[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about whose interests are advanced by the media, how and why this is perpetuated and what needs to be done about it. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
If you watch Western news media with a critical eye you eventually notice how their reporting consistently aligns with the interests of the US-centered empire, in almost the same way you would expect them-to if they were government-run propaganda outlets (Caitlin Johnstone)
–Mainstream commercial social media such as Fox News in the US have long pushed racist narratives to further their profitability. And, outlets like the New York Times –the so-called ‘liberal media icon’– do too little, too late, to push back. (Moreover consider: the New York Times has reliably supported every war the US has waged). It thus falls on the independent media outlets to create and promote counternarratives targeting all kinds of injustice. (Sonali Kolhatkar)
1. That this extreme bias occurs is self-evident and indisputable to anyone who pays attention. Does this mean that wealthy media owners are standing over their employees and telling them what to report from day to day? No. But it does mean they do control who runs their outlet.
2. Consider 15 factors that perpetuate this situation:
- Media are privately owned;
- it is almost impossible for a good journalist to stand up against power;
- journalists learn very quickly what kinds of output will help and hinder their movement up the career ladder without needing to be explicitly told;
- mass media employees who do not comply with the groupthink get worn down and pressured out;
- mass media employees who step too far out of line get fired;
- mass media employees who toe the imperial line see their careers advance;
- with public and state-funded media, the influence is more overt;
- media outlets and reporters can lose access to politicians, government officials and other powerful figures if those figures do not perceive them as sufficiently sympathetic;
- government feeds lies to the media in order to win an ‘information war’ and these media have to publish it (remember weapons-of-mass-destruction?);
- class interests ‘dance’ with the behavior of journalists; (see below)
- staggering percentages of the think tanks are cited by the news media in their reporting on military support —often paid by defense industry contractors;
- news outlets have long been members of the influential think tanks which gives them influence in the media;
- the defense industry advertises in the media, all the time paying for it;
- intelligence agencies covertly infiltrate the most influential news outlets and have many reporters ‘considered assets’; and,
- do not forget overt infiltration (ex-intelligence operators serving as media figures and interviewees).
3. So, as you can see, the news media are subject to pressures from every conceivable angle on every relevant level; this pushes them toward functioning not as reporters, but as propagandists. This is why the employees of the Western mass media act like public relations agents for the Western Empire and its component parts: …because that is exactly what they are. (C. Johnstone)
The class factor in journalism gets overlooked (journalist Glenn Greenwald)
–Thirty or forty years ago, fifty years ago, journalists really were outsiders. That is why they all had unions; they made shit money; they came from like working class families; they hated the elite.
4. In the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now, journalism (in the US, for example) is not only a college-dominated profession, it is an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 US schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation. (David Brooks)
5. This is a major reason behind the freakish adulation and empire loyalism we see in the mainstream press. It is not just the obscenely wealthy owners of the mass media who are protecting their class interests, it is the reporters and editors as well.* The way to elevate their career is to toe the establishment line and refrain from spotlighting issues that are inconvenient to the powerful.
*: They have become the presstitutes of the conservative media that is known to be complicit in creating divisions (territorial, religious, ethnic…), creating inequality, (rich and poor) creating hunger, prejudice, hatreds, homelessness, illiteracy, ignorance…. (Alberto Potugheis) Think human rights…
6. Universities themselves tend to play a status-quo-serving, conformity-manufacturing role when churning out journalists, as wealth will not flow into an academic environment that is offensive to the wealthy. [There is an implicit system of filtering… that creates a strong tendency to impose conformism. (Noam Chomsky)]. This is how things were set up to be. Our media act like propagandists for a tyrannical regime, because that is exactly what they are. (C. Johnstone)
7. Moreover, styles have changed. So many journalists write with less than three hundred poorly digested words and worse spelling, without having assimilated the basic rule of school grammar, that of subject-verb-predicate, and possibly an object and a complement. (Louis Casado)
How, then, to contain corrupt media in a capitalist system –even if it is now practically state capitalism all over the world?
8. We cannot fall-for and believe in the myth of ‘free competition’ in communications.** Ownership of the media, or of the concessions to use them, is only part of the game of the economic and political powers that includes the individual and corporate ownership of the media, more and more on a global level.
**: Free competition is nothing more than, to a large extent, a mask for the concentration of power and the exclusion of the weakest by the strongest.
The consequence: inertia and status-quo
9. Given this saturation we all are exposed to, the extreme political center (Alan Berg) has not joined us in demanding needed changes. We continue to receive the bulk of our information on political and social issues from main stream commercial social media sources. [Moral lesson: To be a part of centrist thinking you have to accept the rules of the theater. Once you exit the theater you are no longer an asset to the corporate media. …and this is what the extreme center ponders].
10. Therefore, what is required is a more effective social regulation of the media, not through the Executive, but through the Legislative. It is this power that should review, guarantee and regulate —together with public interest civil society organizations and social movements– the norms and conduct of the owners and concessionaires of the mass media. The Executive must operate and administer (hold accountable), but not substitute, the decisions of the Legislative. Finally, I affirm that this ought to undoubtedly be one of the highest priority points in the civil and social agendas particularly when it comes to all human rights –none less than the right to information. (Oscar Gonzalez). [If this does not impinge on human rights, I do not know what will do more].
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com