Senate Criticism of Corporate News Media

I debated whether or not actually making this thread. Progressives (which this forum is mostly comprised of) have spent the last five years defending news media against attacks from Donald Trump. Criticism of the media is now a tricky business, as now one must assure everyone they are not part of Qanon when they want to criticize mainstream Western news.

Y'all know I'm a vociferous critic of the news. I do not believe that the supposedly "free" corporate media is a free press or any less biased than the "state owned news" sources of countries that are enemies of the West. So I've decided to post this to critic both news as a theory and current problems in the news.

1) Corporate press exists to make money and further the interests of the corporations that own them. The most prominent example is how Washington Post ran to attack Bernie Sanders after he spoke out against Amazon. Both were owned by Bezos.

2) Mainstream Western news exists as a propaganda arm of United States and NATO foreign policy. This ties into the first policy, as our foreign policy exists to further the interests of the rich. Let's take a look what finally made me make this thread: How western news media is treating the prosecution of Bolivian Coup leaders. These same news sources clutch pearls over how we need to bring the harshest punishments against the capitol rioters, yet the people who actually committed a US-backed coup on Bolivia are innocent victims.

These are not the only instances of domestic and foreign policy agendas have their water carried by the corporate media. And there's a lot to be talked about how social media is involved in directing people to trust corporate media by only labeling the news sources from countries the west doesn't like as untrustworthy.

 

So much of what I'm trying to figure out right now is how to help your average Joe either retain or obtain basic Enlightenment values as faith in institutions like the "free" press plummet. Everyone is so vulnerable to truly dangerous misinformation– that is 21st century warfare. How do we combat this when everything that Vivec just posted is absolutely correct? How do we find truth?

 

What if I mostly read publicly funded media like BBC?

 

I'm not sure if it's possible for a publicly owned press to be regarded as credible by the same people vulnerable to online misinformation. At the very least, full transparency, in a way that's broadly accessible, of all funding for any news organization, public or private, would be a good first step.

 

The late Ben Bagdikian spent his career on this issue: The Media Monopoly is the best starting point for the problem of corporate journalism in the U.S. It was a problem in the 1980s when Bagdikian first wrote about it, and it's exponentially worse now. Interlocking boards of directors, mergers and acquisitions, advertising revenue. All the things that you'd think would compromise the integrity of journalism do in fact compromise the integrity of journalism.

 

We go into my second criticism of western news press being a water carrier for western foreign policy. the BBC is definitely that.

The original title for this article was Bernie Sanders, Sounding Like Trump, Goes After Amazon And Washington Post : NPR

 

While I agree with your post, @Lord Vivec, I think there is some complication. When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, the corporate news media is mostly garbage. When it comes to something like an insurgent leftist candidate for President (or Prime Minister!) or reporting on a sexual assault accusation against their preferred candidate, they're garbage. But there are genuinely good reporters at outlets like the NYT and even the likes of CNN. Also, these large news outlets in our grim reality are among the only ones with the resources, including legal counsel, to research and break stories. Of course it absolutely should not be that way and it's only getting worse.

The Tory Broadcasting Corporation?

 

Well I mean, we just had the postal service turned into a political weapon. There would be even more incentive to twist public media for partisan purposes.

 

The Murdoch press is horrendously biased and all-powerful in Australia, so much so that former PM Kevin Rudd has petitioned for a Royal Commission into the NewsCorp Murdoch influence on reporting in this country. It cites the Fox News experience in the US as to how toxic and damaging this kind of news power has over the lives of ordinary citizens by pushing a right wing agenda. Murdoch owns the majority of the news in Australia (nearly 100% in some states such as Queensland).

 

This thread had reminded me of a Daily Beast article from this February where it was stated that the Biden administration's press team/communications staff had probed reporters for questions in advance of briefings. I think that while Darth Guy's caveat regarding NYT and CNN is true, instances like the one I named as well as a great deal of articles published in order to ingratiate Biden to US citizens kind of strengthen conservative claims that such outlets are often colluding or just outright friendly with corporate Democrats.

Obviously, the relationship between the government and news media should be adversarial so if it isn't on the part of what is often erroneously considered to be "left-wing" media in the US, what credibility does any criticism of Trump's more blatant and visible favoritism for Fox News and then OAN and Newsmax hold? If the many outlets that are touted as legitimate news sources have a culture where such things are acceptable and are attempted freely, then that proves to be corrosive to the average American's ability to be able to easily informed. It will lead, if it has not already lead, to a situation where people in greater will simply believe what they want to believe, regardless of whether or not it reflects reality.

 

Obviously the BBC couldn't ever give in to government pressure...


Germany does have publically funded media in the form of a network of tv-channels and radio stations. Generally split into two main networks and a bunch of regional channels. They are required by law to uphold a certain level of journalistic standards, as well as a pre-set form of content they have to show. It is not paid through taxes, but from a special fee, so the government has no direct influence on funding. The whole system has some level of oversight from political parties, unions, churches, etc. Though there is a limit that only a maximum of 1/3 of the seats of each supervisory council may be held by members of the political parties. There definately is quite a bit of hidden influence involved, though not specifically through the government but political parties as a whole. What you don't have is a slanted view towards a specific political direction though.

 

I mean, yeah, there are individually good reporters and journalists. But that doesn't change the fact that there are systemic issues at play here. It's kinda like cops: yes, there are individual good cops. No, that doesn't matter when the system of policing is bad.

 

Thank you for making this thread.

 

Sorry for the double post.

In my humble opinion, the most sweeping, consequential, and damaging instance of corporate media bias w/ regard to U.S. politics over the past several years has been around Russia, particularly their involvement/influence in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, and a nebulous conspiracy to aid Donald Trump, colloquially referred to as "Russiagate". Time after time, corporate media have published stories on this topic which have been proven to be false, and often based on anonymous sources within the U.S. intelligence apparatus. There is a striking comparison here with corporate media's conduct in the lead up to the Iraq War.

The many examples of bad reporting are too numerous to describe succinctly, but veteran journalist Matt Taibbi has been following the story for years, and has a detailed summary on his substack. From bank servers, to Carter Page, to energy grid sabotage, to sonic weapons in Cuba, story after story has been dis-proven, but I want to focus on one particular story, because I think it gets to the heart of the Russiagate conspiracy theory, and indicates its likely essence: a political campaign orchestrated by Clinton loyalists to harm Donald Trump and shift media scrutiny away from Democrats.

On October 16, 2016, before the election, Hillary Clinton and others publicly stated that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies backed an assessment that cyberattacks in 2016 came from the “highest levels of the Kremlin.” That was later corrected in congressional testimony to four agencies. It was actually a hand-picked team from three agencies, and the chief conclusion from that group came mainly from CIA chief John Brennan, who in his own book, “Undaunted,” published in 2020, revealed that he had overlooked dissenting analysis from two members of the working group. Brennan said he believed “the quality of the sources justified the high confidence,” but the Times and other outlets reported that Brennan was basing much of his confidence on a single human source in Russia whose information was allowed to bypass the normal vetting process.

Brennan's behavior bares a striking similarity to Dick Cheney's efforts to suppress and select opinions from the intelligence agencies in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, it is a basic capability that high level bureaucrats have always had. He would later become a paid commentator for MSNBC, a news agency deeply invested in telling stories about Russian conspiracies, which dominated U.S. news from 2016 to 2019.

The political fallout of Russiagate cannot be understated. Democrat operatives extensively and recklessly used accusations of Russian sympathy against leftward opponents in their efforts to oppose Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential run. It was widely cited as the decisive reason that Donald Trump won the election in the first place, conveniently overruling more logical explanations like Clintonian incompetence and dissatisfaction with Democrats' domestic policies. One of the most shameful examples conspiracy mongering was when former National Security Advisor Susan Rice claimed that violence adjacent to the George Floyd protests was incited by Russian propaganda, rather than emerging from long-simmering racial tensions, a baseless claim eagerly repeated by corporate media.

All conspiracy theories rely on assertions too nebulous to be dis-proven, and the opacity of U.S. intelligence agencies makes Russiagate particularly hard to eradicate. But it's clear imo that the overwhelming weight of evidence points to a political angle, of exaggeration, misinformation, and outright fabrication on the part of corporate media.

 

I wish it weren't just Taibbi and a few other journalists like Glenn Greenwald who cared about debunking Russiagate hysteria, 'cause man, they've got their own problems.

 

All this is accurate. News used to be just "news". Meaning, it existed to tell you what happened at an event that you werent there to witness. Simple but effective. Little or no slants at all. Our old local papers were great in that regard. Then they got bought by some giant thing and it took about 4-6 months to get bad. Then, websites.... my goodness. propoganda.com. 99% of them have an "agenda".

Love the idea of publicly owned news or press. I dont see why it couldnt happen. But, you'd have to properly manage it so it didnt slant too far one way or the other.

 

There should be a federal law that provides funding to states for publicly owned local news outlets. Text-based / audio / video.

 

I think I'm familiar with the leftist criticisms of Greenwald, but what are the problems with Taibbi?

 

The problem with all of this is that there's only two real ways for news to work. One is that they do what pleases the audience, and the other is that they do what pleases their funders. In a market with only a few options, the latter very easily becomes propaganda. The only option is an educated public, and we have clearly seen how badly the education argument's gone.

 

The issue is that someone has to decide that. Propaganda is all about deciding that what "informs" the audience is just the parts of the topic you want them to know about. The allegation brought up already being that the Washington Post thought it was important to inform the audience about the problems with Sanders than it was to inform them about the problems with Amazon.

 

Miraculously enough, I'm actually hopeful about this specific facet. We've gone a long way since the Bush Jr. years, in which Fox News was generally (and inaccurately) considered to be the sole purveyor of corporate disinformation. Now, in the decade of Youtube and Internet streaming, there's been a renaissance of sorts; Chomsky's efforts in exposing the mainstream media's manufacturing of consent has taken root in millions of minds, especially younger people. The vanguards are being held under deeper and deeper scrutiny and suspicion now, and while these outlets still wield power--evidenced by last year's successful propping-up of a senile, alleged rapist as "electable"--I honestly think the discontent will flower as the months and years go on. The lot of the them are nothing more than stenographers for power, and citizens now have access to independent voices who aren't snout-deep into the establishment trough. (And yeah, I know there's a risk to this, as well. But everything casts a shadow, come what may...)