News and truth are not the same things. News, at least as it is configured in the faux objectivity of American journalism can be used quite effectively to mask and obscure the truth. ‘Balance,’ in which you have to give as much space, for example, to the victimizer as to the victim, may be objective and impartial, but it is usually not honest. And when you are ‘objective,’ it means that, in your reasonableness, you ultimately embrace and defend the status quo. There is a deep current of cynicism that runs through much of American journalism, especially on commercial electronic media. It is safe and painless to produce ‘balanced’ news. It is very unsafe, as the best of journalists will tell you, to produce truth. The great journalists, like the great preachers, care deeply about truth, which they seek to impart to their reader, listener or viewer, often at the cost to their careers.The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress by Chris Hedges, pp xi and xii.
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My former employer, the New York Times, with some of the most able and talented journalists and editors in the country, not only propagated the lies used to justify the war in Iraq, but also never saw the financial meltdown coming. These journalists and editors are besotted with their access to the powerful. They look at themselves as players, part of the inside elite. They went to the same elite colleges. They eat at the same restaurants. They go to the same parties and dinners. They live in the same exclusive neighbourhoods. Their children go to the same schools. They are, if one concedes that propaganda is a vital tool for the power elite, important to the system. Journalists who should have been exposing the lies used to justify the Iraq war or reporting from low-income neighbourhoods- where mortgage brokers and banks were filing fraudulent loan applications to hand money to people they knew could never pay it back- were instead ‘doing’ lunch with the power brokers in the White House or on Wall Street. All that talent, all that money, all that expertise, all those resources proved useless when it came time to examine the two major cataclysmic events of our age. And all that news, however objective and balanced turned out to be a lie.
Thanks to David@Montreal for sending me the quotes from the book, which I have not yet read, but which I intend to read.
I well remember Judith Miller's front page articles during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in the New York Times on the supposed WMD in the country obtained from her Iraqi 'source', Ahmad Chalabi, who was later proved to be lying. Oops!
Brave reporters like Walter Pincus of the Washington Post wrote articles questioning the information on WMD in Iraq but received only back-page coverage.
Days before the Iraq war began, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus put together a story questioning whether the Bush administration had proof that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.Of course, Judith Miller's stories ran on page 1 of the NYT with large headlines. Who you gonna believe? In these times of 'balanced news', you believe what you want to believe. In seeking to provide 'balance' the reporters give equal weight to spurious nonsense and the truth of a situation in order not to appear to be leaning to one side or the other, despite the fact that, at times, there is no sensible other side. And we are left with Stephen Colbert's 'truthiness'.
But he ran into resistance from the paper's editors, and his piece ran only after assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, who was researching a book about the drive toward war, "helped sell the story," Pincus recalled. "Without him, it would have had a tough time getting into the paper." Even so, the article was relegated to Page A17.
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An examination of the paper's coverage, and interviews with more than a dozen of the editors and reporters involved, shows that The Post published a number of pieces challenging the White House, but rarely on the front page. Some reporters who were lobbying for greater prominence for stories that questioned the administration's evidence complained to senior editors who, in the view of those reporters, were unenthusiastic about such pieces.
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