A couple posts previous, I talked about Muckrackers and who their modern counterparts were. It was a pretty unenthusiastic post, taking the easy way out by linking you to those Youtube videos. This post is going to address if Muckrackers face ridicule from government workers that they call scum.
I do believe that Muckrackers, particularly Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, face a condemning government and news reporters. By "news reporters" I mean the Fox network. When the people at Fox and in the government react to these Muckrackers' jokes, they take it personally. Which is not a good thing. Stewart and Colbert are not talking about those people because they hate them, they talk about them because that person did something that was completely bogus to someone else or relates directly to the topic being discussed. They do not intentionally try to hurt someone's feelings.
Once, in the Colbert Report , Stephen Colbert played a clip of Sarah Palin telling reporters that Paul Revere road around the country on his horse, "firing those warning shots", "ringing those cowbell's", and "telling the British that we were not going to give up our arms and we would fight for our land." Colbert then went on to get on a mechanical horse, pretend to fire a late 1700's gun, and reload, all while ringing a cowbell. The end result was it was almost impossible to do. In this instance, Colbert was not focusing on Palin, but the untruth in her statement. Colbert just found a funny situation to expound upon.
One thing is absolutely clear: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert get under peoples' skin. All the crap Stewart and Colbert dish out about a topic does reach people with the view Colbert and Stewart are trashing. The best instance is when Rick Sanchez called Jon Stewart a bigot, and got fired from CNN. That just goes to show that sticks and stones do break bones, and words can hurt people.
But for every insulting comment a Fox News reporter has over Stephen Colbert, Colbert has an equally rude comment in reply. Let's get this thing straight, Stewart and Colbert are not being called "bigots" for no good reason, these guys do make some pretty harsh comments. When talking about Newt Gingrich, and I know I keep on going to Jon Stewart, he commented on how Bill O'Reiley thought Newt Gingrich was a lazy candidate with no potential. Look at that. He kills to birds with one stone. Making a political statement and explaining why Newt Gingrich must not be the right candidate for the job. If the most conservative reporter in America says Gingrich is incapable of leading a successful presidency, Gringrich is not the right choice.
All of this brings up the question, is this Constitutional? The 1st Amendment states that people have the freedom of speech, petition, religion, assembly, and protest as long as it does not interfere with anyone else's well-being or human rights. By saying the things they are saying, Stewart and Colbert are unintentionally interfering with the well-being of the people they discuss on their show. Which is another good point in itself. By saying Colbert and Stewart are hurting the well-being of the government workers unintentionally, is it still Unconstitutional? I believe so. The difference between the hurtful comments sent from the Fox news reporters and government workers to Colbert and Stewart and the comments made by Colbert and Stewart to the government workers and Fox news reporters is that Colbert and Stewart are not fazed by the insults, which means that the comments made by the government workers and Fox news are Constitutional because those comments do not interfere with the well-being of Colbert or Stewart. The opposite is true for the comments Colbert and Stewart makes.
This is the largest difference between Muckrackers of the Progressive Era and today. Congress has grown smaller since the original Muckrackers. The same is true for Capitalists. This means that everything Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Jacob Riis, even going back to Dorothea Dix, said, wrote, or otherwise, are all Constitutional. The reason being is that the actions of Riis did not faze the Capitalists so much as to interfere with their well-being. Sinclair did his part, he did change the working conditions for the meat-packing plants, but think the toll on the Capitalists from an economic standpoint. It was a very small percent of the wealth. What these Progressive thinkers did was not decrease the amount of money the Capitalists had, but rather the amount of influence they had over the people and government. However, the amount of power the Industrialists had over the nation that the Progressives had to work super hard to accomplish what they wanted. All of this means that because the Capitalists had so much power and were rarely upset or caught off guard by these Progressives, it would not be considered Unconstitutional.
Now here is the catch. This is for those of you who argue that what Tarbell, Sinclair, Riis, and other Progressives did was Unconstitutional. If you argue that what they did was Unconstitutional, then is it right for the Constitution to be broken if it is in the good of the common man? If we see it from Voltaire's point of view, yes, when the rights of the poor are about as strong as pudding, and that is the measure to the rights of the Capitalists, it is alright to break the Constitution to get what we want, because when one person's rights are discarded, all of us are in trouble.
Colbert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWcQEO1OG4Q
Stewart: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKLRmVYk0-s&feature=related
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