What’s up with our news media?

In my brief lifetime I have witnessed four assassination attempts on members of the Kennedy family, three successful. A pilot who flew members of the JFK assassination team out of Dallas confided to a witness, Wayne January (as reported post-mortem by British author Mathew Smith), “They are not only going to kill the president, they are going to kill Robert Kennedy and any other Kennedy who gets into that position.”

Such intrigue is unfathomable to innocent Americans who imagine they are governed by people who are like them. This is the great advantage that people who seek power for power’s sake have over regular people. It is the central focus of Machiavelli’s The Prince. They understand us. We do not understand them. They can imitate us, we only imitate them in movies and TV shows, and not well. Hannibal Lechter only bears faint resemblance to a true psychopath. Dick Cheney, Zbigniew Brzezinski are the real deal.

The four Kennedy assassination attempts, John, Robert, Ted and John Jr., stand out like bright stars, and not just dots. I have not seen or read one person in our news media who has the ability (or at least admits it) to connect those dots, even as they are so bright as to hurt the eyes. All events are random. Add a host of other murders and unexplained deaths, timely scandals, even coincidences as obscure as a powerful congressman* caught in a public fountain late at night with a hooker … and perhaps it is but a matter of attrition. The good journalists go do something else. The ones we are left with, even if they do have some dot-connecting ability, are either clueless or know to shut up.

Not knowing, or knowing and keeping quiet … same difference.

The American news media is perhaps the worst on the face of the earth. They love to give themselves awards, and one or two here and there are really worth the little plaques and statues. But a typical journalist will interview a typical politician, get a quote or two, write about it with no insight, and think he has done his job. He did not gather information, scrutinize it, sift it, follow leads, challenge contradiction. He reported to us, his only job. If he is confrontational, he’ll never get another interview with that politician.

Why? How can one profession produce such poor work and continue to flourish? The only other professions with such low standards that I am aware of are economics and nutrition. Even accountants are held accountable when we fail at our jobs.

People have studied this phenomenon, and the answers are not satisfying. Here’s an attempt by Edward Herman from the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, which he co-authored with Noam Chomsky. His contention was that filters were in place, and the filters were the result of a collective consciousness that was a cloud over journalism. He listed five of them:

Size, Ownership, and Profit Orientation: Our major media outlets are nothing more than profit-oriented businesses, and so only view journalism as a tool to that end. Excellence is neither required nor rewarded.
Advertising: Classic example – NPR, which is advertising -oriented, once did some good investigative reporting on Archer-Daniels-Midland, exposing a huge price-fixing scam. ADM turned around and took out ads on NPR, and thereby avoided any further scrutiny. A journalist cannot report on an advertiser unless the advertiser is too small to matter.
Sources: Journalists rely on access to power to report on the activities of power, and so only relay information that does not threaten power. Protection of access is deemed more important than journalism.
Flak and the Enforcers: Any journalist who does good work, even if by accident, is drummed out of the profession. Organizations like Accuracy in Media came about to enforce a right-wing state of mind on media, and it did not take much pressure to achieve results. After all, the owners of these media are themselves right-wing. Flak is blowback, or negative consequences for good reporting.**
Anti-Communism: This is the guiding “ideology,” and really nothing more than a Trojan horse through which thought control is effected. It is now “anti-terrorism.” Same horse, new paint job.

That is all interesting, even true. Media and journalists do indeed respond to those pressures. The problem is that Herman attempted to replace conscious intent with the natural fallout of unfocused collective pressure by pockets of concentrated wealth. He does explain some things, but not all things. He does not explain active media participation in hoaxes such as 9/11 and the Boston bombing. There is far more going on here than Herman envisions. Although his attempt to organize the knowledge is commendable, he did not go far enough.

More to follow.
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*Wilbur Mills
**There are seemingly left-wing outfits that try to do the same, such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, but they are relegated to the margins and have no lasting impact.