Journalists on the side of power and privilege betray the fourth estate
Jim Rutenberg in today’s The New York Times International Edition seems to believe that journalism has been doing a good job in difficult conditions. In talking about the decimation of newsrooms across the country in the light of the post-factual election underway in the US, he writes:
…it means another rapid depletion in the nation’s ranks of traditionally trained journalists whose main mission is to root our corruption, hold the powerful accountable and sort fact from fiction for voters.
Excuse me? This sounds like a description of a journalistic ideal that has not really been evident — except in increasingly infrequent moments — since the time of Reagan and Thatcher. Rather than accepting that journalists in both the US and the UK have reneged on their duty to fulfil the mission Rutenberg defines, he identifies to ‘fake news’ as the problem. And this fake news is, of course, to be found online.
Alternative news sites tend to do the job relinquished by mainstream journalists and do so with a fraction of the resources available to the traditional press. This fact is ignored. Rutenberg appears to be unable to make a distinction between social media trolls and the likes of The Real News, Truthdig, and The Intercept.
Looking at the corporate media in the UK, it is hard to see how online fake news is any less rooted in reality than much of the news propagated by the key right wing titles such as The Daily Mail, The Sun, and The Daily Express, for instance.
The truth is, that in the battle of truth and justice against privilege and power, our media has sided with the latter. We no longer have a functioning fourth estate. Chris Hedges invokes the spirit of Julien Benda in a recent speech:
[He] reminds us that we can serve two sets of principles. Privilege and power or justice and truth. The more we make compromises with those who serve privilege and power the more we diminish the capacity for justice and truth. Our strength comes from our steadfastness to justice and truth, a steadfastness that accepts that the corporate forces arrayed against us may crush us, but that the more we make compromises with those whose ends are privilege and power the more we diminish our capacity to effect change.
Instead of truth and justice, instead of speaking truth to power, we have a fourth estate that merely disseminates corporate press releases and celebrity gossip. Much of the propaganda work is done through omission rather than commission, too. News that would provide ammunition for voters to use against their corporate masters goes unreported. Instead, scapegoats and fear are the front page stories. The rest is fluff.
Newspapers and mainstream news channels are no longer on the side of their readers. They pretend to be outraged on their behalf but serve only one master: the corporate state. We can no longer look to the traditional fourth estate for any help in saving ourselves, our children, and our planet.
Our best journalists and thinkers no longer write within mainstream media. This is why Jonathan Cook, John Pilger, and Glenn Greenwald now exist outside the pages of the traditional media outlets. Noam Chomsky is rarely allowed space in press or TV. It’s why Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange are reviled in the press. All tend to be branded as eccentric at best, unpatriotic, treasonous, and friends of terror at worst. As Hedges goes on to say:
Our only chance to overthrow corporate power comes from those who will not surrender to it, who will hold fast to the causes of the oppressed no matter what the price, who are willing to be dismissed and reviled by a bankrupt liberal establishment, who have found within themselves the courage to say no, to refuse to cooperate.
That’s as good a place as any to leave it.
