Constitutional Law

Thought on the mass media

I recently read a book by George P. LeBrun, New York CIty medical examiner in the early 1900s, and who wrote that he was the actual author of the Sulivan Act.

What was interesting, also, was his list of reforms that he'd pushed and of which he was proud. One dealt with increasing traffic deaths by creating a "driver's license" and requiring a driving test before getting it. Before then, people were just buying cars and figuring they'd learn to drive on the way home ... in the process running down pedestrians and smashing things up. Another required that poisons be conspicuously labeled as such. Bug and rat poisons were often sold in drug stores, and sometimes had their nature mentioned only in fine print -- a legislator had died after the drug store messenger gave him the wrong tin.

I wonder if the mass media have an underlying world view, at a subconscious level, that stems from the days of the progressive era, when almost nothing was regulated, the new measures proposed were sensible and modest, and the move for them was a crusade for reform? Might the media value system have carried over for a century, into a radically different world? Values such as more government is *always* good, more laws are *always* good, these things will make the world safer. Not to mention that anyone who resists this is ignorant or selfish, government operations are always altruistic, etc.

Full post as published by Of Arms and the Law on February 21, 2011 (boomark / email).