John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Ominous New 'Fact Checker' Approves MSM Lies to Start Wars While Attacking Alternative Media
"Newsguard attempts to set itself outside of the other allegedly “unbiased” fact checkers like Snopes and Politifact by setting out to monetarily cripple independent media sites by having their ads pulled"
I don't see a lot of point in citing a selection of past transgressions by the mainstream press. It has never done anything but support the establishment, including supporting every conflict in which America engages.
That is, almost by definition, part of its job. It is the corporate mouthpiece for a corporate government establishment. It is beholden to the establishment for its place and patronage and privileges, so that it could not do otherwise if it tried.
Just as one example, The New York Times has been described as the house organ of the American establishment. You could not come up with a more apt description. And surely, we all understand that the house organs you find provided to employees in any large corporation are provided to make employees feel good about their company, to make them feel proud, and to support what the company undertakes, not to search for truth.
Anyone who believes that the principles of journalism, as espoused in schools, are applied in the mainstream press and broadcasting simply is confessing to the fact that he or she does not read or listen with much understanding.
The old saying, attributed to more than one author, about the only way to have a free press is to own one, is one of the truest things ever said on the subject of journalism and publishing.
Well, that, of course, is just what the many diverse writers and publishers in our Internet universe have done – gone and got their own presses.
Technology has made it possible to have more and more diverse publications and perspectives published than anyone could have imagined just fifty years ago.
We all understand how new technology made the Industrial Revolution possible, but similar revolutionary effects come from any important new technology, such as home computers and the Internet.
Of course, the establishment house organs do not like it, and they like it even less in a new technology-driven environment which has stripped them of traditional revenue sources, revenue such as want ads, once a gold mine for many of them.
The only opinion that counts about any news source is the opinion of its readers. That is the only way it should be in a free society.
NewsGuard is a genuinely insidious concept which effectively tries to put up old-fashioned "quarantined" notices on the front doors of houses to prevent anyone from visiting. But we are not talking about deadly disease here, we are talking about ideas and free speech.
Free speech comes with risks, inherently. Some speech will be misinformed, some prejudiced, some just dumb, but you cannot have free speech without its accompanying messiness. There is no such thing as scrubbed, pre-washed, lab-tested free speech. To even think that you can have it so is to think along the lines of the Soviets.
All of NewsGuard’s interviews and research efforts are intended to give the appearance almost of a scientific research operation supporting their judgments. But, in the end, it is all as phony as the guys with fellowships and titles from “think-tanks” or “institutes” who pose as independent scholars and thinkers while, in fact, being full-time paid advocates for a cause, all much resembling the actors who wear white lab coats and carry clip boards in television ads as they advise you, in authoritative baritone voices, about which headache remedy to buy.
Judgments are what NewsGuard is peddling, judgments and absolutely nothing else. Judgments as dependable as the customer product reviews on many large Internet sales sites, which is to say, not at all. These are then applied with a mechanism intended to destroy revenue sources for the publications they target. You really need to know nothing more than that to reject and condemn this effort to control the flow of free speech.
The very concept is inhibiting, controlling, and unwarranted in a free society.
But who ever regarded an empire as a free society? The American empire is somewhat unique in history as being one that has been carefully tailored over generations to provide a good illusion of a free society. Operations like NewsGuard only remind us of the reality.
