A Waiting Period for News
Some years ago I proposed making a change to ‘freedom of the press’ as it is understood.

At the time, I was being sarcastic and illustrative. My purpose was to take popular arguments for gun-control and apply them to the press. You know- turn the tables.

Unfortunately, the proposals actually don’t sound much like satire anymore.

My proposal-

I propose that we create a seven day waiting period before news can be published. Understand, I don’t want to censor anything; I don’t want to undermine the founding father’s inclusion of a free press in our bill of rights; I simply want to create a ‘cooling off’ period before the trigger is pulled in the emotionally charged atmospheere of developing news.

Let’s face it. When our founding fathers allowed for a free press, they didn’t foresee today’s rapid fire assualt of 24 hour news channels being able to affect world politics instantaneously. No, indeed, they were thinking of single copy, manually reloaded presses, that editors used primarily to provide their families with food.

Let’s face facts. We’ve all heard of situations where a producer, under the gun from a deadline (doesn’t the jargon alone demonstrate what a violent institution we’re talking about here), pulls the trigger on a ‘news’ story only later to find out they had an innocent bystander in their sights.

All I’m saying is this. Institute a waiting period. The producer woud still pull the trigger at the same time, but the bullet wouldn’t leave the barrel for 7 days. That’s it. Certainly the Brady Bill has demonstrated that a cooling off period for comparative child’s toys of handguns has saved billions of lives daily. I’ve read it in the news.

So, as soon as the story is ready to go, the waiting period begins. During that time, obscure, quaint processes from journalistic antiquity could be brought to bear. Peer review, fact checking, editorial review.

Any corrections could be made during this ‘failsafe’ period, and the final story either released or killed.

Oh, I know the knee-jerk reaction of journalists will be “When news is outlawed, only outlaws will have news”; and ‘News doesn’t kill people, bad reporting does” and “they can have my notebook and rolodex when they pry it from my cold dead fingers”. But can we really allow a bunch of self-interested irresponsible people put everyone at risk just because of some ill-conceived ‘constitutional right’? Join the cause. End drive-by journalism. Let’s keep reporter’s notebooks out of the hands of children.  ¶ 8:03 PM