I have had my ups and downs with American media since 911. In some ways it has given us great human interest stories that deal with the heroism of everyday people who felt a duty to their fellow man and rose to the heights of human potential, but American media has done all that while keeping us in the dark about what our government is doing in our name, what it plans to do, and in many ways complicit in government’s illegality. Robert Scheer of The Los Angeles Times, once said, “This has been the most shameful era of American media. The media has been sucker-punched completely by this administration.” While the analogy is a good one, it’s incomplete: The media was sucker punched because it led with its chin. The media hasn’t resisted attempts to be a mouthpiece for the Administration, rather it has been a willing accomplice, and the message that compliance was absolutely necessary, was delivered by a military government that made it perfectly clear, especially during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that dissent from media would not be tolerated. Bullying outlets with “access” or allowing climates where media outlet representatives were in seriously jeopardy of death, government has made it clear it wants absolute power to control the message passed on to its citizens. We blogged about one such example here, where people who wanted the public to see the true casualties of war were denied oand fired from their jobs.
I have always felt media’s role in promulgating, cheerleading, and supporting the Iraq war bordered on criminality, despite their cries of self-cleansing to absolve themselves of that image and while not saying that Bill Moyers has spoken in a piece that I liked very much and which I want to excerpt here.
Our media institutions, deeply embedded in the power structures of society, are not providing the information that we need to make our democracy work. To put it another way, corporate media consolidation is a corrosive social force. It robs people of their voice in public affairs and pollutes the political culture. And it turns the debates about profound issues into a shouting match of polarized views promulgated by partisan apologists who trivialize democracy while refusing to speak the truth about how our country is being plundered.
*snip*
These organizations’ self-styled mandate is not to hold public and private power accountable, but to aggregate their interlocking interests. Their reward is not to help fulfill the social compact embodied in the notion of “We, the people,” but to manufacture news and information as profitable consumer commodities.
Democracy without honest information creates the illusion of popular consent at the same time that it enhances the power of the state and the privileged interests that the state protects. And nothing characterizes corporate media today more than its disdain toward the fragile nature of modern life and its indifference toward the complex social debate required of a free and self-governing people.
*snip*
Across the media landscape, the health of our democracy is imperiled. Buffeted by gale force winds of technological, political and demographic forces, without a truly free and independent press, this 250-year-old experiment in self-government will not make it. As journalism goes, so goes democracy.
Mergers and buyouts change both old and new media. They bring a frenzied focus on cost-cutting, while fattening the pockets of the new owners and their investors. The result: journalism is degraded through the layoffs and buyouts of legions of reporters and editors.
*snip*
…we needed to know the truth about Iraq. The truth could have spared that country from rack and ruin, saved thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and freed hundreds of billions of dollars for investment in the American economy and infrastructure.
But as reporters at Knight Ridder – one of the few organizations that systematically and independently set out to challenge the claims of the administration – told us at the time, and as my colleagues and I reported in our PBS documentary Buying the War, and as Scott McClellan has now confessed, and as the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed in June, the Bush administration deceived Americans into supporting an unprovoked war on another country. And it did so using erroneous and misleading intelligence – and with the complicity of the dominant media. It has led to a conflict that, instead of being over quickly and bloodlessly as predicted, continues to this day into its sixth year.
We now know that a neoconservative is an arsonist who sets a house on fire and six years later boasts that no one can put it out. You couldn’t find a more revealing measure of the state of the dominant media today than the continuing ubiquitous presence on the air and in print of the very pundits and experts, self-selected message multipliers of a disastrous foreign policy, who got it all wrong in the first place. It just goes to show, when the bar is low enough, you can never be too wrong.
The dominant media remains in denial about their role in passing on the government’s unverified claims as facts. That’s the great danger. It’s not simply that they dominate the story we tell ourselves publicly every day. It’s that they don’t allow other alternative competing narratives to emerge, against which the people could measure the veracity of all the claims.
Back in the day, our parents would gather the morning paper, sit down for breakfast, read and discuss what they found in that one publication. Now, that simply isn’t enough. Because the media no longer feels the responsibility to inform the public in the true sense of the word inform, it is up to each person to get the information they need from as many sources as possible in order to make knowledgeable opinions about what is going on in the world around them.
Miscellany101's Weblog 