rubydick
Shiny_Rock
- Joined
- Sep 27, 2004
- Messages
- 321
William Rivers Pitt is one of my heroes. A former schoolteacher, he has worked with former Iraq weapons inspector Scott Ritter to shed light on the murky subjects of Iraq WMDs and so many other matters. Below is a brief selection from a recent interview where he discusses the state of US mainsream media.
My Chat With Will Pitt
MA: Okay, but if the "corporate news media delivers tainted, altered, watered-down information to the public" as you say, can't they argue as you argue that it's all in the name of cutting through the nonsense to get to the truth?
WP: Professional journalism standards are not what they once were, and the days of the "egghead journalist" are long gone. What we have now on television are a lot of models reading from scripts written by the boys in the newsroom, and the aforementioned boys are drawing paychecks from major corporations that have interests to look out for that more often than not cut against the requirements of objective journalism.
Check out the Columbia Journalism Review's list of who owns what in the corporate news realm.
You will see, for example, that NBC, MSNBC and CNBC are owned by General Electric, one of the largest defense contractors in America. General Electric does very well by war, and yet we are expected to trust their "news" organizations to report objectively on Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars that GE is making money off of.
Look at CNN, and their owners AOL/TimeWarner. Look specifically at all the subsidiaries of that parent company, all the subsidiaries of those subsidiaries, and remember all the advertisers associated with all of them. It is almost impossible for CNN to report objectively on something without that report affecting its parent company, a subsidiary or an advertiser.
The print media isn't immune from this. Judy Miller of the New York Times is cooling her heels in a prison cell right now, in no small part because she became the most helpful reporter Bush and friends had in their push for war in Iraq. Miller took the verbatim words of Ahmad Chalabi as gospel and published stories about how Iraq was riddled with WMD. Once she said it in the Times, the rest of the media felt safe in following in the footsteps of that august paper. So of course, Karl Rove felt entirely comfortable calling her up about Valerie Plame. Her tainted, poor reporting before the invasion is the reason she was on Rove's speed-dial.
Once upon a time about 20 years ago, the NBC Nightly News brought in 54% of that station's parent company's profits for the year. Now that General Electric owns them, the Nightly News brings in 4% of the profit. There is no money in good journalism anymore, and so there isn't much good journalism in the corporate mainstream world.
Never forget this: One of the main reasons Nazi Germany's extreme military and nationalistic build-up in the 1930s went almost unnoticed in the wider world was because the European news media at that time was owned by chemical and steel companies, which were profiting from Germany's build-up. They didn't report it, and so it did not gain notice until it was too late. The moral is simple: A news media owned by companies more interested in profit than fact is a cancer. That is exactly what we have now, and we are seeing the ramifications all over the world.
My Chat With Will Pitt
MA: Okay, but if the "corporate news media delivers tainted, altered, watered-down information to the public" as you say, can't they argue as you argue that it's all in the name of cutting through the nonsense to get to the truth?
WP: Professional journalism standards are not what they once were, and the days of the "egghead journalist" are long gone. What we have now on television are a lot of models reading from scripts written by the boys in the newsroom, and the aforementioned boys are drawing paychecks from major corporations that have interests to look out for that more often than not cut against the requirements of objective journalism.
Check out the Columbia Journalism Review's list of who owns what in the corporate news realm.
You will see, for example, that NBC, MSNBC and CNBC are owned by General Electric, one of the largest defense contractors in America. General Electric does very well by war, and yet we are expected to trust their "news" organizations to report objectively on Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars that GE is making money off of.
Look at CNN, and their owners AOL/TimeWarner. Look specifically at all the subsidiaries of that parent company, all the subsidiaries of those subsidiaries, and remember all the advertisers associated with all of them. It is almost impossible for CNN to report objectively on something without that report affecting its parent company, a subsidiary or an advertiser.
The print media isn't immune from this. Judy Miller of the New York Times is cooling her heels in a prison cell right now, in no small part because she became the most helpful reporter Bush and friends had in their push for war in Iraq. Miller took the verbatim words of Ahmad Chalabi as gospel and published stories about how Iraq was riddled with WMD. Once she said it in the Times, the rest of the media felt safe in following in the footsteps of that august paper. So of course, Karl Rove felt entirely comfortable calling her up about Valerie Plame. Her tainted, poor reporting before the invasion is the reason she was on Rove's speed-dial.
Once upon a time about 20 years ago, the NBC Nightly News brought in 54% of that station's parent company's profits for the year. Now that General Electric owns them, the Nightly News brings in 4% of the profit. There is no money in good journalism anymore, and so there isn't much good journalism in the corporate mainstream world.
Never forget this: One of the main reasons Nazi Germany's extreme military and nationalistic build-up in the 1930s went almost unnoticed in the wider world was because the European news media at that time was owned by chemical and steel companies, which were profiting from Germany's build-up. They didn't report it, and so it did not gain notice until it was too late. The moral is simple: A news media owned by companies more interested in profit than fact is a cancer. That is exactly what we have now, and we are seeing the ramifications all over the world.
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