EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JANE MARTINSON
IN THE GUARDIAN
"Press standards:
the vital bond of trust that journalists have to win back"
It simply ain't going to happen.
Even if many individual journalists wanted to change their industry,
they could not.
Newspapers and broadcasting have always been viewed as means
of influence, and I think today that is truer than ever.
I say that because there are so relatively few newspapers
and broadcasters left owing to decades of consolidation and mergers and
take-overs, all permitted by governments.
We have newspaper and broadcasting empires built on the
desirability of exercising the power to influence.
The relatively small number of owners left are very much
committed to the concept, influencing government itself and influencing the
public in favor of the government, as any brief survey of the major corporate
press starkly reveals.
That on-going effort should be obvious to all critical
readers and listeners.
Other changed technology and economic conditions also affect
the press greatly. The press has lost a lot of advertising revenue to the
Internet. It simply cannot afford much in the way of foreign correspondents,
investigative reporting, and other costly activities. And, for sure, you won’t
find much of them in any survey.
Pages are filled today with extremely light and low-cost or
even costless stuff. What anyone could even term journalism, whether good or
bad, is often a small proportion of content.
And national governments are busy in all kinds of dark or
covert activity – perhaps at a level as never before. They will not tolerate
much true or accurate reportage in those dark matters. They very much do have
tools to discourage and punish it. Anyway, most of the corporate owners today -
extremely well-off members of the establishment – have zero interest in
embarrassing their governments. They are “all in it together,” as it were.
Imagine, just as one example, the New York Times undertaking
an intense set of reports on what has actually happened in Syria? They would
embarrass their own government, they would embarrass key allies like the Saudi
Princes, they would be accused of undermining the policies of the United
States, they might be charged in court, they would immediately lose all
cooperation from government officials and no longer receive helpful leaks, and
they would lose serious advertising dollars from companies loyal to or
associated with the government.
They would also embarrass Israel, a country with whom they
are intimately tied, having admitted not long ago that every story connected to
Israel is passed by that state’s official censor before being published.
The further into ‘deep state” stuff, “dark ops” and the
like, any government goes, it is guaranteed that its own press will be
deliberately negligent or dishonest in reporting about it. Today, the United
States is not only up to its armpits in such dirty stuff, it very much
browbeats and intimidates allies to follow the pattern. And that is exactly
what we see in the press in Britain, in Canada, in France, in Germany, and in
other member states of “the West.” The West does much the same things with the
press the old Soviets did, it just does them in subtler and less obvious ways.
Such are the realities of contemporary journalism, and
journalists themselves are, after all, just salaried employees who can be sent
packing in an instant plus with the threat of bad references to any potential
new employer. Even the very best of journalists has no real leverage, and the
silly journalism schools keep graduating troops of new hopefuls each year. Any
idealism about journalism and truth and trust is just fantasy.
As someone once wisely said, the only way to enjoy freedom
of the press is to own one.
