conamend

Issue #44

Last Update March 2, 2006

National Constitutional Amendment by Sten Grynir Constitutional amendments have been much in the news lately. The right has a laundry list of amendments they would like to see passed so that they would no longer be inconvenienced by the Constitution. These include a marriage definition amendment, restricting marriage to a man and a women, an “under God” amendment preventing courts from eliminating that phrase from the Pledge of Allegiance, an amendment that would in effect eliminate separation of church and state, and an amendment overturning Roe v Wade. The center/left (there is no far left anymore) would like the Equal Rights Amendment passed. Given the polarization of our society, neither side has a chance of putting together a large enough majority to see any of these amendments passed and ratified. There is one amendment, however, that I think the left and right could agree on. I call it the “Defense of News” amendment.

A well informed citizenry is essential to the well-being of the nation. This campaign season has made painfully clear the woeful weakness of our news services, especially, but not exclusively, network television. My amendment would significantly strengthen news reporting and relieve viewers of the intolerable burden of boredom imposed upon them by “news”. It would do this by forbidding four things: instant analysis, shouting at or interrupting other commentators, sound bites, and Punditry. The left and right can find large areas of agreement here; perhaps the right would object to the ban on shouting and interrupting, but the rest should be noncontroversial.

Instant analysis, the commenting on a speech or event immediately upon its conclusion, leaves no time for reflection and for fact-checking. The result is usually five to ten minutes of contentless commentary telling us, inaccurately, what we have already observed first hand. Outlawing instant analysis would improve political reporting, and would have the added benefit of making most sports programs entirely silent except for crowd noises. If we throw in a prohibition on instant replays, both sports and news programs will have time to spare, which can be used, in the case of news programs, to air longer and more informative segments, or, alternatively, to cover events that don't involve American citizens or weird weather. Sports programs could be shorter or could have more amusing half-time shows.

The prohibition against shouting at or interrupting other commentators would eliminate such programs as The Capital Gang, The McLaughlin Group, The O'Reilly Factor and Chris Matthews. Enough said.

Sound bites attempt to reduce a lengthy communication to one or two sentences, usually chosen to effect the greatest distortion possible in the speaker's position. By forbidding excerpts shorter than one minute if the speech or interview was two minutes or longer, we stand a chance of hearing what the speaker intended, not what the news editor would like us to hear. Of course, unless an event is heavily visual, TV is at a disadvantage in news dissemination compared with newspapers and magazines. TV though newer than print, is actually an older paradigm: it is a linear medium, whereas print allows random access. The only way to get rid of a long TV news piece that one has no interest in is to change the channel. With a newspaper, you just skip to another article and keep reading. This accounts for the prevalence of sound bites: it is the TV producer's attempt to keep you from switching channels if a particular item doesn't interest you. Unfortunately, this makes each item so short as to be useless as information. Maybe TiVo will solve this problem in the future, but my Constitutional amendment will deal with it now.

The ban on Punditry will be applauded by most of the population, although unemployment among academics, pollsters, ex-political operatives and members of the military industrial complex will rise. TV Pundits specialize in telling us that we didn't hear/see what we heard/saw, and forecasting the future without actually understanding the present. Like astrologers and clairvoyants, no one actually compiles statistics on the accuracy of their predictions. (Magazine pundits, such as yours truly, have better records, since their words remain for anyone to check later.) The punishment for Punditry will, of course, have to be set by Congress, but I recommend that a convicted Pundit be sentenced to not less than two years servitude as a bookie. The only permissible defense against a charge of Punditry will be an accuracy record one standard deviation above chance.

We need more actions on which the right and left can agree, in order to heal our national divisions and make political discourse civil again. The Defense of News amendment is a start.