MSNBC’s Propaganda News
by Tibor R. Machan
Here is what the "news" story on MSNBC’s Web site said on Monday morning, June 12th:
"...Four days after [a] routine, elective surgery, Lykins—a healthy, 23-year-old student from Minnesota—died of a raging infection."
"He died because the cartilage came from a corpse that had sat unrefrigerated for 19 hours—a corpse that had been rejected by two other tissue banks. The cartilage hadn’t been adequately treated to kill bacteria. The Georgia-based tissue bank, CryoLife Inc., knew that the donor had the germ and released the tissue anyway.
"None of this broke a single federal rule."
"And it could happen again today—likely is still happening today—because of shoddy practices by some in the billion-dollar body parts business and the lack of government regulation."
Why is MSNBC perpetrating such journalistic malpractice? Why is it undermining its integrity by becoming an advocate of federal government regulation instead of reporting on the various ways bad things can be dealt with in a free country?
Let’s get it straight—there are zillions of federal rules about nearly everything we do in life the existence of which do absolutely nothing to prevent malfeasance. I give you, for starters, the disaster in New Orleans related to hurricane Katrina. And that "could happen again today."
Day in and out awful things happen in America over which the federal government has jurisdiction, which the feds regulate, yet MSNBC unabashedly champions putting cases like the one involving the death of the 23-year-old student from Minnesota under the care of these same feds.
Why didn’t MSNBC promote stronger liability laws, whereby when such things happen those responsible would be sued and punished or fined big time if found guilty of malpractice? Such non-preemptory measures—which are consistent with the principle of a free society—are powerful means in the effort to combat the mishandling of innumerable professional tasks.
The case for the non-regulatory approach was made by professor emeritus J. C. Smith, of the University of British Columbia, in a book edited by me and my friend, the late M. Bruce Johnson, professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Rights and Regulation (San Francisco: Pacific Institute of Public Policy Research, 1983). He titled his path breaking paper, "The Processes of Adjudication and Regulation, A Comparison," and concluded:
"Under the system of civil justice [adjudication] standards are set for each specific situation, generally by the people who are the most knowledgeable, while under a system of government regulation standards are either too general to be effective, or if specific, too numerous and complex to be operable."
In addition, government regulation has an element about it that violates a classical conception of justice in a free society. It amounts to a form of prior restraint. Legal authorities prosecute professionals not because someone has been harmed, someone’s rights have been violated but because some rule has not be adhered to, some inspector claims a regulation has been broken. This amounts to nothing less than punishing professionals who don’t deserve it because they haven’t infringed anyone’s rights. Its effect is that professionals become bogged down in dodging regulations—consulting forever with their attorneys and experts not about how to do their work better but how to maneuver the maze of rules government bureaucrats create for them.
Unfortunately, with the support of lazy and biased journalists—who, because of the protection offered by the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution do not face any threat of government regulations—the system of government regulation continues to make a mockery of justice and lulls millions of people into thinking they are safe. MSNBC should be ashamed of itself for perpetuating this governmental habit.
If media professionals are interested in getting into the fray about various controversial issues, at least let me present their viewers and readers with the wide array of options that are possible to deploy as these problems are being confronted. That would be keeping in line with proper journalistic standards instead of becoming propagandists for the state.
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