COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MANUEL ROIG-FRANZIA AND PAUL
FARHI IN THE INDEPENDENT
“Breitbart News
Network, accused of being a mouthpiece for xenophobes, racists and misogynists
– and thrown into the spotlight this week by the resignation of its poster boy
Milo Yiannopoulos for remarks on paedophilia – is so right wing it makes Fox
News look like the BBC. Now that its former boss Steve Bannon is Trump’s chief
strategist, nothing stands between its extremist stance and US presidential
policy.”
There is no such thing as an unbiased press, always and
everywhere.
Whoever pays for a press organization plus whoever feeds it
information - those are the people whose interests are served by the
organization.
There are no exceptions.
If you read only The Independent or only The New York Times
or only Pravda, you will, to a certainty, be misinformed on certain important matters.
Saying anything else is just pure fantasy.
So, in a sense, the critics of new press organizations like
Breitbart are correct - it is biased - but they are also wrong because
everything else you can possibly read is also biased.
The critics are telling a partial truth, a partial truth
being by its very nature not the truth at all.
That is the fundamental reason why the whole “fake news”
controversy is itself fake. It’s just a new slogan from one of several biased
sources attacking others.
You know the old warning about how nothing is actually free,
no matter what the advertising claims say otherwise?
Well, it is exactly the same with accurate information. No
one is offering it to you free, or even at the very modest price of a daily
newspaper. Just think of the great cost of higher education or superb skills
training of any kind.
Information, accurate information, is costly, and not always
being measured in currency. It is often measured in the hard effort needed to
obtain it.
The only way a conscientious individual can try to be
informed, on either politically sensitive or international policy matters, is
to read, or listen to, a significant variety of sources.
You must then interpolate, taking into account what each of
them is trying hide or feature, and judge roughly where truth is.
It is much what a juror must do in a criminal trial,
listening to two sides make arguments in opposite directions. The juror judges everything
from the tone of voice to the facial expressions to determine who may be
telling truth.
Lawyers know, too, and quite famously, that eyewitnesses are
often highly undependable, peoples' perceptions and mental abilities to process
them varying greatly, to say nothing of vast differences in the quality of
memories. Yet jurors still must make a determination in a trial based at least
in part on what they say.
As a citizen, you are in a sense a juror in a trial, the
trial of the veracity of your own press and your own government.
We all understand that government does many things for which
it has no mandate from the people. And we all understand that the commercial
press almost always supports a government in these deceptive acts.
If you look back, you'll have a hard time finding press
organizations who worked against Tony Blair's criminal invasion and mass
murder. And the same for Lyndon Johnson when he first started the holocaust in
Vietnam (eventually, about 3 million Vietnamese were slaughtered, and for
nothing but embracing the wrong loyalty).
By the way, the method for getting at approximate truth
would be the same even if you were getting information directly from folks like
CIA or MI6, organizations which also have tremendous bias and always use their
privileged positions to influence their audience of high government officials
in the direction they want them to go.
So-called “big intelligence” is infamous both for offering
what it knows high government officials want to hear and for using their
intimate access to advocate for things they themselves desire. There is simply
no known way of avoiding this inevitable set of behaviors.
That is one of the reasons why Trump does not hold these
people in quite the same regard as they themselves think that they should be
held. The truth is, President Kennedy felt exactly the same way about the CIA.
He just didn’t have the kind of personality Trump has, one which just blurts
out what he is thinking.
We have many historical examples demonstrating the fact of
security service bias and dishonesty -e.g., the CIA during the height of the
Cold War never got its annual estimates of the USSR even close to right. The
reason: they always wanted large increases in budget for themselves and for the
armed forces, and they got them.
Honest journalism? It simply does not exist. Free press? A
wise man in America said many decades ago that the only way to have a free
press is to own one.
