The country has been trying for years to get journalism to back off its expansion into law enforcement and character policing.
Messages come politely, in the form of surveys and polls showing public resentment of media growing steadily. And they come rudely, in the form of decisions like the one made last week by a jury in North Carolina that ordered ABC News to pay US$5.5 million in punitive damages for fraud and trespassing during a Prime Time Live report that accused the Food Lion supermarket chain of selling tainted meat.
But nobody seems to be listening much.
Journalism school deans and media critics have been on TV a lot since the North Carolina judgment, promising to appeal, warning about the chilling effect of judgments like this on the First Amendment, and arguing with straight and somber faces that reporters should be above the law anytime they wish under any circumstances they deem appropriate anytime they feel like it's in the public interest.
This position makes perfect sense if you buy the notion that journalism is now responsible for policing not only the sexual and financial lives of our public figures, but rotting chicken too.
It makes a lot less sense if you consider - as this verdict reminds us - that journalism is dependent on public good will and support for the freedoms and protections it has.
Some journalists are getting this: "Journalists are not cops," New York Times Washington bureau chief Andrew Rosenthal told NPR earlier this week. These are wise words. They should be chiseled on the walls of journalism schools everywhere.
If the FBI director went on TV asking for powers like what the press demands, editorial page writers across the country would burst blood vessels in outrage. But for journalism, gall in the pursuit of self-righteousness is no vice.
Newsmagazines from 60 Minutes to Prime Time Live have specialized for years in the art of gimmicky, mostly pretend, often high-tech "investigations." Cameras are hidden in purses, and disgruntled employees are wired. The kitchens of nursing homes where the elderly are allegedly being pushed around are photographed in herky-jerky black and white, and pictures of the "shocking" filth in the day-care center where you leave little Johnny every day are taken by cameras hidden in toys. Newsmagazine reporters have refined to an art form the shock interview, wherein befuddled security guards or hapless secretaries are confronted by outraged reporters demanding answers.
These stories create the illusion of a fearsome media, but broadcast almost never undertakes any real investigations - like tough looks at our disastrous drug policies, skyrocketing prison populations, racism and sexism in corporate hiring and promotions, or the entrenched social problems of the underclass.
In this case, ABC was accused of having producers submit fake résumés to get jobs, using hidden cameras to film once they got them.
In many contexts, some of these "investigative" techniques are blatantly illegal. No police agency would be permitted to employ them without a warrant.
A number of governmental agencies are responsible for inspecting food, from the FDA to state and local health inspectors. Did ABC News notify them about Food Lion's alleged food problems? Did it give them an opportunity to follow rational process and the law, or did it prefer to find yet another excuse to send "hidden" cameras onto private property to tell us what we desperately need to know about the food that we're buying?
If ABC News thinks these governmental health inspections are inadequate or incompetent, that's the story it should be bringing us.
Andrew Rosenthal is right. Journalists are not cops. Tainted chicken is not a compelling enough reason for journalists to misrepresent themselves, invade privacy, trespass on private property. They can call 911 like everybody else.
The moral crisis in modern media isn't that the freedom of the press is being curbed. It's that the press has acquired too much power. Reform will come only from the voluntary relinquishing of power.
Press investigations have become a public-policy crisis for the country and its political system. Media investigations have driven public figures to suicide, resulted in tens of millions of dollars being spent on eternal investigations, forced the removal of qualified candidates from consideration for office, altered the national political agenda, driven many people from public life - not at the hands of the electorate, but by the howling of the media mob.
The arrogant movement of the press into roles traditionally occupied by law enforcement has damaged democracy, alienated the public and is transforming media into a renegade institution, the arrogance of which is matched only by its lack of accountability and oversight.
The North Carolina jury is emphasizing the simple message the public has been trying to send mainstream media for years now: Back off. The press has no business usurping the job of government, the courts, and the police, except under extraordinary circumstances and when those agencies have failed demonstrably to perform their official functions.
Unfortunately, journalism is no better than any other public institution at voluntarily relinquishing power. Journalists, of all people, are not above any laws. The public never gave journalism the kind of power it has taken for itself, nor has any poll or survey suggested they want them to have it.
But the public can take it away.
The real news about the North Carolina verdict - which scares news folks to the core - is that the public is beginning to.
