Tainted mainstream media

This article The Media in America: Selling Views, Calling it News by John Kozy is so right that I think I need to repeat its reasons for not calling the American press “free”. He quoted Snardfarker.ning.com’s 5 reasons why mainstream media is useless (and I quoted the same liberally here):

(1) Self-Censorship by journalists. “You can rock the boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble …. You cannot say: By the way, there’s something wrong with our …. system.  The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do. . . .
There’s the intense pressure to maintain access to insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There’s the fear of being labeled partisan if one’s bullshit-calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum.”

(2) Censorship by higher-ups. “In fact many journalists are warning that the true story is not being reported. There are many reasons for censorship by media higher-ups….One is money….The media has a strong monetary interest to avoid controversial topics in general. It has always been true that advertisers discourage stories which challenge corporate power. Indeed, a 2003 survey reveals that 35% of reporters and news executives themselves admitted that journalists avoid newsworthy stories if “the story would be embarrassing or damaging to the financial interests of a news organization’s owners or parent company.” In addition, the government has allowed tremendous consolidation in ownership of the airwaves during the past decade. ….The large media players stand to gain billions of dollars in profits if the Obama administration continues to allow monopoly ownership of the airwaves by a handful of players. The media giants know who butters their bread. So there is a spoken or tacit agreement: if the media cover the administration in a favorable light, the MSM will continue to be the receiver of the government’s goodies.”

"If journalists do want to speak out about an issue, they also are subject to tremendous pressure by their editors or producers to kill the story."

(3) Drumming up support for war. It is painfully obvious that the large news outlets studiously avoided any real criticism of the government’s claims in the run up to the Iraq war. It is painfully obvious that the large American media companies acted as lapdogs and stenographers for the government’s war agenda. Veteran reporter Bill Moyers criticized the corporate media for parroting the obviously false link between 9/11 and Iraq (and the false claims that Iraq possessed WMDs) which the administration made in the run up to the Iraq war, and concluded that the false information was not challenged because: "the [mainstream] media had been cheerleaders for the White House from the beginning and were simply continuing to rally the public behind the President — no questions asked."

"I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . . if we did not stand up [in the run-up to the war] and say ‘this is bogus, and you’re a liar, and why are you doing this,’ that we didn’t do our job. I respectfully disagree. It’s not our role"[NBC News' David Gregory]

“There is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it. The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news.”[Nick Davies, The Independent]

“So why has the American press has consistently served the elites in disseminating their false justifications for war? One of of the reasons is because the large media companies are owned by those who support the militarist agenda or even directly profit from war and terror (for example, NBC – which is being sold to Comcast – was owned by General Electric, one of the largest defence contractors in the world — which directly profits from war, terrorism and chaos). Another seems to be an unspoken rule that the media will not criticize the government’s imperial war agenda.”

4) Access. "For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post . . . offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to ‘those powerful few’ Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and — at first — even the paper’s own reporters and editors. The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — was a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival. That may be one reason that the mainstream news commentators hate bloggers so much. The more people who get their news from blogs instead of mainstream news sources, the smaller their audience, and the less the MSM can charge for the kind of "nonconfrontational access" which leads to puff pieces for the big boys."

(5) Censorship by the Government. "the government has exerted tremendous pressure on the media to report things a certain way. Indeed, at times the government has thrown media owners and reporters in jail if they’ve been too critical. The media companies have felt great pressure from the government to kill any real questioning of the endless wars. For example, Dan Rather said, regarding American media, "What you have is a miniature version of what you have in totalitarian states". Tom Brokaw said "all wars are based on propaganda.
And the head of CNN said: There was ‘almost a patriotism police’ after 9/11 and when the network showed [things critical of the administration's policies] it would get phone calls from advertisers and the administration and "big people in corporations were calling up and saying, ‘You’re being anti-American here.’…As Edmonds has also alluded, Ellsberg pointed to the New York Times, who "sat on the NSA spying story for over a year" when they "could have put it out before the 2004 election, which might have changed the outcome." "There will be phone calls going out to the media saying ‘don’t even think of touching it, you will be prosecuted for violating national security,’" he told us….Of course, if the stick approach doesn’t work, the government can always just pay off reporters to spread disinformation.”

Snardfarker.ning.com ended the post with these quotes:

• "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent"[Thomas Jefferson]
• "To stand in silence when they should be protesting makes cowards out of men."[Abraham Lincoln]
• "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."[Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.]
• "Powerlessness and silence go together. We…should use our privileged positions not as a shelter from the world’s reality, but as a platform from which to speak. A voice is a gift. It should be cherished and used."[Margaret Atwood]
• "There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at points in history and creating a power that [nothing] cannot suppress."[Howard Zinn]

Video on Mass Control by the Government

The BBC documentary Century of the Self is an eye-opener on how government control the minds.

 

My View

From the above, I am convinced that there are only 2 reasons: (1) government control through carrot and stick and (2) business’ profit motive. 

Here is how the government try to control things:

• Keep the people from getting the facts, by making blunders as “states secrets privilege”.
• Feed them with propaganda: this and this
• Dissuade those who are pissed from taking action by making them think they are in the minority.
• Spy on people.
• Control the web.
• Control the news organizations.

For media to be more of the investigative type, all media should be non-profit organizations but still self-funded/self-sufficient financially. It should also be non-aligned.  If there is none at the moment, how does individual persons get hold of the news that is factual and balanced, and escape this net of control?

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