Many of the nation’s largest and most influential newspapers are in trouble.
The corporate media has lost its credibility and rightly so. This conclusion is confirmed by a Gallup poll conducted last year and recently published at Global Research. In that poll, almost 80 percent of Americans ranging in age from 21–64 responded that they do not trust the mainstream media to convey the truth.
Virtually all the corporate media outlets, including newspapers, film, radio and television, are owned by only a handful of global corporations: Comcast-Time Warner, News Corporation, Viacom, NBC and the Walt Disney Company.
Never is this more problematic than in the buildup to armed conflict. Now our feckless leaders speak of permanent war. Few journalists have the integrity and moral fortitude to challenge the great propaganda machine of the Pentagon and the corporate media. Those who do are not employed for long.
News Corporation, owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is the big top under which the media circus of Fox News operates. It also publishes the Wall Street Journal. NBC is owned by General Electric, a major provider of munitions to the military.
Does anyone honestly believe that NBC is going to air perspectives that oppose war? Has anyone ever seen historian Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky on MSNBC, CNN or Fox News? I dare say that most students do not know who these men are. There is a reason for that.
Older students may recall General Colin Powell’s eloquent but bogus speech before the United Nations when he pitched the Iraq war to the gullible American public and to the rest of the world. Every mainstream newspaper and newscast uncritically parroted Powell’s words. Where were the dissenting views? What would Edward R. Murrow have done? Why didn’t anyone ask the simple question: Is it true?
Historian Gore Vidal used to refer to us as the United States of Amnesia. We seem incapable of learning the lessons of history.
Marching in lock step with anonymous sources at the Pentagon, nationally syndicated journalists like Charles Krauthammer and Judith Miller were continually beating the drums for war. Krauthammer has never ceased while Miller rode quietly, if not ingloriously, into the sunset when the cruise missiles started flying and civilians began to die.
There is a term for this behavior: yellow journalism. Paul Craig Roberts refers to these people as “presstitutes.” It is an apt term.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist working for the New York Times, was fired for refusing to lie about the wars in the Middle East. But if truth be told, most people will put a career above integrity. This may be one reason why readers are abandoning the commercial media like rats from a sinking ship.
Miller published a series of articles in the New York Times trumping up the military capabilities of Iraq, particularly their non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). I knew all along that Miller has lying. I had read the reports of Scott Ritter, a United Nations weapons inspector and a former marine, who had been working on the ground in Iraq. Ritter emphatically declared that Iraq had no WMDs. This information was widely available. But no newspaper headlined Ritter’s story.
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” —George Orwell.