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Banned
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What Persuades You That US Corporate News Media Reporting shows a "Liberal Bias" ?
...and how does such an opinion effect US politics, and our interaction on this forum? If you believe there is a liberal slant to "the news", do you favor alternative sources for updates on current events, instead? What do you think the impact of your information sources has on your participation in discussions on this forum, in 3D, and on your voting choices, compared to someone who believes the opposite of what you do about the slant of news reporting.....that it is tainted by the political agenda of those who own the means of gathering the information and reporting it?
How does this;
.....Compare to all of the following......? If Upton Sinclair was accurate in his expose of the meatpacking industry, was he wrong in his later expose on the news media? Aren't his observations and revelations about American journalism, parallel to what we observe in the 2008, broadcast media blackout of the NY Times reporting about the retired military officers manipulated by the Pentagon to propagandize the broadcast audience with the knowledge and complicity of the broadcast media?
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The Brass Check - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Overview
The book is one of the "Dead Hand" series: six books Sinclair wrote on American institutions. The series also includes The Profits of Religion, The Goose-step (higher education), The Goslings (elementary and high school education), Mammonart (great literature, art and music) and Money Writes! (literature). The term "Dead Hand" criticizes Adam Smith’s concept that allowing an "invisible hand" of capitalist greed to shape economic relations provides the best result for society as a whole.
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Monthly Review May 2002 Robert W. McChesney and Ben Scott
...Radical criticism of the press was an integral component of the many large social movements of the Progressive Era, which sought to resist the effects of accelerating capitalist development. It was a time of striking similarity to the present, mirroring in particular the corruption of democracy by political and economic elites whose control over the media strangles public awareness, debate, and activism. However, unlike today, radical criticism of capitalist journalism was a dominant theme on the left during the Progressive Era, particularly in the socialist, anarchist, and progressive press....
...Upton Sinclair is best remembered for his novel The Jungle, the 1906 muckraking exposé of labor and sanitary conditions in the Chicago stockyards. The book catapulted the then-twenty-seven-year-old author into international prominence, and Sinclair remained a highly acclaimed and widely read author until his death in 1968. What has been forgotten is that, although he wrote ninety-two books and twenty-nine pamphlets, for much of Sinclair’s career he was known as a “two book author.” The other book, besides The Jungle, was The Brass Check, which he published himself in 1919. In The Brass Check, Sinclair made a systematic and damning critique of the severe limitations of the “free press” in the United States. “(T)he thesis of this book,” he wrote, is “that American Journalism is a class institution serving the rich and spurning the poor.”*If The Jungle was notorious for its aggressive assaults on capitalist industry, The Brass Check pulled even fewer punches. The title itself is a reference to the chit issued to patrons of urban brothels at the time. Sinclair drew an analogy between journalists and prostitutes, beholden to the agenda, ideology, and policies of the monied elites that owned and controlled the press. It was an integral part of his broader critique of the corruption of U.S. politics and the appalling nature of capitalism: “Politics, Journalism, and Big Business work hand in hand for the hoodwinking of the public and the plundering of labor” (p. 153)......
... In the text of the book itself, he called it “the most important and most dangerous book I have ever written”(p. 429).
Yet while The Jungle remains a staple of American literature, The Brass Check has been all but forgotten. This is the case despite its groundbreaking critique of the structural basis of U.S. journalism, arguably the first such systematic critique ever made. Anticipating much of the best in more recent structural media criticism, Sinclair explained the class bias built into journalism in a four-part systemic model emphasizing the importance of owners, advertisers, public relations, and the web of economic interests tied into the media system, and invested in its control of public opinion. Integrating the critique of the press into the larger history of Progressive Era activism, Sinclair pointed to the centrality of the media in all of the problems of social injustice which attended the rise of modern capitalism.
Yet, those historians who bother to mention The Brass Check dismiss it as ephemeral, explaining that the problems it depicts have been solved. As John Ahouse, Sinclair’s bibliographer put it, the criticism made by Sinclair in “The Brass Check played an important part by provoking and broadening a debate that eventually led to greater objectivity in the American press.”* Sinclair, the curmudgeonly muckraker, helped clean up the newsrooms much like he helped clean up the stockyards. We can all move on to some other more pressing social issue.
In fact, many of the concerns Sinclair had about commercial journalism did not disappear with the rise of professionalism and “objectivity”—a development he witnessed and regarded with disdain as a sham solution. Moreover, as commercial pressures on the integrity of U.S. journalism have intensified over the past two decades, much of Sinclair’s critique now appears startlingly accurate. What then explains the erasure of The Brass Check, not to mention the entire radical tradition it crystallizes, from public consciousness, or even from the reading lists of contemporary media scholars, both mainstream and critical?.....
....Critics loosely charged that Sinclair had been sloppy with his facts in The Brass Check, and the book did not stand up to close scrutiny. Sinclair, a fanatic for factual accuracy, directly challenged any of those he criticized in The Brass Check to sue him for criminal libel—often in the footnotes of later editions of the book—if they could prove a single word in the text was false. No suits were ever forthcoming. Indeed, in 1921, the Associated Press announced it was appointing a commission to review, collect evidence, and denounce the charges Sinclair made about the AP in The Brass Check. The project was quietly abandoned without any report, formal or informal, being issued (p. 376).
In our view it was this smear campaign, more than anything else, which led to the virtual disappearance of The Brass Check by the middle of the century. ....
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CNN, the Pentagon's 'Military Analyst Program' and Gitmo | CommonDreams.org
Published on Friday, May 9, 2008 by Salon.com
CNN, the Pentagon's 'Military Analyst Program' and Gitmo
by Glenn Greenwald
......But what is most extraordinary about all of this is that huge numbers of Americas who were subjected to this propaganda by their own Government still don't know that they were, because the television networks which broadcast it to them refuse to tell them about it, opting instead to suppress the story and stonewall any efforts to find out what happened. As corrupt as the Pentagon was here, our nation's major media outlets were at least just as bad. Their collective Pravda-like suppression now of the entire story -- behavior so blatantly corrupt that even the likes of Howie Kurtz and The Politico are strongly condemning them -- has become the most significant and revealing aspect of the entire scandal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/wa...ss&oref=slogin
May 24, 2008
2 Inquiries Set on Pentagon Publicity Effort
By DAVID BARSTOW
The inspector general’s office at the Defense Department announced on Friday that it would investigate a Pentagon public affairs program that sought to transform retired military officers who work as television and radio analysts into “message force multipliers” who could be counted on to echo Bush administration talking points about Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo and terrorism in general.
The announcement came a day after the House passed an amendment to the annual military authorization bill that would mandate investigations of the program by both the inspector general’s office and Congress’s investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office.
The G.A.O. said it had already begun looking into the program and would give a legal opinion on whether it violated longstanding prohibitions against spending government money to spread propaganda to audiences in the United States.
The Defense Department suspended the program last month, just days after it was the focus of an article in The New York Times. The article described an ambitious Pentagon campaign to cultivate dozens of military analysts as “surrogates” to generate favorable coverage of the administration’s wartime performance. The analysts, many with undisclosed ties to military contractors, were wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior government officials.
The inspector general’s office said its inquiry would specifically look at whether special access to Pentagon leaders “may have given the contractors a competitive advantage.”.....
.... Representative Paul W. Hodes, Democrat of New Hampshire, added: “The American people were spun by Bush administration message multipliers. They were fed administration talking points believing they were getting independent military analysis.”
Representative Duncan Hunter of California, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, objected to the amendment, arguing that retired officers working as military analysts were a “great asset” for the country.
“The idea that somehow Don Rumsfeld got these people in a room and told them what to say, if you believe that you don’t believe in the independence of these general officers,” Mr. Hunter said. “None of them are used to having people tell them what to say.”
And Representative Paul C. Broun, Republican of Georgia, said: “Of course Americans engage in propaganda. It’s a vital part of the mission of the United States to promote democracy and protect our country from harm.”.....
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.....aren't the objections of Duncan Hunter and Paul C. Brown, in synch with your own objections? Hunter and Browne bekieve the news media has a "liberal bias", even as they defend the pro-Pentagon propaganda that the broadcast networks routinely distributed.
Since I firmly believe that Upton Sinclair had both his critiques of the meatpackers and the corporate news media "spot on", and you believe that there is a "liberal" corporate news media in America, is it even possible for us to discuss politics?
Is it possible to believe that the corporate news media has a liberal slant in it's reporting, and still be informed enough to vote for candidates who, if they are elected, will do the least harm, compared to the election and "service" in office, of their opponent?
Last edited by host; 09-01-2008 at 02:40 AM..
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