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"The Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded."

— Obi-Wan Kenobi

It is crucial to remember that the American founders, the ones who enshrined the ideas of a free press and free speech in the Constitution, had no concept of an unbiased media. They'd never seen, heard or smelled such a beast.

The newspapers that John Adams and James Madison read — or, in the case of Alexander Hamilton and The New York Post, founded — existed to further their own political agendas. They would have no more grasped the idea of printed or spoken objectivity than they would the concepts of curved space or sub-atomic physics.

The idea is that self-rule — representative republic, direct democracy or whatever other subcategory you might invent — cannot work outside of an atmosphere where advocates are free to make their case and, much more importantly, the people are smart enough and dedicated enough to sort through all the flotsam and jetsam presented to them and make, often enough, the right decisions.

Over the next 14 months we are going to find out if the idea of an unregulated marketplace of ideas on the one hand and democratic self-rule on the other are really so compatible. In addition to all the flaws that have always dogged the American experiment, two major factors have been added to the mix.

One is the final repeal of The Fairness Doctrine. That was the Federal Communications Commission rule, based on the idea that the airwaves were a public trust, demanding that each license-holder give a fair shake to all sides of any political disagreement. In practice, the rule was a bad idea because lazy and/or absentee broadcast executives met the requirement by basically avoiding controversial topics, comfortable that silence is never unbalanced.

The other is the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling. That's the one that holds that "independent expenditures" made by outside groups in support of, or opposition to, political candidates or ballot questions may not be limited under the First Amendment.

The inevitable result will be a blanketing of the deregulated airwaves, and the always untamed blogosphere, with all manner of claims, counter-claims, smears, distortions and outright lies. The eternal potential for elections to be won by those with the best, or meanest, campaign strategists, rather than by the best candidates, will become that much greater.

The image of such campaigning bothers many activists, especially those who side with the poor, the workers and the environment. They fear their superior ideas will be shouted down by the deep-pocketed advocates who want to exploit all three for increased private profit.

But it also upsets the modern mainstream media, the ones who hold to the very non-Hamiltonian idea that the press should be objective and bring people the unspun truth. Doing so is going to be a lot more difficult in a world where calm, dispassionate reportage is likely to sound deadly dull next to the flashy and shrill attack ads.

That means that objective journalism, right at the point in its relatively short history when it is the most strapped for resources, has the ever-more-difficult job of sifting through the twisted truths and outright lies to bring their readers the unbiased skinny. Which partisans and advocates will bash as being biased whenever it doesn't back their candidate.

If the founders were right about us — about you — it should turn out fine. But it's going to require the use of a lot of higher brain functions that perhaps have not been that well exercised since the advent of television. If ever.

George Pyle is a Tribune editorial writer because he found objective reporting too frustrating. Email: gpyle@sltrib.com. Twitter: @debatestate.