PRESS FREEDOM - TO WHAT GAIN?

I've been following this Kenyan media puff for a long time and can NOT understand why the frogs can't just get out of the pond onto better terrain.

PROPOSAL
As a good citizen of the republic, I hold discordant views in that I see as a hypocritical and supplicant Kenyan media that is trying to subscribe public sympathy on an emotive subject that is basically a tiff between owners of capital - media houses - and a clique of executive players. Kenya's operant fourth estate is whining at our expense without defining the whole extent of the ramification of the Media bill.

TRUTH:
My reservations are stated herein:

“Nothing important ever gets to the Press; important things are classified, reality is top secret”.
Sorensen, IN THE BOOK: To Kill The Potemkin

PRESS FREEDOM. TO WHAT GAIN: WHO’S PROFIT?
TITLE: COMMON SENSE, AND, THE PAIN OF POPULIST WRITERS.

ON APRIL 27, 2006, the Office of the Government Spokesperson published a statement requesting media houses to exercise proper journalistic standards in their reportage to avoid misleading Kenyans and the entire world about happenings in the country. ‘Basics such as thorough research, clarification, balance and unbiased coverage should be the norm otherwise credibility of journalists will continue to suffer and citizens will be operating from a position of untruths and propaganda’ it added. This was referenced to a story ran in a section of the local media regarding a military airplane crash that came down with a fatal count among the victims prominent civilian personalities. The statement warned that ‘the story attempted to build a case against the Officer (Pilot) and tried to insinuate that he and the military he served in had acted in a reckless manner and were responsible for the crash’.
The statement prayed that the journalists, as human beings, ‘say sorry to the families of our departed heroes who have been greatly affected and pained by the story they published’, which, save for their pride, should have included apologizing ‘to the people of Kenya, to the government and even the military’. How did popular journalism get to dominate our every day lives for unfeeling ‘yarn merchants’ to sensationalize issues they neither understand nor have the capacity to explain to the public? How does the public view such journalists and why has this miscreant trait been confused with the ideal of Press freedom?

IN 1733, JOHN PETER ZENGER, a German migrant to the yet colonial American published the New York Journal. In it, he engaged corruption claims against the incumbent governor of New York. Zenger was arrested and detained for eight months. In August 1735, he was charged with libel. His defense lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, countered that such charges as preferred contained the inference that what had been published was ‘false’ while it was known to be ‘notoriously true’. The Chief Justice cautioned Zenger’s lawyer that he could not be admitted to give the libel in evidence. ‘A libel’ he said, ‘is not to be justified for it is a libel that is true’. Hamilton appealed to the Jury. Though Zenger was acquitted by the Jury, this singular appearance is quoted by many a journalist as the home note of media freedom orchestration.
Had Zenger really wished to write about corruption in wholesome American society, no doubt the worst corruption had to be mistreatment of native-Americans (Red Indians) by expansionist settlers, the African slave trade notwithstanding. Indeed Zenger’s defense against his political plaintiff only ended as a triumph over executive tyranny. It sustained the ‘right to criticize’ not necessarily confer value to press freedom. One year earlier, 1732, Benjamin Franklin had entered the field of American publishing with his Poor Richard’s Almanack. He was the first American writer to invest heavily on the platitude of human relations syntax. Invoking oral hyperbole and metaphors, he invited both friend and foe to argue common folk plaints always seeking remedy within individual accountability.
At a time when Americans were congregating rights by faction of origin, religion and class affiliation, Franklin also isolated the family unit entertaining readers with the querulous tiffs of a typical American couple caught up in everyday hustles. For the scientific mind, Franklin included pages on astronomical data, weather forecasts sunsets and sunrise, lunation and eclipses. Franklin’s annual publication ran for 25 years a self published quill that included jokes, recipes, poems, proverbs, wit and pithy maxims. For each reader was a page; for the nation a wholesome read. He caught the people’s attention when through complaint of higher colonial taxes he responded that Americans would rather pay since 'we are taxed twice as much by our idleness…..four times by our folly'.
Franklin in effect warned Americans against blaming imaginary foes for their failures. His publication endeared itself to the hearts of thousands for his cheeky characters. His call to self determination doubled as a beacon of hope and catalyst to national bonding. However in 1758, having become one of the most famous Americans in Europe for his writings he made a statement that took a back his fellow journalists. He lamented that 'though I have…without vanity been an eminent author for a quarter of a century, my brother authors for what reason I know not have been very sparing in their applauses and no other author has taken the least notice of me'.

When Franklin left the writer’s prime to concentrate on public affairs, Thomas Paine a middle aged English migrant entered the writers’ fray in 1776. Journalism trainees are to date privileged to study the antics of a man believed to have pioneered the current trade called 'dine and whine' journalism. Paine must have noticed one thing though. Almost all Americans were clamoring for independence from Britain. In January 1776 - six months to the declaration of independence - he published a pamphlet called Common Sense. Thousands of copies started circulating in America. Paine certainly rode the crest of swell populism with rhetorical agitation. He however claimed to be writing for a passion of patriotism. His pattern soon developed into a combative style. Applauses for Paine were unanimous from all quarters being readers, politicians, merchants, lay and landed gentlemen, employed and indentured servants all baying for the Crown’s debunk.
This new style journalism soon degenerated such that every Tom, Dick and Harry even Charlie could cite right to freedom of expression claiming reportage a vocation. Many took up Paine’s style wherein they sought to profit quick if not to append status of 'journalist' as their career and creed. A time came when every noontime was a meridian passage deadline for plausible targets to scandalize. Even so, sleaze was yet confined to the taverns of the demon rum and not to the bold type of the major papers. Tracts parading gossip, hearsay and commissioned sectarian opinions proliferated without much scientific input to ponder. By the end of the eighteenth century, disillusionment held toady journalism as an art of contempt than an art of writing. In any case, it didn’t take long for Americans to classify Paine a deviant. He was evidently anti-establishment. After the American declaration of independence July 2, 1776 – endorsed July 4, 1776 – Thomas Paine was lost for subject anchor. He left for France where the French revolution – 1789 – culminated in the execution of King Louis XVI. Paine joined active Politics serving in local council sessions. By then, he had changed to attacking Theistic religion calling for a new religion based on reason. In fact, he published on a platform of 'Age of Reason'. He attacked Judaism, Islam and Christianity with malice and contempt. Paine also took a swipe at President George Washington.
Paine’s wording was unprecedented though. Throwing caution to the wind, he wrote to Washington thus; ‘the world will be puzzled whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any…' James Chalmers – though a monarchist – did not hesitate to call Paine’s kind of journalism ‘lowest form of quackery’. Paine added pain to his doctrines criticizing the French – on their own soil – for beheading King Louis XVI. Either for folly or bravado – common traits with populist journalists – he overlooked that he had neither remained in aristocratic Britain to lead a revolution nor settled in America to salute the freedom that had been declared under threatening clouds of British backlash. He also had not suffered indignity or known serfdom in the French system that had caused the very revolution he had applauded – against Britain – from across the Atlantic. The French were not as forgiving as the British or Americans. They sent him to prison and sentenced him to death by guillotine. A hostile American Ambassador to France refused to claim his release. Like Zenger, he was saved in time by the incoming American Ambassador to France James Munroe, author of the famous Munroe doctrine. Worse for his reputation, other young men of letters and literaly gifts had emerged to capture the nation with a new call to fostering the Union. The Federalist Papers sought to recapture the land of opportunity clarion making Paine’s writings appear personalized essays. While there was nothing wrong with what he wrote, there was no longer anything unique about his opinions. The trio of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton – the man who told Americans that the rise of their nation lay in industrial production as opposed to agrarian tradition – and James Lay, totally eclipsed other writers with commentaries fronting constitutional safeguards against oppression, dictatorship and prayers for a more cohesive union. They expressed options for organized executive, judicial and legislative separation of powers.
James Madison came to be known as the father of the constitution for the original notes he took covering deliberations at the second continental congress held in camera. The Federalist papers became popular with American readers because they argued against radical faction, or, extremist interests that could threaten the envisioned union. At the time, the Southern states were simmering with separatist designs of a parallel confederacy.
Madison also successfully vied for deregulation of the Church of England (Anglican/Episcopal) as the state religion without raising tempers of promoting schisms or nominal theology. In 1802, aged 65, Paine returned to America a migrant nomad without a writer’s podium. For his radicalism in France – a man who had dared call Napoleon ‘the greatest charlatan I have ever seen’ – Paris had become untenable. As Franklin had told his readers years earlier, ‘fish and visitors smell in three days’. Seven years later, 1809, Paine died in New York – aged 72 - a virtual recluse, penniless and completely forgotten. That very year 1809, James Madison became President of the United States of America. The man who had rescued him from the guillotine James Munroe also followed as President, 1816 and 1820. Nobody knows whether Paine would have criticized a man he owed a life. And Thomas Paine owed a lot more to other people not least Benjamin Franklin.
However, Franklin’s success contrasts heavily with Zenger’s or Paine’s and for a reason.
Zenger had started by publishing religious tracts before drifting into political criticisms while Paine started with political fencing before deviating to anti-religious tirades. Neither of the reciprocal paths worked for either. Benjamin Franklin was born Sunday January 6, 1706. Without formal education, he was largely self- educated. Almost every endeavor young Franklin tried had a Midas touch earning him, as he put it later, ‘a tidy pudding’. He saw the first regular American newspaper which John Campbell published in 1724 and read it.
When Samuel Keimer followed with the ‘Pennsylvania gazette’ in 1728, Franklin picked it up, read it and bought interests in it next year, 1729, aged only 23 years. Franklin started profiting without writing. Three years later, 1726, Franklin published his famous ‘Poor Richards Almanack’ an annual publication that sold for the next 25 years. His almanac outsold all others in circulation combined.
That is the age at which most trained journalists graduate to go look for employment. Franklin was different. Benjamin had ran away from his brother’s printer’s shop to start his own publishing business in Philadelphia at age 17. At 42 years, Franklin set his eyes on scientific research and hobby kite flying. Aviation records show that he was the first man to fly a kite in thunderstorm to prove lightning was electricity. Having proven it, Franklin invented the lightning rod on June 15, 1752. The invention was not so much to protect buildings but ships at sea. He had crossed the Atlantic Ocean many times thus was not averse to horrors of foul weather. It was on one of these European trips September 1774 that a friend introduced him to one Thomas Paine whose world had come apart with failures at employment, business and broken marriages twice over. It was Franklin who asked Paine to emigrate - from Britain - in search of better tidings in the American colonies. On November 30, 1774, Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia – Franklin’s town- a sickly man. It took Franklin’s private doctor to return him to good health whereas a tidy sum of those who had traveled on the same ship had perished at sea.
If Munroe was to later save him from the guillotine, there are those who blamed Franklin for having invented Paine like the bi-focal lenses. Puritan and Quaker faithful couldn’t tell why Franklin had ‘imported’ such a worldly radical thus creating for non-believers an anti-Christ totem as well.
There are many who felt that in the space of 25 years from his arrival at Philadelphia and for his irritant modus, Paine ought to have been left to face the guillotine since he had himself suggested in his Paper ‘Crisis’ of 1777 that those who were against the declaration of independence should face the ‘Gibbit’ (hanged). At 70 years, Benjamin earned the title ‘Editor’ when he was given the task of editing the original declaration of independence document drafted by the committee’s sub-committee of two, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. At the time, young James Madison at only 25 years was busy helping elder Virginian statesmen frame their constitution. That experience helped him 11 years later to debate and record deliberations while representing Virginia at the second continental congress. Jefferson’s text was fluid yet Franklin’s role in editing was to suggest wording or alterations for universal clarity. The congress having made final changes, the document was accepted July 2, 1776. Benjamin Franklin was the oldest to sign it. At 81, Franklin was Boston’s representative at the second continental congress held at Franklin’s Philadelphia. For a prodigal son who had abandoned his father’s small time candle making business to succeed into American wealth, Boston still felt it an honor to be represented by its ablest kin. To them, their's was an indispensable sage who had successfully rallied citizens of diverse roots, be they servants or master, to the ways of patience, discernment and prudence teaching that honor traded is honor repaid.

The ring of his maxims – and simple but practical inventions – was also ‘their’ gift to emerging America. Or, perhaps, with the galaxy of worthy representation per state, Boston felt obliged to honor Franklin this last once. By then, Franklin was in such a poor state of health that he had to be carried into the meeting hall by four convicts on a custom chair. Benjamin repeatedly said that he wrote so that settlers of diverse persuasions could think first of these three things: ‘whence you came, where you are going and to whom you must account’.
These have long since become timeless truisms taught in philosophies of administration worldwide. He also founded a fire station, fire insurance company, scientific society and a library that stands to date in Philadelphia. Perhaps Franklin had had enough of fast lane journalism so popular with ego prone predators for him to have self-published. Lobbying for press freedoms at piece rate pay and little work station guarantees - yet remaining averse to risk taking - could only be interpreted as telltale stealth to hide the tainted image of errand runners.
Worse, within this brave attempt at universal union posturing of the fourth estate lies an untold hostile cut-throat character of internecine competition.
Even as reporters came to believe they had indispensable status in society, failing triumphs of their own to trumpet like Franklin found them perennially cursed to duplicity. Forced to scavenge from the same news pot, they ended up extrapolating same events under differentiated titles. Within this closet, many writers sought to upstage peers through scalp hunting.
Commercial journalism has always been anchored on partisan investment and editorial policies quite removed from writers’ input. Journalism is subjective and rarely objective. The writer’s honor was invalidated to supplicant brief making the journalist appear a parasitic sponger. In fact, nothing important ever gets to the press: 'important things are classified, reality is top secret!'
Making a name within this gung-ho maze became the reporter’s only plot worked at the expense of target subjects who had to be violated in text for buyer readers untutored to the stable politick of patronized publishing.
Calls for Press freedom thus beg the question: to what gain; who’s profit? If the scandalized have more shares than the writer in the particular media house, who gets the better credit? Philosophically, can beneficially citizens begrudge a pasted corrupt benefactor politician especially if the same politician owns the media house for which the writer strings? It is no use writers trying to ride the rattle in desperation raising rackets of their own under pretext of validation of professional but superficially skewed legalisms. Zenger sued for it, he died young; Paine flouted it, readers later shunned him. Yet graduate journalists continue to crave a certain ambience to national recognition that turns elusive. The Ecclesiastical tenet calls such stunts chasing after the wind all for which is but vanity. Franklin called it ‘putting airs of appearance’. He dismissed it as a pride of appearance for which so much is risked…. ‘it cannot promote health, or ease pain; it makes no increase in merit in the person, it creates envy, it hastens misfortune’. Truth be said; writers of commissioned typecast are for equal measure fated to retire to obscurity if not infamy not unlike the characters they attempt to scandalize.
Even where populist scripts are justified as a right to freedom of expression cushioned on artistic license or propped by writer’s convention, none a day would readers be fooled.
Newspapers and tabloids – but for acclaimed journals – are treated universally as no more than pep filler necessities to sprite up the day not souvenirs of artistic or scientific value. As to who then reserves the right to criticize, condemn or complain about aspects of contemporary societal issues, Franklin coined this famous quip: 'any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do!’ For the pain and frankness of these two writers, Americans were not lost for paying tribute in kind. Except for occasional quoting by scriptwriters for nationalist speakers, a solitary mute statue honors Thomas Paine in the remote neighborhood of his burial. As stated, Franklin’s gift library cheers readers up to this day in Philadelphia. When the first adhesive postage stamps went on sale in America 1847, Franklin and Washington were honored with commemorative portraits thereon. And while the famous $I (one) dollar bill was redesigned in 1869 to carry Washington’s image, America’s highest value note in modern circulation the $100 (one hundred) dollar note has Franklin’s portrait as affirmed in 1929. The $10 (ten) dollar note carries Alexander Hamilton likeness. Shortly before his death 1790, Benjamin Franklin published his biography dedicated to his son. While almost ever other journalist believes he or she can write other people’s biographies, few would dare attempt to write their own. Hollow achievements are definitely unprintable. Franklin stated he wished to inspire all those who read his biography to ponder, reflect and prosper thus.
True citizens would give a thumps up for such a go-go motto as they celebrate Franklin’s birthday this and every January 6 or, January 17 whichever was a Sunday.
When a flight plan is filed and flown to the plot and every tempting drift and deviation countered, an aircraft is said to have flown to destination on a path pilots call track made good (TMG). That is what Zenger, Paine and later day operant journalists lack: ‘consistency to purpose’.

Franklin had it. For a man who lived graciously for his readers to forgive his faults and long enough for planet Uranus to do one complete orbit round the sun (84 years), Benjamin Franklin certainly etched out an indelible track made good for a lifetime legacy. His was true journalism.

Are you are frank or a pain?
END.
Biblio trail Google/Documents Of The United States Of America.