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**astonas** · October 25, 2014, 10:22 PM

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

Originally posted by vt View Post

[...]
she points out that TV news, being reluctant to offend its advertisers, has become more and more skittish about, for instance, stories questioning pharmaceutical companies or car manufacturers.

Working on a piece that raised questions about the American Red Cross disaster response, she says a boss told her, �We must do nothing to upset our corporate partners . . . until the stock splits.� (Parent company Viacom and CBS split in 2006).
[...]

It seems like this concern is one that could use a little more light shed on it.

Does anyone know if there is a website that tabulates which advertisers buy spots on which networks. I've seen summaries before with lists of companies before concerning single-issue protests ("Call these companies and tell them you're not going to buy their products until they stop supporting XX TV program!")

But does anyone know if there a place where a non-insider can easily get such information to analyze for a whole network, or even the whole industry?

**jacobdcoates** · October 26, 2014, 10:41 AM

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

I don't know of any place were you can find which companies, but it seems that there are two problems pointed out by the story. The first one is a unhealthy relationship between senior executives at the news networks and the administration. The first problem highlights a further additional issue, which is; The concentration of media outlets with a few executives controlling what gets reported as news worthy. It does a serious disservice to the public that media ownership has been so concentrated over the last 3 decades. I might add that this has happened across multiple political administrations both republican and democrat.

Personally I find watching TV prime-time news jarring and disconcerting. I have been getting my new online from diverse sources the last 4 yrs or so. While I can't say that the sources of my new are fair and balance, each has their own slant/bias. The online new sources make no bones about their bias and as long as you keep that in mind and read different view points, I think I get a better handle on what is going on in the world; than just watching the evening news.

**don** · October 26, 2014, 11:17 AM

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

sometimes you just have to grow up - unbiased reporters? No such animal . . . .

How Lincoln Played the Press

Garry Wills
NOVEMBER 6, 2014 ISSUE

Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion

by Harold Holzer
Simon and Schuster, 733 pp., $37.50

Library of Congress
A print by Currier & Ives, 1860, in which Horace Greeley (center) and Abraham Lincoln try to conceal the �radical� Republican Party platform from a man identified as �Young America�

People are amazed or disgusted, or both, at today�s �power of the media.� The punch is in that plural, �media��the twenty-four-hour flow of intermingled news and opinion not only from print but also from TV channels, radio stations, Twitter, e-mails, and other electronic �feeds.� This storm of information from many sources may make us underestimate the power of the press in the nineteenth century when it had just one medium�the newspaper. That also came at people from many directions�in multiple editions from multiple papers in every big city, from �extras� hawked constantly in the streets, from telegraphed reprints in other papers, from articles put out as pamphlets.

Every bit of that information was blatantly biased in ways that would make today�s Fox News blush. Editors ran their own candidates�in fact they ran for office themselves, and often continued in their post at the paper while holding office. Politicians, knowing this, cultivated their own party�s papers, both the owners and the editors, shared staff with them, released news to them early or exclusively to keep them loyal, rewarded them with state or federal appointments when they won.

It was a dirty game by later standards, and no one played it better than Abraham Lincoln. He developed new stratagems as he rose from citizen to candidate to officeholder. Without abandoning his old methods, he developed new ones, more effective if no more scrupulous, as he got better himself (and better situated), for controlling what was written about him, his policies, and his adversaries. Harold Holzer, who has been a press advocate for candidates (Bella Abzug, Mario Cuomo) and institutions (the Metropolitan Museum of Art and various Lincoln organizations), knows the publicity game from the inside, and he is awed by Lincoln�s skills as a self-publicist, that necessary trait of his time. Holzer is also a respected and influential Lincoln scholar who does not come to bury Lincoln with this new information but to wonder how a man could swim so well through the sewer and come out (relatively) clean.

Lincoln�s arena broadened as he climbed the ladder of power. He went from local venues in his own state�rival papers in Springfield and Chicago�to the newspaper power center in New York, with three main papers and the pioneering syndicate the Associated Press. Then, in Washington, he had to deal with the concentration there of many papers� bureaus. He developed different skills for each widening stage of his career. In roughly chronological but overlapping order, there were five main stages.

1. Infiltrating

Lincoln early followed the axiom, If you can�t lick �em, join �em. As a beginner with no party standing, he lacked the common coin of exchange in the political and journalistic worlds, patronage. A member of the Whig Party, he got into the game the one way he could�by writing anonymous articles for Whig papers to promote him or his friends and to denigrate rivals. This could be dangerous in that era when caning or horsewhipping editors or reporters was common. Horace Greeley, the famous abolitionist editor of the New York Tribune, was pummeled by a congressman on a street outside the Capitol in Washington. The editor of Lincoln�s local paper, the Sangamo Journal, was beaten up several times�once by a furious preacher and once by no less a figure than Stephen Douglas. They got off lightly by comparison with a Massachusetts editor (of the Essex County Democrat), who was drawn around town tarred and feathered for what he published. Lincoln had to know that his own rancorous articles (and those of his ally and law partner William Herndon) could be dangerous for them, as well as embarrassing, if they were found to be the writers.

On one occasion, in 1841, that happened�and it involved not only Lincoln but his fianc�e Mary Todd. The two had collaborated on a series of scurrilous letters from a fictitious �Rebecca� that vilified James Shields, a rising candidate in the Democratic Party (he would later be elected a senator three times from three different states). The fake Rebecca, who claimed Shields was a former beau, mocked his Irish origin and declared him �a fool as well as a liar�. With him truth is out of the question, and as for getting a good bright passable lie out of him, you might as well try to strike fire from a cake of tallow.�

Shields stormed into the office of the Sangamo Journal, demanding that the editor, Simeon Francis, tell him who was behind the Rebecca letters. When Francis asked Lincoln what he should do, Lincoln, in order to shield his Mary, took sole responsibility (without admitting he wrote anything). Shields challenged him to a duel, and they actually met on the dueling ground�but Lincoln, as the one receiving the challenge, had the right to choice of weapons. When he called for broadswords, this gave him, with his long and strong right arm, a ludicrous advantage, and the fight was called off. Though Mary liked to recollect how her own beau had stood up for her, Lincoln cut off any later attempts to remember this episode�perhaps (though Holzer does not mention this) because Shields, vilified by �Rebecca,� became a Union officer when Lincoln was president, and was wounded at the Battle of Kernstown. There was a real duel after all.

Though Lincoln became more circumspect about his own anonymous writings, he continued to have his secretary John Hay write secretly for the cause when he was president, and Mary leaked her own items to the press from the White House�once almost disastrously when her favorite reporter released to a New York paper Lincoln�s annual address before it was delivered. Lincoln himself, even as president, continued to ghostwrite items for the Philadelphia Press, a paper he liked.

2. Co-opting

When Lincoln did not get enough of his way with anonymous writings in other people�s papers, he helped set up his own. He was a principal backer of the Old Soldier, begun to support the 1840 Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison. The paper promised to �sear the eye-balls, and stun the ears� of any Harrison detractor. Holzer says it is typical of the time that Lincoln�s once and future foe, Stephen Douglas, founded an opposing paper, Old Hickory, for the Democratic candidate, Martin Van Buren. Douglas, Holzer writes, �saw no conflict in playing the concurrent roles of editor, letter writer, advocate, and of course, political leader.� Lincoln would be just as crass, without the same clout at this stage. Both campaign papers died after the election (which Lincoln�s candidate won), but Lincoln was playing a longer game in 1859, as he began his maneuvering for the White House. Aware of the importance of the German vote, he secretly financed a paper, the Illinois Staats-Anzeiger, with what Holzer calls an �iron-clad clause� that the paper will never �depart from the Philadelphia and Illinois Republican platforms.� Lincoln had bought himself a paper with guaranteed compliance.

The year before that purchase, he had found a way to be a self-publisher. Knowing that his direct senatorial bid against Douglas would be widely reported, he pestered the better-known and incumbent Douglas into meeting him in a series of debates. It was clear that Douglas�s home paper, the Chicago Times, would give the meetings heavy coverage, so Lincoln collaborated with the Chicago Tribune to have its own scribe, Robert R. Hitt, make a record that favored him. Lincoln tried to delay the opening of one debate till his stenographer got to the platform, saying �Ain�t Hitt here? Where is he?� Though Douglas won the Senate seat that year, Lincoln knew he had come off well in the debates, which were given lengthy transcription in the newspapers (a complete one in Horace Greeley�s important New York Tribune).
Not content with the �real time� reporting of the event, Lincoln made up a scrapbook of the newspaper accounts, letting Douglas�s side appear in the Chicago Times version, but making sure his side was reproduced from the Chicago Tribune. Then he worked to have the �scrapbook� published, which became a hit, selling 30,000 copies�Holzer calls it �the most brilliant publishing venture Lincoln ever initiated.� He used the fame of the debates to arrange for a New York lecture�what became the Cooper Union address�that was heavily covered in the all-important New York newspapers, which Lincoln had cultivated for years and would stay close to from this point on.

Greeley�s New York Tribune erratically, and Henry Raymond�s New York Times fairly steadily, favored Lincoln as president. Even the editor of the racy (and racist) New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, was worth cultivating in Lincoln�s eyes. He hoped to gain at least occasional neutrality in this tainted forum, and it paid off when Bennett allowed the young reporter Henry Villard to report favorably on Lincoln�s long wait between his election and inauguration. Lincoln could usually charm a reporter, when given enough time with him.

3. Buying Off

As soon as Lincoln was elected he set about new dealings with the press. His inaugural address was secretly set in type by the editor of the Illinois State Journal, which had the sole firsthand report of his remarks at the train station as he left for Washington. Armed with the presidency, Lincoln famously tried to appoint cabinet members and military officers of as wide political variety as would cooperate with him. Holzer shows us something further�that he used patronage to recruit the loyalties of newspaper owners, editors, and reporters on a grand scale. Newspapering became the preferred path to becoming ambassador, port inspector, revenue collector, postmaster, and White House staffer�dozens and dozens of the ink-stained were brought in to save the Union.

Lincoln even kept wooing the stubbornly negrophobe editor James Gordon Bennett, of the New York Herald, making his son a navy lieutenant (how could the father not support a war his favored son was fighting in?). Lincoln helped a favored editor, John Wein Forney, move from the Philadelphia Press to set up the Sunday Morning Chronicle in Washington by securing for him the remunerative post of secretary of the Senate and giving the new paper government advertising accounts.
Lincoln kept doling out measured favors and refusals to the papers as events made for shifts in the situation. The volatile Horace Greeley, for peace one day, for abolition the next, was especially exasperating. The man was too respected to ignore, and too flighty to be relied on. With all his other tasks and distractions, Lincoln could never take his eyes from a range of competitive papers. The job got increasingly difficult as the reports of war correspondents flooded into their respective papers. Some of Lincoln�s generals, especially William Tecumseh Sherman, hated reporters anywhere near them or their operations, and Lincoln had to hear editors complaining of those reporters� treatment. On the other hand, some generals (like George B. McClellan and John C. Fremont) cultivated the press in ways that slighted Lincoln. So different degrees of latitude and stricture had to be constantly calibrated.

4. Repressing

The power of the press is always a two-edged sword. It can wound even its user. As Lincoln had to restrict other liberties in time of war, he meant to blunt or cripple papers that made his job more difficult (it often seemed, after all, not a difficult task but an impossible one). Holzer describes Lincoln�s repression as mostly a hidden-hand activity. It began with generals either crushing rebel papers in areas they controlled, or silencing Northern reporters telling too much about troop dispositions or movements. Lincoln did not want to hobble generals so long as they were doing their job, and he tried to stay out of the scuffles with journalists on the battlefield. But many government departments joined in actions to restrict or censor news gathering�the telegraph company, the Post Office, the Treasury, the War Department, as well as some local courts. All exercised some form of censorship, especially after bad news flooded out from the disastrous early defeat of Union forces at Bull Run. Lincoln generally just let this censorship happen, without taking the blame.

Meserve-Kunhardt Collection
Abraham Lincoln; photograph by Johan Carl Frederic Polycarpus von Schneidau, Chicago, 1854

Journalists who tried to break the censorship could end up detained with other war prisoners at Fort Lafayette, which became known as the �American Bastille.� Some refractory newsmen were imprisoned at Fort McHenry. On the other hand, Lincoln let it be known that there should be a relaxation of the repression as his reelection campaign approached. One of the few times when he did voice his support for control of the press was after his old nemesis the Chicago Tribune was suppressed by General Ambrose Burnside.

Burnside had also shut down the New York World and arrested for treason Clement Vallandigham, who was opposing the war. These actions caused a protest meeting of editors in Albany, to which Lincoln felt he had to reply. Without undermining Burnside�s authority, Lincoln reopened the Chicago Tribune, and freed Vallandigham from prison, to be deported to the Confederacy (giving it the onus of imprisoning him as an independent Northerner). He wrote a letter to a signatory of the Albany protest, Erastus Corning, justifying his executive authority in war.

5. Outmaneuvering

The Corning letter is an example of what Holzer calls one of Lincoln�s most ingenious inventions for dealing with the press. Rather than make a speech or a presidential proclamation of some sort, or answer a single newspaper, he sent private letters, knowing they would be published broadly. He even leaked his most famous letter�that to Horace Greeley on his �paramount object� in the war (to save the Union)�to one of Greeley�s rival papers, the Washington National Intelligencer. In that way, each paper that had a copy of the letter could publish it without treating it as any one outlet�s property. Lincoln was often playing one move ahead of the game in this way. When Greeley urged Lincoln to hold a peace conference in Washington, Lincoln suggested it would be better conducted in a neutral place, on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, under Greeley�s own management, thus shunting delegates off to an exercise in futility for which Greeley would carry the sole responsibility. Lincoln was a hard man to trap.

When he was in a position to play the papers off against each other and bypass them with his leaked letters, Holzer maintains, Lincoln revolutionized the art of presidential communications�.

[He] had come to realize that he could control �public sentiment� best by bypassing the editors and going directly to their readers. Rather than resume making time-consuming public speeches, he transformed the so-called public letter into a weapon of mass communication.

It is no wonder more recent presidents have tried to go directly to the public over the heads of the mass communicators. But the public is now far more splintered and babbling with its own thousand voices. Lincoln had only one medium to circumvent, the newspaper. More recent officeholders are joining a Babel of self-publicists.
This is not the only thing that makes Lincoln�s situation different from the modern one. Lincoln had one war to deal with. Now we have many fronts in our omnidirectional war with terrorisms, foreign and domestic. But the greatest difference may be in the character of the president himself. Lincoln was not only shrewd, innovative, and imaginative. He continued dealing with people�editors, generals, politicians�who had been personally insulting to him, as well as destructive in their performance during a war. He did not let amour propre get in the way of what he was trying to accomplish. He had an inner confidence that could absorb obloquy and dishonesty and viciousness without letting them jostle him off his concentration on what he felt was America�s calling as well as his own. No wonder Holzer thinks he came out of the sewer clean.

In order to demonstrate the thorny particularities of Lincoln�s dealings with the press, Holzer gives us vivid biographical glimpses of the willful and colorful editors who fought for Lincoln�s attention�the �Big Three� in New York (Greeley, Raymond, and Bennett)�along with other editors there: Manton Marble (New York World), James Watson Webb (New York Courier), William Cullen Bryant (New York Evening Post), Henry Ward Beecher (New York Independent). In Illinois, there were Joseph Medill and Horace White (Chicago Tribune), James W. Sheahan (Chicago Times), Charles Lanphier (Illinois State Register). These and other editors, along with their pushy reporters, are an important (if vicious) part of the history of American journalism. Holzer has done exhaustive research into their respective journals, and he usefully adds an epilogue on what happened to the leading journalists after the war. Only by showing us what Lincoln was up against can Holzer measure the man�s achievement in using, controlling, or defying the one news medium of the time, the newspaper.

vt · October 26, 2014, 12:39 PM

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

Sometimes you just need to read the entire article:

"Calling herself �politically agnostic,� Attkisson, a five-time Emmy winner, says she simply follows the story, and the money, wherever it leads her.
In nearly 20 years at CBS News, she has done many stories attacking Republicans and corporate America, and she points out that TV news, being reluctant to offend its advertisers, has become more and more skittish about, for instance, stories questioning pharmaceutical companies or car manufacturers."s

This is certainly far less "biased" than we've typically seen. Perhaps one has other examples of other reporters with less bias?

Sometime our own biases get in the way of listening to someone with a more open mind, when they write critically about a deeply help beliefs of our own.

vt · October 27, 2014, 09:11 AM

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

We know for a fact that the justice department has gone after a number of reporters for trying to report the truth. We see below just how much the Obama cronies will go to try to destroy any who question them. These people are even outdoing Nixon/Agnew.

http://nypost.com/2014/10/27/ex-cbs-...d-my-computer/

**Raz** · October 27, 2014, 10:42 AM

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

Originally posted by vt View Post

We know for a fact that the justice department has gone after a number of reporters for trying to report the truth. We see below just how much the Obama cronies will go to try to destroy any who question them. These people are even outdoing Nixon/Agnew.

http://nypost.com/2014/10/27/ex-cbs-...d-my-computer/

I can think of only two reasons you would post this, questioning Obama and Holder: (1) you despise the poor and working class, or (2) you're a racist.

vt · October 27, 2014, 12:20 PM

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

Raz,

I despise how they use the poor and working class for their own elitist political agenda. Black unemployment has not gone down. There are practically no infrastructure projects caused by this administration. All the stimulus has gone to FIRE, political payoffs, and crony socialist government boondoggles.

The use of the race card is beyond belief.

**don** · October 27, 2014, 01:03 PM

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

The Myth of the Free Press

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...ress_20141026/

Posted on Oct 26, 2014

By Chris Hedges

There is more truth about American journalism in the film �Kill the Messenger,� which chronicles the mainstream media�s discrediting of the work of the investigative journalist Gary Webb, than there is in the movie �All the President�s Men,� which celebrates the exploits of the reporters who uncovered the Watergate scandal.

The mass media blindly support the ideology of corporate capitalism. They laud and promote the myth of American democracy�even as we are stripped of civil liberties and money replaces the vote. They pay deference to the leaders on Wall Street and in Washington, no matter how perfidious their crimes. They slavishly venerate the military and law enforcement in the name of patriotism. They select the specialists and experts, almost always drawn from the centers of power, to interpret reality and explain policy. They usually rely on press releases, written by corporations, for their news. And they fill most of their news holes with celebrity gossip, lifestyle stories, sports and trivia. The role of the mass media is to entertain or to parrot official propaganda to the masses. The corporations, which own the press, hire journalists willing to be courtiers to the elites, and they promote them as celebrities. These journalistic courtiers, who can earn millions of dollars, are invited into the inner circles of power. They are, as John Ralston Saul writes, hedonists of power.

When Webb, writing in a 1996 series in the San Jose Mercury News, exposed the Central Intelligence Agency�s complicity in smuggling tons of cocaine for sale into the United States to fund the CIA-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua, the press turned him into a journalistic leper. And over the generations there is a long list of journalistic lepers, from Ida B. Wells to I.F. Stone to Julian Assange.

The attacks against Webb have been renewed in publications such as The Washington Post since the release of the film earlier this month. These attacks are an act of self-justification. They are an attempt by the mass media to mask the collaboration between themselves and the power elite. The mass media, like the rest of the liberal establishment, seek to wrap themselves in the moral veneer of the fearless pursuit of truth and justice. But to maintain this myth they have to destroy the credibility of journalists such as Webb and Assange who shine a light on the sinister and murderous inner workings of empire, who care more about truth than news.

The country�s major news outlets�including my old employer The New York Times, which wrote that there was �scant proof� of Webb�s contention�functioned as guard dogs for the CIA. Soon after the 1996 expos� appeared, The Washington Post devoted nearly two full pages to attacking Webb�s assertions. The Los Angeles Times ran three separate articles that slammed Webb and his story. It was a seedy, disgusting and shameful chapter in American journalism. But it was hardly unique. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, in the 2004 article �How the Press and the CIA Killed Gary Webb�s Career,� detailed the dynamics of the nationwide smear campaign.

Webb�s newspaper, after printing a mea culpa about the series, cast him out. He was unable to work again as an investigative journalist and, fearful of losing his house, he committed suicide in 2004. We know, in part because of a Senate investigation led by then-Sen. John Kerry, that Webb was right. But truth was never the issue for those who opposed the journalist. Webb exposed the CIA as a bunch of gunrunning, drug-smuggling thugs. He exposed the mass media, which depend on official sources for most of their news and are therefore hostage to those sources, as craven handmaidens of power. He had crossed the line. And he paid for it.

If the CIA was funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in drugs into inner-city neighborhoods to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua, what did that say about the legitimacy of the vast covert organization? What did it tell us about the so-called war on drugs? What did it tell us about the government�s callousness and indifference to the poor, especially poor people of color at the height of the crack epidemic? What did it say about rogue military operations carried out beyond public scrutiny?

These were questions the power elites, and their courtiers in the press, were determined to silence.

The mass media are plagued by the same mediocrity, corporatism and careerism as the academy, labor unions, the arts, the Democratic Party and religious institutions. They cling to the self-serving mantra of impartiality and objectivity to justify their subservience to power. The press writes and speaks�unlike academics that chatter among themselves in arcane jargon like medieval theologians�to be heard and understood by the public. And for this reason the press is more powerful and more closely controlled by the state. It plays an essential role in the dissemination of official propaganda. But to effectively disseminate state propaganda the press must maintain the fiction of independence and integrity. It must hide its true intentions.

The mass media, as C. Wright Mills pointed out, are essential tools for conformity. They impart to readers and viewers their sense of themselves. They tell them who they are. They tell them what their aspirations should be. They promise to help them achieve these aspirations. They offer a variety of techniques, advice and schemes that promise personal and professional success. The mass media, as Wright wrote, exist primarily to help citizens feel they are successful and that they have met their aspirations even if they have not. They use language and images to manipulate and form opinions, not to foster genuine democratic debate and conversation or to open up public space for free political action and public deliberation. We are transformed into passive spectators of power by the mass media, which decide for us what is true and what is untrue, what is legitimate and what is not. Truth is not something we discover. It is decreed by the organs of mass communication.

�The divorce of truth from discourse and action�the instrumentalization of communication�has not merely increased the incidence of propaganda; it has disrupted the very notion of truth, and therefore the sense by which we take our bearings in the world is destroyed,� James W. Carey wrote in �Communication as Culture.�

Bridging the vast gap between the idealized identities�ones that in a commodity culture revolve around the acquisition of status, money, fame and power, or at least the illusion of it�and actual identities is the primary function of the mass media. And catering to these idealized identities, largely implanted by advertisers and the corporate culture, can be very profitable. We are given not what we need but what we want. The mass media allow us to escape into the enticing world of entertainment and spectacle. News is filtered into the mix, but it is not the primary concern of the mass media. No more than 15 percent of the space in any newspaper is devoted to news; the rest is devoted to a futile quest for self-actualization. The ratio is even more lopsided on the airwaves.

�This,� Mills wrote, �is probably the basic psychological formula of the mass media today. But, as a formula, it is not attuned to the development of the human being. It is a formula of a pseudo-world which the media invent and sustain.�

At the core of this pseudo-world is the myth that our national institutions, including those of government, the military and finance, are efficient and virtuous, that we can trust them and that their intentions are good. These institutions can be criticized for excesses and abuses, but they cannot be assailed as being hostile to democracy and the common good. They cannot be exposed as criminal enterprises, at least if one hopes to retain a voice in the mass media.

Those who work in the mass media, as I did for two decades, are acutely aware of the collaboration with power and the cynical manipulation of the public by the power elites. It does not mean there is never good journalism and that the subservience to corporate power within the academy always precludes good scholarship, but the internal pressures, hidden from public view, make great journalism and great scholarship very, very difficult. Such work, especially if it is sustained, is usually a career killer. Scholars like Norman Finkelstein and journalists like Webb and Assange who step outside the acceptable parameters of debate and challenge the mythic narrative of power, who question the motives and virtues of established institutions and who name the crimes of empire are always cast out.

The press will attack groups within the power elite only when one faction within the circle of power goes to war with another. When Richard Nixon, who had used illegal and clandestine methods to harass and shut down the underground press as well as persecute anti-war activists and radical black dissidents, went after the Democratic Party he became fair game for the press. His sin was not the abuse of power. He had abused power for a long time against people and groups that did not matter in the eyes of the Establishment. Nixon�s sin was to abuse power against a faction within the power elite itself.

The Watergate scandal, mythologized as evidence of a fearless and independent press, is illustrative of how circumscribed the mass media is when it comes to investigating centers of power.

�History has been kind enough to contrive for us a �controlled experiment� to determine just what was at stake during the Watergate period, when the confrontational stance of the media reached its peak. The answer is clear and precise: powerful groups are capable of defending themselves, not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are threatened,� Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote in �Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.� �By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or dissident victims of U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general population, media opposition is muted and absent altogether. This is why Nixon could go so far, lulled into a false sense of security precisely because the watchdog only barked when he began to threaten the privileged.�

The righteous thunder of the abolitionists and civil rights preachers, the investigative journalists who enraged Standard Oil and the owners of the Chicago stockyards, the radical theater productions, such as �The Cradle Will Rock,� that imploded the myths peddled by the ruling class and gave a voice to ordinary people, the labor unions that permitted African-Americans, immigrants and working men and women to find dignity and hope, the great public universities that offered the children of immigrants a chance for a first-class education, the New Deal Democrats who understood that a democracy is not safe if it does not give its citizens an acceptable standard of living and protect the state from being hijacked by private power, are no longer part of the American landscape. It was Webb�s misfortune to work in an era when the freedom of the press was as empty a clich� as democracy itself.

�The Cradle Will Rock,� like much of the popular work that came out of the Federal Theatre Project, addressed the concerns of the working class rather than the power elite. And it excoriated the folly of war, greed, corruption and the complicity of liberal institutions, especially the press, in protecting the power elite and ignoring the abuses of capitalism. Mister Mister in the play runs the town like a private corporation.

�I believe newspapers are great mental shapers,� Mister Mister says. �My steel industry is dependent on them really.�

�Just you call the News,� Editor Daily responds. �And we�ll print all the news. From coast to coast, and from border to border.�

Editor Daily and Mister Mister sing:

O the press, the press, the freedom of the press.
They�ll never take away the freedom of the press.
We must be free to say whatever�s on our chest�
with a hey-diddle-dee and ho-nanny-no
for whichever side will pay the best.

�I should like a series on young Larry Foreman,� Mister Mister tells Editor Daily. �Who goes around stormin� and organizin� unions.�

�Yes, we�ve heard of him,� Editor Daily tells Mister Mister. �In fact, good word of him. He seems quite popular with workingmen.�

�Find out who he drinks with and talks with and sleeps with. And look up his past till at last you�ve got it on him.�

�But the man is so full of fight, he�s simply dynamite, why it would take an army to tame him,� Editor Daily says.

�Then it shouldn�t be too hard to tame him,� Mister Mister says.

�O the press, the press, the freedom of the press,� the two sing. �You�ve only got to hint whatever�s fit to print; if something�s wrong with it, why then we�ll print to fit. With a he-diddly-dee and aho-nonny-no. For whichever side will pay the best.�

**lektrode** · October 27, 2014, 01:15 PM

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

Originally posted by vt View Post

....The use of the race card is beyond belief.

+1
and if not race, then 'choice' is another very effective one (to IGNORE when it suits the agenda)

and ya dont even wanna mention 'tourism' anymore (altho they will UNLESS it DOESNT suit the agenda)

and heres another one that likely WONT make the 6pm propaganda hour (well... maybe not the 'big 3's vers of it)
(from one of woody's fave sources.... ;)

Government Gold-Plating

October 24, 2014 5:21PM

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) released his annual Wastebook this past week. It contains a laundry list of doozies. The U.S. government�s gold-plating operations included $190,000 to study compost digested by worms, $297 million for the purchase of an unused mega blimp, and $1 million on a Virginia bus stop where only 15 people can huddle under a half-baked roof. These questionable (read: absurd) expenditures only represent the tip of the iceberg.

Just consider the following: the Speaker of the House currently receives an annual salary of $223,500, and will receive a payment of roughly that amount, depending on the years of service, for life. An annual payment of this magnitude amounts to about five times the average annual wage in the United States. But that�s not all. For those who have had different positions in Congress, their retirements can be augmented. For example, Nancy Pelosi will not receive $223,500 for life, but roughly double that. Why? Because she is a member of Congress, currently the House of Representatives� Minority Leader, and a retired Speaker of the House. For purposes of computing retirement pay, Congress adds and accumulates. They do not net.

In addition to supporting members of Congress and civil servants, U.S. taxpayers support welfare recipients. And they support them lavishly, too. Hawaii, Massachusetts, and D.C. residents receive sizeable welfare payments (read: salaries). Indeed, the magnitude of these payments exceeds the average salary of an American teacher, as well as a soldier deployed in Afghanistan, by at least $10,000 per year.

The public can forget all the clap-trap they are hearing about austerity. Indeed, a fairly dull knife could cut billions of dollars from the U.S. government�s largess.

vt · October 27, 2014, 02:00 PM

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

No argument on the fact that msot of today's press is biased. But for every journalist that supports corporate capitalism, there are just as many, if not more, that support crony socialism, excess governments, the Democrats or Republicans, or some fruity left or right cause.

I've said this at least ten times on this forum that we don't have a press that goes after both sides of the political fence.

So I bring up a journalist that has talked about corporations hold on the media, gone after both sides, and appears to have recently been targeted by this administration. The public should be up arms in her support. The public is getting fed up with politics.

Hopefully we can replace both these political puppet shows by an independent party that stands for the people.

**santafe2** · October 27, 2014, 04:25 PM

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

I can't believe anyone under the age of 85 still watches "news" on CBS...

**Woodsman** · October 27, 2014, 04:56 PM

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

Originally posted by don View Post

The Myth of the Free Press

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...ress_20141026/

Posted on Oct 26, 2014

By Chris Hedges

There is more truth about American journalism in the film �Kill the Messenger,� which chronicles the mainstream media�s discrediting of the work of the investigative journalist Gary Webb, than there is in the movie �All the President�s Men,� which celebrates the exploits of the reporters who uncovered the Watergate scandal.

The mass media blindly support the ideology of corporate capitalism. They laud and promote the myth of American democracy�even as we are stripped of civil liberties and money replaces the vote. They pay deference to the leaders on Wall Street and in Washington, no matter how perfidious their crimes. They slavishly venerate the military and law enforcement in the name of patriotism. They select the specialists and experts, almost always drawn from the centers of power, to interpret reality and explain policy. They usually rely on press releases, written by corporations, for their news. And they fill most of their news holes with celebrity gossip, lifestyle stories, sports and trivia. The role of the mass media is to entertain or to parrot official propaganda to the masses. The corporations, which own the press, hire journalists willing to be courtiers to the elites, and they promote them as celebrities. These journalistic courtiers, who can earn millions of dollars, are invited into the inner circles of power. They are, as John Ralston Saul writes, hedonists of power.

When Webb, writing in a 1996 series in the San Jose Mercury News, exposed the Central Intelligence Agency�s complicity in smuggling tons of cocaine for sale into the United States to fund the CIA-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua, the press turned him into a journalistic leper. And over the generations there is a long list of journalistic lepers, from Ida B. Wells to I.F. Stone to Julian Assange.

The attacks against Webb have been renewed in publications such as The Washington Post since the release of the film earlier this month. These attacks are an act of self-justification. They are an attempt by the mass media to mask the collaboration between themselves and the power elite. The mass media, like the rest of the liberal establishment, seek to wrap themselves in the moral veneer of the fearless pursuit of truth and justice. But to maintain this myth they have to destroy the credibility of journalists such as Webb and Assange who shine a light on the sinister and murderous inner workings of empire, who care more about truth than news.

The country�s major news outlets�including my old employer The New York Times, which wrote that there was �scant proof� of Webb�s contention�functioned as guard dogs for the CIA. Soon after the 1996 expos� appeared, The Washington Post devoted nearly two full pages to attacking Webb�s assertions. The Los Angeles Times ran three separate articles that slammed Webb and his story. It was a seedy, disgusting and shameful chapter in American journalism. But it was hardly unique. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, in the 2004 article �How the Press and the CIA Killed Gary Webb�s Career,� detailed the dynamics of the nationwide smear campaign.

Webb�s newspaper, after printing a mea culpa about the series, cast him out. He was unable to work again as an investigative journalist and, fearful of losing his house, he committed suicide in 2004. We know, in part because of a Senate investigation led by then-Sen. John Kerry, that Webb was right. But truth was never the issue for those who opposed the journalist. Webb exposed the CIA as a bunch of gunrunning, drug-smuggling thugs. He exposed the mass media, which depend on official sources for most of their news and are therefore hostage to those sources, as craven handmaidens of power. He had crossed the line. And he paid for it.

If the CIA was funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in drugs into inner-city neighborhoods to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua, what did that say about the legitimacy of the vast covert organization? What did it tell us about the so-called war on drugs? What did it tell us about the government�s callousness and indifference to the poor, especially poor people of color at the height of the crack epidemic? What did it say about rogue military operations carried out beyond public scrutiny?

These were questions the power elites, and their courtiers in the press, were determined to silence.

The mass media are plagued by the same mediocrity, corporatism and careerism as the academy, labor unions, the arts, the Democratic Party and religious institutions. They cling to the self-serving mantra of impartiality and objectivity to justify their subservience to power. The press writes and speaks�unlike academics that chatter among themselves in arcane jargon like medieval theologians�to be heard and understood by the public. And for this reason the press is more powerful and more closely controlled by the state. It plays an essential role in the dissemination of official propaganda. But to effectively disseminate state propaganda the press must maintain the fiction of independence and integrity. It must hide its true intentions.

The mass media, as C. Wright Mills pointed out, are essential tools for conformity. They impart to readers and viewers their sense of themselves. They tell them who they are. They tell them what their aspirations should be. They promise to help them achieve these aspirations. They offer a variety of techniques, advice and schemes that promise personal and professional success. The mass media, as Wright wrote, exist primarily to help citizens feel they are successful and that they have met their aspirations even if they have not. They use language and images to manipulate and form opinions, not to foster genuine democratic debate and conversation or to open up public space for free political action and public deliberation. We are transformed into passive spectators of power by the mass media, which decide for us what is true and what is untrue, what is legitimate and what is not. Truth is not something we discover. It is decreed by the organs of mass communication.

�The divorce of truth from discourse and action�the instrumentalization of communication�has not merely increased the incidence of propaganda; it has disrupted the very notion of truth, and therefore the sense by which we take our bearings in the world is destroyed,� James W. Carey wrote in �Communication as Culture.�

Bridging the vast gap between the idealized identities�ones that in a commodity culture revolve around the acquisition of status, money, fame and power, or at least the illusion of it�and actual identities is the primary function of the mass media. And catering to these idealized identities, largely implanted by advertisers and the corporate culture, can be very profitable. We are given not what we need but what we want. The mass media allow us to escape into the enticing world of entertainment and spectacle. News is filtered into the mix, but it is not the primary concern of the mass media. No more than 15 percent of the space in any newspaper is devoted to news; the rest is devoted to a futile quest for self-actualization. The ratio is even more lopsided on the airwaves.

�This,� Mills wrote, �is probably the basic psychological formula of the mass media today. But, as a formula, it is not attuned to the development of the human being. It is a formula of a pseudo-world which the media invent and sustain.�

At the core of this pseudo-world is the myth that our national institutions, including those of government, the military and finance, are efficient and virtuous, that we can trust them and that their intentions are good. These institutions can be criticized for excesses and abuses, but they cannot be assailed as being hostile to democracy and the common good. They cannot be exposed as criminal enterprises, at least if one hopes to retain a voice in the mass media.

Those who work in the mass media, as I did for two decades, are acutely aware of the collaboration with power and the cynical manipulation of the public by the power elites. It does not mean there is never good journalism and that the subservience to corporate power within the academy always precludes good scholarship, but the internal pressures, hidden from public view, make great journalism and great scholarship very, very difficult. Such work, especially if it is sustained, is usually a career killer. Scholars like Norman Finkelstein and journalists like Webb and Assange who step outside the acceptable parameters of debate and challenge the mythic narrative of power, who question the motives and virtues of established institutions and who name the crimes of empire are always cast out.

The press will attack groups within the power elite only when one faction within the circle of power goes to war with another. When Richard Nixon, who had used illegal and clandestine methods to harass and shut down the underground press as well as persecute anti-war activists and radical black dissidents, went after the Democratic Party he became fair game for the press. His sin was not the abuse of power. He had abused power for a long time against people and groups that did not matter in the eyes of the Establishment. Nixon�s sin was to abuse power against a faction within the power elite itself.

The Watergate scandal, mythologized as evidence of a fearless and independent press, is illustrative of how circumscribed the mass media is when it comes to investigating centers of power.

�History has been kind enough to contrive for us a �controlled experiment� to determine just what was at stake during the Watergate period, when the confrontational stance of the media reached its peak. The answer is clear and precise: powerful groups are capable of defending themselves, not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are threatened,� Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote in �Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.� �By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or dissident victims of U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general population, media opposition is muted and absent altogether. This is why Nixon could go so far, lulled into a false sense of security precisely because the watchdog only barked when he began to threaten the privileged.�

The righteous thunder of the abolitionists and civil rights preachers, the investigative journalists who enraged Standard Oil and the owners of the Chicago stockyards, the radical theater productions, such as �The Cradle Will Rock,� that imploded the myths peddled by the ruling class and gave a voice to ordinary people, the labor unions that permitted African-Americans, immigrants and working men and women to find dignity and hope, the great public universities that offered the children of immigrants a chance for a first-class education, the New Deal Democrats who understood that a democracy is not safe if it does not give its citizens an acceptable standard of living and protect the state from being hijacked by private power, are no longer part of the American landscape. It was Webb�s misfortune to work in an era when the freedom of the press was as empty a clich� as democracy itself.

�The Cradle Will Rock,� like much of the popular work that came out of the Federal Theatre Project, addressed the concerns of the working class rather than the power elite. And it excoriated the folly of war, greed, corruption and the complicity of liberal institutions, especially the press, in protecting the power elite and ignoring the abuses of capitalism. Mister Mister in the play runs the town like a private corporation.

�I believe newspapers are great mental shapers,� Mister Mister says. �My steel industry is dependent on them really.�

�Just you call the News,� Editor Daily responds. �And we�ll print all the news. From coast to coast, and from border to border.�

Editor Daily and Mister Mister sing:

O the press, the press, the freedom of the press.
They�ll never take away the freedom of the press.
We must be free to say whatever�s on our chest�
with a hey-diddle-dee and ho-nanny-no
for whichever side will pay the best.

�I should like a series on young Larry Foreman,� Mister Mister tells Editor Daily. �Who goes around stormin� and organizin� unions.�

�Yes, we�ve heard of him,� Editor Daily tells Mister Mister. �In fact, good word of him. He seems quite popular with workingmen.�

�Find out who he drinks with and talks with and sleeps with. And look up his past till at last you�ve got it on him.�

�But the man is so full of fight, he�s simply dynamite, why it would take an army to tame him,� Editor Daily says.

�Then it shouldn�t be too hard to tame him,� Mister Mister says.

�O the press, the press, the freedom of the press,� the two sing. �You�ve only got to hint whatever�s fit to print; if something�s wrong with it, why then we�ll print to fit. With a he-diddly-dee and aho-nonny-no. For whichever side will pay the best.�

Cradle Will Rock, from one who was there:

CRADLE WILL ROCK
8 JUNE 2014
Marc Blitzstein�s Cradle Will Rock is a 1937 Broadway show. In this video, Cradle Will Rock producer John Houseman recalls the dramatic opening night of the show.

Tell you the truth, as far as "Cradle Will Rock" my tastes lean more Van Halen than Blitzstein. But Houseman does tell quite the yarn.

**LorenS** · October 27, 2014, 06:36 PM

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

There are no unbiased reporters. I like the folks who are honest about what they believe.

The mass media blindly support the ideology of limited liability capitalism.

There, fixed it for you. Corporations are creations of the state. Too bad the state did not adequately protect it's self from it's creation.

vt · November 04, 2014, 08:59 AM

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

Enemies list?

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...tkisson-745982

Announcement

An Unbiased Reporter

An Unbiased Reporter

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