Where is Upton Sinclair? Where is John Steinbeck? Where is Theodore Dreiser, or Charles Dickens, or Emile Zola?  Where even are the Woodward and Bernstein prima donnas? 

Newspapers and books used to publish the truth, no matter how ugly, and to bring to light the injustices and immorality that swims all around us. Sometimes they had to couch it in fiction, like Dickens or those other guys noted above, but the story got told. They may not always have gotten the truth entirely right, but they saw it as their duty to hold society up to the light and take a good hard look at it.  

Then we found radio, and people began to breath life into that news and put some immediacy to it. And for years, radio journalists were pretty good; they fit well into the tradition of incisive and investigative reporting. But with television we eventually got talking heads and, with the exception of a few bright shining moments in the past 50 years, we have sat benumbed in front of our screens. To its credit, television did bring the Vietnam war into out living rooms and gave war an immediacy that most of us will never see. That by itself might have been the catalyst for the swelling anti-war movement that filled the 1960s and 70s. 

Some of us can think critically enough that we have seen through much of the nonsense being fed to us by television; but for such a large number of people, there is a realism to it that makes it easy to believe and to accept as truth what the mindless newscasters and the screaming pundits say. But it rarely is true.  

This is not entirely a North American problem; indeed, it’s pervasive worldwide. But the bulk of this article will address the North American media simply because it is the largest and, more important, it's the one I know best.  

Independent, aggressive and critical media are essential to an informed democracy. But mainstream media are increasingly cozy with the economic and political powers they should be watchdogging. … With U.S. media outlets overwhelmingly owned by for-profit conglomerates and supported by corporate advertisers, independent journalism is compromised.

(Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)  

This is what makes organizations such as AxisofLogic.com so important. It is beholden to no corporation, no government, no organization or political party, and its writers are free, within the bounds of decency and slander and libel statutes, to write the truth as they understand it. Many of the articles are opinion pieces; many are supported by detailed research. But they are all meant to hold up to scrutiny the comfortable lies and half-truths that slide so easily off the lips of our corporate media and government officials.  

There is a basic misunderstanding of the role of advertisers in the media. It is generally presumed that commercial advertisers are interested in selling their clients' products to an audience. In fact, they are actually selling the audience to their clients. And that means they have to attract the audience, one suitable for those clients. The commercial advertisers, in turn, sell the clients' message to whatever medium can best project that message, be it television, print, or radio.  

Naturally, the people who pay for all of this, the clients of the advertisers, are unwilling to support media which might regularly criticize their products or expose corporate wrongdoing. This, then, gives these clients a disproportionate influence over the media and, hence, over what reaches the audience. To give a hypothetical example: suppose CNN's largest advertiser was Beatrice Foods and that, either through deliberate or accidental carelessness, a certain ingredient in some Beatrice product was killing people. How thoroughly do you suppose CNN would cover the story?  

It is also true that the media of most countries are government controlled, either directly or indirectly. In the so-called "free world," there is a pretence that the media is separate from the government in an adversarial relationship. This does not stand up to careful scrutiny. In truth, most media follows the lead of the government and this is particularly evident during times of war or other national crisis. At those times, the range of debate severely narrows and criticism of the actions or inactions of government drops almost to zero.  

Part of this arises from the simple fact that the owners of the most dominant media outlets generally share the same beliefs, background, and income as the elites who typically fill our political offices. And those media outlets regularly contribute financially to those political elites while receiving, in return, large revenues for political advertising.  

It is a foolhardy or brave journalist (and there are some) who is willing to hold a government’s feet to the fire – careful reporting of the facts will usually result in them being excluded from news releases, interview scrums, etc. 

To quote FAIR again:  

In this incestuous culture, 'news' is defined chiefly as the actions and statements of people in power. Reporters, dependent on 'access' and leaks provided by official sources, are too often unwilling to risk alienating these sources with truly critical coverage. Nor are corporate media outlets interested in angering the elected and bureaucratic officials who have the power to regulate their businesses.  

Probably the most insidious aspect of all of this is that the truth rarely sees the light of day anymore. Or if it does, it does so on the back page long after the artificial story has been allowed to settle in the public's mind. The outlets that produce most of our popular media are driven by profit. Not only are they not interested in the truth, they are very often quite interested in ensuring that the truth remains buried.  

News these days is purely sensationalistic. Natural disasters, mass deaths in war, criminal activity in the highest corridors of our economic masters are occurring every day. But our newscasts are filled with more important stuff, like Janet Jackson’s nipple or the incessant babbling about America’s first African-born president … 

Major news outlets have become increasingly dependent on tabloid and soap opera stories. And they do so in a manner designed to maximize profits. Corporate news outlets try to produce more and more with less and less staff. Journalists are left unable to research and dig for stories properly so they are increasingly reliant on the public relations folks to do it for them; reporters rewrite corporate and government press releases rather than do their own independent research. Television regularly broadcasts infomercials designed to look like real news.  

The range of debate over issues has narrowed almost to the point of total occlusion. The media is hugely responsible for the stupid debate ongoing in the US right now about healthcare. They have managed to divide the citizenry evenly in half, each claiming it is right and the other is wrong. They support the references to Barak Obama as a socialist – a guy who wouldn’t know a socialist if it fell in his porridge. But by cracky all that crap sells newspapers and air time. 

Corporate media will never sponsor a wide-ranging debate on any subject of substance. The "right" is usually represented by some mouthpiece of the ultra-conservative camp while the "left" is represented by an establishment-oriented middle-of-the-roader. The progressive side of any debate almost never sees the light of day in the corporate media. Some of this results from government-implied censorship, but even more from self-censorship. Media outlets will kill stories that undermine corporate interests (except, one must presume, the interests of major competitors), and advertisers use their clout to squash stories they don't want to hear. Many investigative reporters cower in fear over threats of lawsuits from huge and powerful businesses and frequently are dissuaded from following the story by legitimate investigation. This makes the self-imposed censorship of journalists the most common type of news hiding.  

So what's a person to do? Well, first, you can regularly read AxisofLogic.com (and, if you can, contribute – this whole thing is run by volunteers, including the writers).  

But most important is to install your own personal BS-filter. One of the many lessons we all should have learned from the Watergate experience is to "follow the money." When listening to or watching or reading news, it is important to know who is paying for it, who stands to win or lose from the story being presented. It should be assumed that no for-profit media outlet is independent and will ever tell you the bald truth; they cannot afford to. And when listening to government officials, it is important to remember the other lesson we should have learned from Watergate: never believe anything until it has been officially denied.

Read his bio and more articles by 
Paul Richard Harris, Editor, Axis of Logic