Too Many Secrets

We seem to have too many secrets being exposed in this U.S. election.  On the one side, we have the collection and presentation of videos that purport to show gross behavior toward women, some of which occurred 30 years ago.  On the other side, we have the internal emails of a political campaign that talk about attitudes towards various groups within the opposition, like Catholics and Christians.  This is not a face we want to show to the rest of the world, but it is the state of politics since the alignment of political parties and media  channels favoring one candidate over another.

What prompts this kind of activity in the U.S. is the First Amendment to the Constitution [see https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment for a broader explanation]

"The First Amendment guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to petition.  It forbids Congress from both promoting one religion over others and also restricting an individual’s religious practice.  It guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely.  It also guarantees the right of citizens to assemble peaceably and to petition their government.

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

So, this delicate balance of press and freedom of expression is easy to document, but the harder to describe in terms of what is happening today.  What is allows the press to do is sandbag videos and voice recordings of any potential candidates and play them when they choose to.  It allows other governments to steal information and feed it into a free press which does not care about the source, accuracy, or context of such things.  With every right there should be some responsibility, which seems to be lacking everywhere in what used to be called "yellow journalism" when it was more fashionable than it is today.

George William Alger wrote a rather long explanation of the law and this form of print where he said the press shows its ethics, more than its respect for law, when it does these kinds of things.  Nobody in 1903 could foresee the storage capacity of a terabit drive or the interconnection of groups over the Internet.  It took years of law and public discourse to change the way the press operated in the late 1800s.  Nobody could have guessed that we would have to deal with it all over again.