I wrote a story a few days ago in which I said that the problem with journalism is that it’s controlled by corporations that breed incompetence, but I was wrong.

It’s not that mainstream media journalists are incompetent, it’s that they willfully seek to distort the public record for the purposes of lining the pockets of men like Rupert Murdoch and the other fat cats who control the vast majority of media in the US. The goal is to maintain capitalism, capitalists and the spheres of power that support the moneyed interests.

This explains why there was virtually no coverage of previous FCC rule changes which further consolidated the media and cemented the power brokers in their seats of influence. This explains why news reports rarely, if ever, highlight the real opposition to things that corporate capitalists want or don’t want.

In today’s Washington Post, there’s a story about health care reform which clearly paints the so-called town hall protesters as mainstream when they so obviously are not. People carrying assault weapons, hanging people in effigy and shouting down politicians and fellow citizens to prevent any real discussion of health care reform to occur does not represent the mainstream, but if you read the Post story you’d think so.

And this is nothing new. News publishers have always sought to maintain the power structure in the US, because they are an integral part of that structure.

And so the bogus notion of objectivity is a ruse to create the illusion that all sides of the story are covered fairly, but they aren’t and have never been. Just look at the coverage leading to the war in Vietnam, World War II, World War I and the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In none of these cases did The New York Times, or any mainstream news organization, take a critical look at the root causes of any of those wars before, during or after.

All of these wars, like all war, was about control, money and power. Whether you supported the war effort or not, none of them were fought for peace because claiming war is peace makes no sense, yet that’s how it was presented to the public and the public ate it up with a spoon.

As a journalist, and someone who truly cares about role of journalism in a viable representative democracy, I’m ashamed to even associate myself with this industry.

journalism

If you ask the founder of the conservative Media Research Center what he thinks of the media, L. Brent Bozell III will say that news coverage has an overt liberal bias. If you ask me, that’s bunk, the reason journalism sucks has nothing to do with political ideology, but just plain old incompetence.

The root of the problem is corporate consolidation of the media. The bean-counters expect 20 percent profit from an industry that in a good year can turn out 5 percent, maybe ten.

The only way to get those huge profits is to track the least expensive and most outrageous “news” story. Last month’s town hall meeting coverage provides a perfect example.

Certainly there was plenty of reasonable debate taking place in town hall meetings everywhere, but that’s boring. The cheap thrills were found in taping the wackos representing a small percentage of the population, giving the impression that there’s widespread outrage over health care reform. There isn’t.

Bozell’s argument for a liberal bias in the media holds no water. Leading to the war with Iraq, the “liberal” media duckwalked in lockstep with the Bush administration and did nothing to challenge the president, in fact, they paved the path to war by not providing a valuable check on the Executive. The New York Times and the Washington Post issued apologies for their failure after-the-fact.

But none of these anecdotal examples of conservative bias proves the media has any particular bias at all. What it means is that the news media is grotesquely incompetent. Sure there are overtly biased “news” organizations on cable TV. Fox is obviously a right-wing propaganda machine and MSNBC is now unabashedly liberal (it’s worth noting that back in 2003 MSNBC was clearly ideologically right-of-center).

If the responsibility of a journalist is to provide all sides to a story (yes, sometimes there are more than two), there can be no doubt that the news media, particularly broadcast news, is utterly failing. It’s failing because telling all sides of a particular story is difficult, expensive and not always the most exciting to watch on TV.

So to get viewers or readers – to make lots of money – journalists are in a race to the bottom and our supposedly representative form of government is failing. Extremists, liberal and conservative, know that if they scream loud enough and burn enough people in effigy, someone will point a camera at them and they’ll dominate the news cycle – creating the illusion of widespread outrage.

It is interesting that conservatives are far more effective at changing policy with this strategy than liberals. My guess is that while most journalists are politically left of center, most executives that run these corporate media conglomerates are not. So we’re left with a corporate-controlled incompetent news media that is failing as the unelected fourth branch of government. To solve this problem, the FCC must reinstate rules about media ownership to break up media conglomerates and put the power of the press back in the hands of the people rather than the MBAs.

Chris Wallace August 2009

Andrew Sullivan makes an interesting point in his column today about the so-called journalists at Fox News.

“When future historians ask how the United States came not only to practice torture but to celebrate it and treat torturers as heroes, a special place in hell among the journalists who embraced and justified it should be reserved for Chris Wallace.”

I don’t know if Wallace will burn in hell, but there’s no doubt history will not look favorably on the Chris Wallace’s working for Fox News. However, the same can be said about a lot of the mainstream news media. Corporate controlled news organizations go out of their way to toe the corporate line. That explains why they failed to cover changes to the FCC encouraging further corporate consolidation of news organizations. That also explains why the majority of mainstream media duck-walked in lockstep with Bush and Cheney into the war in Iraq.

Chris Wallace August 2009

Is MSNBC any better than Fox News?

During the fervor following 9/11, MSNBC made a concerted effort to go as far to the right as they could. Now that Democrats control the White House and Congress, MSNBC has swerved hard to the left.

But we’re talking about cable news, which, well, it isn’t really news. So when Sullivan condemns Chris Wallace to hell for his lack of journalistic integrity, it’s a false claim because Wallace is no more a journalist than is Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Wolf Blitzer or Lou Dobbs.

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Check out Sullivan’s column Chris Wallace, A Teenage Girl Interviewing The Jonas Brothers at the Atlantic

US soldiers torturing a prisoner at Abu Graib in Iraq.

In case you missed it … You paid to have people tortured and possibly murdered. Your tax dollars went to train CIA employees on how to torture people. And according to recently declassified documents, it appears some prisoners died in the process. What’s more disturbing is that since President Obama has not clearly reinstated a prohibition on torture, you can only assume it’s still happening today.

If I were a member of the elite White House press corpse (yeah I know how to spell corps) I’d ask Obama why he doesn’t unequivocally state that his administration will not torture people. Sure, former President Bush said point blank: “We do not torture.” That didn’t mean much, but we have to assume that if Obama is specifically not prohibiting torture, he’s doing so to avoid lying, and thus by getting him to state he won’t torture, that could mean something. I know, it’s stupid wishful thinking.

CIA Report on Torture Program (17MB) 269 pages of pdf

The issue for Obama is that while he may not be using CIA employees to torture and murder people, he continues to pursue the Bush policy of rendition. Rendition is the process of sending prisoners to countries that aren’t bound by international treaties like the Geneva Convention that bans torture. What’s great about rendition is that the Egyptians or Syrians are doing all the torturing and stuff like that, so we don’t have to. Outsourcing.

Obama claims that he’s monitoring the treatment of these prisoners to make sure they aren’t tortured, but if they aren’t being tortured, why bother sending them there at all?

But like I said, I’m not a member of the elite White House press corpse.