently because their corporate owners were seeking approvals for various business deals that needed government approval.
We describe foreign rulers’ control over broadcasters as rigging elections. Trump keeps claiming that Democrats are rigging elections. But election rigging by controlling broadcasting is demonstrable, not just another myth. Plus, Republican success in making Congress and state legislatures unrepresentative of the population through gerrymandering and exclusion of voters that might vote against them are also forms of election rigging.
It’s all got to be stopped.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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