Saturday, February 25, 2017

The best press money can buy



"The difference between burlesque and the newspapers is that the former never pretended to be performing a public service by exposure." -I.F. Stone, 1952

There is no such thing as an objective media. This is a lesson I learned a lot time ago when writing for and being part of the underground media movement.
Any media subject to advertising is automatically biased.
America has the best press you can buy, as long as you can afford to pay for it.
A free press is always an out-of-control press by its very nature, and the theory of having no overseer to regulate it, is that somehow with all the conflicting accounts, the truth emerge.
This, of course, assumes that the audience is intelligent enough to look for alternative opinions and not satisfied with accepting what it wants to hear in the first place.
When a majority of major media agree on anything, you have to be suspicious, especially in an era when nearly all major media is owned and controlled by a few individuals.
Free press stops being free when these individuals decide to take one side over another, and the control that we all so fear might come from government, comes from these puppet masters behind the scenes, who want to direct public opinion down a particular pathway.
This is largely what we are seeing now from major media, an unspoken agreement for an unholy alliance aimed largely at bringing down a government these individuals dislike.
American Media has always been deeply involved with politics a kind of strange dance and which media influences policy and policy reflects media's wishes and wants.
People talk about yellow journalism and when Hearst created his own war that made the United States into an international power.
This is nothing new headlines and propaganda go hand-in-hand.
What makes journalism great over time are those people who are the exception to the rule, a few brave people and organizations that have risen above the muckraking to become truly inspired.
This is why the Washington Post today is such a tragedy because it has -- to quote and Indiana Jones film -- fallen away from the true faith and become just more muck. It has ceased serving a public use and has become an instrument of destruction.
At a time when media is largely controlled by very few the concept of Free Press ceases to exist and what we get our propaganda machines designed to steer public opinion in certain directions.
Trump calls this fake news but in reality it is bad journalism, biased reporting designed to benefit a particular group or ideology. Individual stories may have validity but when you look at the pattern, the constant drumbeat that media like New York Times CNN and the Washington Post gives us, we begin realize there is an agenda in this case it appears that they want to bring down the current government.
Part of this has to do with its own frustration its inability before the election to steer voters into a particular outcome. This failure showed how less influential media has become now that everybody has access to their own media outlets.
I keep thinking I was a scene in The Godfather where the mafia don talked about controlling its own press ie we have people on the payroll.
To Greater extent this is what the Democrats are doing now to use liberal media to make up for what they could not do at the ballot box.
Since no one by the nature of media and journalism actually oversees what media does, we can do just about anything they just about anything and get away with it.
Trump can't challenge media without accusations of censorship. Media even those that are reasonably fair sides with slanted media to defend the concept of Free Press, a concept that is really not a reality
There is no such thing as a free press Just an Illusion
 There are individuals who might fight for objectivity in each newsroom but they are clearly subject to editorial review and in the end management controls the medium and the message


"I am not an editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one." -Mark Twain

email to Al Sullivan

1 comment:

  1. “As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. … That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.”

    ~ Anthony de Mello

    “Socialism easily accepts despotism. It requires the strongest execution of power -- power sufficient to interfere with property.”
    Lord John Acton (1834-1902).

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