There is a great responsibility in passing on the news. Ill-founded gossip can end a friendship, a marriage, a business... rumor-mongering is clearly among the most dangerous and irresponsible things one person can do.
So what happens when there exists a huge group of people devoted to spreading half-truths?

The development of the news-media as a political force is hard to trace. During the Revolutionary War, papers in the Colonies incited colonists not harmed by a stamp tax -- colonists, indeed, who had never written a letter in their life -- to consider it a foul encroachment on their personal liberties. In the days before the Civil War, local papers screamed outrages to the literate easterners about slavery-motivated 'massacres' of two or three people on the distant frontier.

Illiteracy would remain an obstacle to effecting huge political change through the news-media until the late 19th century, when an increasingly lettered populace suddenly acquired an appetite for literature. It was the era of the penny dreadful, the serialized novel... and the well-read newspaper.

On the ground floor of the skyrocketing newsmedia was William Randolph Hearst: a plutocrat who took his parents' millions and turned them into an impossibly huge personal fortune. One of his most reliable investments: the newspaper. He liked the paper because it offered political power; he once said that he refused to go into Hollywood 'because you can crush a man with journalism, and you can't with motion pictures'. His papers profited well, half from monopolistic business practices (lowering the price of the paper to one cent to drive rival papers into his conglomerate, for instance) and half from incredible amounts of grift. Give Hearst enough money and he would gladly see to your personal and/or political rivals being stamped down like ants; after all, who would speak up for the reputation of a man about whom the papers had nothing but ill to say? Who would slander the man who the papers made into a living god?
The influence Hearst had on the course of American history cannot be understated. He made a public call for an imperialist war against Spain, turned a tragic engine fire into an international terrorist attack, and has even been accused of single-handedly conjuring the Spanish-American war into life for the sole purpose of selling papers. He backed the politically foredoomed William Jennings Bryan fiercely, and after McKinley won the Presidential election, Hearst editorialized at length on the justice of assassinating him. Needless to say, the President was shot and killed mere months later. His continual bashing of the League of Nations destroyed US involvement in it, turning it into a powerless, pointless political body and almost certainly helping to cause the second World War. The life story of William Randolph Hearst alone is a stunning reproach to those who would trust the newsmedia with the massive power they wield on a daily basis.

But what about today? For the most part, people don't read the papers any more -- and if they do, they don't pay attention to much besides the funny pages. There's no niche in the world for a gigantic newspaper magnate any more with the emergence of movies and television, so Hearst is almost certainly one of a kind. Or is he?

For an example of a modern Hearst, we need look only to the modern newsmedia: huge broadcasting corporations, often with diverse holdings throughout the field of telecommunications. In the last decade alone we have seen such absurdities as MSNBC and AOL-Time Warner. These are newsmedia which are so surreal in their spread -- with holdings in the Internet, computing, all manner of paper media, movies, and who knows what else -- that the idea they are even capable of presenting an unbiased viewpoint beggars the imagination. These are corporations, not people, so it's unfair to charge them with maliciousness in bias -- but it does exist. Think for a moment about national politics: elections on a scale most people are incapable of concieving beyond the abstract, right? Without the concept of big newsmedia, it's hard to imagine that someone in San Diego and someone in Sacramento could even get the same story about a Californian candidate, to say nothing of national elections.

But the newsmedia exist! It is possible for two men on opposite sides of the country, let alone a state, to be given exactly the same story at exactly the same time -- what a wonder! As we live in an era where the world is growing smaller and smaller, it's often true that the only difference between local newscasters in Seattle and Atlanta working at satellites of the same company is one of accent. The incredible unity and reliability in information is something our founding fathers could not have dreamed of -- and something Hearst could only have dreamed of.

We live in a market economy, there is no doubt. So men, women, and corporations behave as normal for economic man: rationally, doing all they can to secure advantages for themselves. In not as many words, a rational economic entity would be willing to sell their mother for a few bucks, as long as she didn't have a better offer. The newsmedia, to a man, are run by big corporations, and corporations are economic man at his finest. A regular, rational man would never sell his mother -- he is bogged down by sentiments such as decency or principles. Corporations have none such; as a whole, they behave as indecently as the law allows, and show whatever principles are convenient at the moment. The corporate world is a battlefield, and as such only the ruthless will survive. That means that unless someone is watching them, corporate entities have no problems with dirty pool.

The newsmedia have next to no regulations -- besides regulations prohibiting them from displaying 'obscene' material. There exists no requirement to cover every story, or even every important story. If the newsmedia liked, they could devote an entire week's coverage to potato chips that look like people. They wouldn't, of course, because that would be bad for ratings. And ratings are important: for companies that make money through advertisement, the more people that see their programs, the better. In an anarcho-capitalist world, newsmedia, if they existed, would be governed by nothing BUT ratings -- whatever is spectacular will sell, so spectacular is put on the air 24/7 (excepting commercial breaks). There would be no motivation to meddle in politics or government or international affairs or economic policy, because none of those things would exist to meddle in.

It would be nice if we lived in a world where anarcho-capitalism were not an impossible dream.

But we don't. The United States is dominated by a binary political system: there is a bold line between conservative and liberal and people vote based on which side of the line they believe they stand on. Intellectual people, for the most part, tend to become ideologues: they vote for the Democrat or they vote for the Republican, they chastise their neighbor who feels like voting Green or Reform, and never really even give much thought to the other party. There exist a number of intellectual centrists, but generally they part down the middle each election year: some decide to vote for the Democrats, some decide to vote for the Republicans. Unless one party or another has done something intensely unpopular, the election is seldom decided by the educated voter.

This is because educated voters cancel each other out. If 3000 people vote for A and 3000 people vote for B, in an obliquely percentage-based election, neither candidate has gained an advantage over anyone but the various third parties. That is why, whenever elections come up, the biggest coverage is on the battleground states: winning New York or Texas by a greater margin won't help any, and investing efforts into states which are already on the opponent's side is an exercise in foolishness. So who decides the election? The undecided voters, to be certain.

The stupid undecided voters. Official terminology would refer to a 'non-issue vote' here, which is essentially a vote based on charisma. I like the term 'hair vote', because the image it conveys -- a man or woman voting on the candidate's hair rather than what he will be doing for the country -- is more or less accurate. They are not voting on the issues; they are voting on what they have heard about the candidate's family life, or which parts of their speeches they have heard, or how their hair looks on television.

Which, naturally, brings us back to the newsmedia. Since Bush Sr., we have lived in an age of 'soundbite politics' -- because of that very media institution, the best way to run an election campaign has been with short, peppy sayings that mean nothing but play very well on TV. Sometimes, the newsmedia run coverage on election based solely on ratings. These are generally the best of times; they happen only because ratings offer more money than politics for the moment being. Again, economic man is utterly ruthless, with a greed that knows no bounds, and corporations are as close to economic man as they can legally get. That means that sometimes, the temptation to meddle in national politics grows too strong. Corporations, on the whole, will back whoever they consider the most favorable to themselves; companies which depend on a domestic market which is beginning to decline will support protectionists, companies which depend on cheap raw materials will support candidates and parties in favor of aggressive acquisition of foreign goods. Wal-Mart would likely dig deep to support the opponent of a party which made support of unions a campaign plank.

All of that support is good -- it means more money for advertisement in exchange for plugging the donator's interests more vigorously. That is what politics is all about -- people helping people. Most of the money goes to advertisement -- again, nothing important, just 'Candidate X served valiantly in Y and will Z taxes -- vote X for freedom and integrity'. Nothing that will influence politically-interested ideologues. These advertisements make a huge impact on the hair vote, but generally that impact can balance itself out -- one candidate never makes enough more than the other to drown them in advertisements and carry an election.

So the support of various interest groups -- mostly corporate, as the citizen interest groups can actually win votes -- is to politics as an individual gonad is to us -- something that is present, necessary, but really not all that useful. The influential factor comes from the newsmedia. They will vigorously and subtly edit juxtaposition of stories -- and stories themselves -- to influence Presidential and other elections in their favor. Generally, they want reductions in corporate taxes, reductions in corporate restrictions, and most of all, news. A President who starts wars is the best thing the newsmedia could ask for; they do not care that American and foreign lives are lost, that billions of dollars are thrown into a wasteful conflict; they care that big explosions make for good 11:00 stories. Does the loss of American lives or property overly concern them?

No. It is not their department.

And yet we persist on viewing any newsmedia as unbiased. Fox News, which claims the title 'fair and balanced', is run by an Australian neoconservative -- something of a reincarnation of Hearst himself -- who constantly pushes his political beliefs, in the form of opinion programs and placement of stories, on his own media. Even the relatively reliable CNN has slipped up here, airing biased pieces designed to attack one opponent or another for the eventual economic benefit; they have helped to shore up support for war in a country where it did not exist, because war would be good for business. There is nothing more dangerous to the American political scene than companies which have potentially useful and powerful influence, realize it, and exercise no morality whatsoever in using it.

It shows a chilling disregard for any concept of decency, and it is something the newsmedia are guilty of even when they are not meddling in politics. On a day hundreds of children died of starvation -- some barely out of infancy -- all of the major news networks could not get over new evidence from the Neverland Ranch. The next day, the story was the same -- there existed sorrow around the world which we could easily put an end to if people only KNEW that it EXISTED, and the men and women responsible for bringing information to the masses would obsess over an over-the-hill pop singer who had more issues than the New York Times.

It is disgusting, and it needs to be changed.

National standards could help this problem: a governmental overview board which determines if news content is accurate and relevant, or if it's trying to pander to either ratings or corporate interests. We could go a step farther, as has been done in Britain, and create a national news network run by the United States government, or an independent committee overseen by it -- and completely independent of advertisements or the necessary biases of a corporation.

If we don't, who knows what amazing things the next Hearst might accomplish?