free press

When the founding fathers set up the constitution, one of their major concerns was to restrict the power of the federal government. The best example of this is the first amendment which provides for a free press. They envisioned the free press as a watch dog that would expose abuse of power. This remained the objected of the press until the early 1900’s when a man by the name of Finley Peter Dunne coined the phrase, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”, when he referred to the media. This broadened the press area from government to non –government business. It soon became apparent that the comfortable were the rich both as individuals and corporations. The other side to comfort the afflicted came to mean the poor. This whole process developed into what some called class warfare and soon the Democratic Party became known as the party of the poor and all of the Avant-garde reporters became defenders of the poor and by default defenders of the Democratic Party. This process continued until the 1960’s when the democrats realized that the poor didn’t vote so they became the party of the middle class and this is best exemplified by President Obama’s continuous reference to his concern for the middle class. I do not question his desire to help the middle class but in looking at the results over the past five years I don’t see any improvements. While the stock market is rising and Wall Street along with the Big Banks have seen government money pouring into their coffers the middle class has seen high unemployment and stagnant wages. My mother used to say, the poor get poorer and the rich get richer and that seems to be the case.