“…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…
“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...”
From The Myth of the Free Press by Chris Hedges
(Nation of Change)
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