COMMENT POSTED TO A STORY IN RINF
A man once said there is only freedom of the press if you
own one.
Of course, he was absolutely right, but a broader
interpretation of his words gives us a more complete meaning.
The freedom that the press exercises includes the freedom to
publish rubbish and disinformation of every kind, and that is just what it does
and what it has always done.
Going back to America's early days, the press worked in
exactly the same fashion.
Each party owned a paper or papers and stuffed them with
rubbish and even outright lies. Thomas Jefferson was an expert at this dark
work and hired unscrupulous people to do his bidding, but he was not alone.
"Yellow journalism" was a feature early in the
20th century, especially with W. R. Hearst and his large chain of newspapers.
So, too, The Chicago Tribune and its unpleasant and extremely biased owner,
Colonel McCormick. Today we have the
impossibly pompous, and regularly
dishonest, New York Times presenting
itself as the authoritative word in news when in fact its history is strewn
with dishonesty, propaganda, fraudster journalists, and extreme prejudice.
You just cannot expect the truth about the really important
issues from the establishment press because it has vital interests in maintaining
high government contacts for leaks and leads, the friendship of great corporate
leaders, and the patronage of corporate advertisers.
There is no way out of the conundrum. State press has proven
how feeble it is in recent years, examples being the BBC and CBC, both
disgraces as news services many times in recent years because they fear cuts in
funding from their political bosses.
We always have a smart maverick or two like Seymour Hersh,
but such genuine investigative reporters have trouble securing steady outsets of
importance for their discoveries, and generally their printed stuff does not
raise even a faint echo in the mainstream press which is what affects the
thinking of most of the population.
The notion of a free press is pretty much a game, and all
the rules and best practices taught at journalism schools are largely
meaningless noise. The situation is not unlike the pretence that the United
States maintains in the political sphere that it is a democracy. Elections
between two money-drenched parties whose candidates are each carefully vetted
and selected by the very establishment supplying the money really are not all
that different to the old Soviet ballots with one candidate.
Most Americans live in a kind of fairy world when it comes
to the hard-headed realities of journalism and government, and they
mechanically repeat words they have heard repeated thousands of times such as democracy and a free press without ever examining their meaning.
By the way, the establishment has learned that it can afford
to have the odd maverick voice such as Seymour Hersh, just as it can afford the
odd independent political candidate. The fact is, money gives access to the
press, and these people don’t have much of it. They represent the journalistic
and political equivalents of an established marketing reality we all see
regularly, a small local bottler of soda pop having a couple of feet of shelf
space in a supermarket’s huge aisle overwhelmingly filled with the products of
just two massive and wealthy companies.
As a last note, all of the prizes in journalism are close to
meaningless, much like the Nobel Peace Prize often given to scoundrels. The
Pulitzer Prize, which the writer cites for Hersh, has a terrible record of
being awarded to undeserving and even fraudulent journalists. That is not a
reflection on Hersh, but a statistical statement of the general conditions.
Like the silly and grossly biased Academy Awards, the
Pulitzers are marketing tools and a way for the industry to slap itself on the
back annually. Good God, Thomas Friedman, the most dishonest and manipulative
columnist in the United States, has at least two of them.
Once in a while, again like the Academy Awards, a worthy
recipient manages to slip through.
