The Action and the Reaction--Part I
by Gordon Francis Corbett

Tranquillity reinforces opinions; tumult calls them into question. So, someone observed, public opinion changes only when heated.

What do the "civil rights" demonstrations of the 'sixties, the Viet-Nam War, and the attacks of 11 September have in common? The answer is,
"television." Television brought them into our homes. Seeing police charge demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, watching Viet-cong kill
American soldiers, and looking on as Arab terrorists collapsed skyscrapers in New York all made us question hitherto undoubted assumptions.

Consider the demonstrations. Television reporters rarely described them even-handedly. Instead, they presented alleged facts, bolstered with dramatic motion pictures.

Their exercise of judgment kept many viewers from using their own. Consequently, when their television screens showed supposedly villainous
Southern police attacking allegedly heroic demonstrators, they wrote our Representatives and Senators to demand that they grant the demonstrators' goals.

The reporters' implicit idea was not that the Constitution was "broke," and therefore needed fixing, but that new social thinking had made it
obsolete. Sociologists had found the purportedly "rigid" South stupid and cruel. Result: the public backed the transformation of the Founders'
Constitutionally federative republic into a unitary democracy, whose subordinate states Washington would supervise.

Or, look at the Viet-Nam War. War is a horrible thing. Its sights and sounds repel every right-thinking person. Television reporters presented
those sights and sounds, implied that our blood and treasure was propping up an Asian dictatorship, and showed college students burning draft cards. Result: the public backed leaving Viet-Nam.

Concerning 11 September, remember how our reporters covered it, and have been covering the subsequent war. Look up the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth,
Seventh, and Eighth Amendments. Ponder the number of their prohibitions that our government now ignores.

More in Part II.