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Aug
17 · 6 min read
After days of ridiculous, hysterical garment rending by mass media
talking heads in response to Senator Bernie Sanders’ utterly undeniable assertion that The Washington
Post has displayed unfair bias against his campaign, people with extensive
experience in the mainstream press who are fed up with the lies are beginning
to push back. Hard.
Former MSNBC producer Jeff
Cohen has published an article in Salon titled “Memo to
mainstream journalists: Can the phony outrage; Bernie is right about bias”.
Cohen details his experience with the way corporate media outlets keep a
uniform pro-establishment narrative running throughout all their coverage without
their staff having to be directly told to to do this by their supervisors
(though sometimes that happens, too). He writes as follows:
“It happens because of
groupthink. It happens because top editors and producers know — without being
told — which issues and sources are off limits. No orders need be given, for
example, for rank-and-file journalists to understand that the business of the
corporate boss or top advertisers is off-limits, short of criminal indictments.
“No memo is needed to achieve
the narrowness of perspective — selecting all the usual experts from all
the usual think tanks to say all the usual things.
Think Tom Friedman. Or Barry McCaffrey. Or Neera Tanden. Or any of the elite club members who’ve been
proven to be absurdly wrong time and again about national or global affairs.”
Cohen’s exposé follows the phenomenal segment recently aired on The Hill’s
show Rising, in which former MSNBC star Krystal Ball and her co-host
Saagar Enjati both detailed their experience with the way access journalism,
financial incentives, prestige incentives and peer pressure were used to push
them each toward protecting establishment narratives in their respective
mainstream media careers. Ball said at one point she was literally called into
the office and forbidden from doing any critical Hillary Clinton coverage
without prior approval in the lead-up to the 2016 election, saying that in
mainstream journalism jobs “you are aware of what you’re going to be rewarded
for and what you’re going to be punished for, or not rewarded for.”
“It’s not necessarily that
somebody tells you how to do your coverage, it’s that if you were to do your
coverage that way, you would not be hired at that institution,” Enjati said.
“So it’s like if you do not already fit within this framework, then the system
is designed to not give you a voice. And if you necessarily did do that, all of
the incentive structures around your pay, around your promotion, around your
colleagues that are slapping you on the back, that would all disappear. So it’s
a system of reinforcement, which makes it so that you wouldn’t go down that path
in the first place.”
Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi
has also jumped in to push back against the absurd denials of bias from the
establishment media, publishing a new article titled “The Campaign Press:
Members of the 10 Percent, Reporting for the One Percent — Media companies run
by the country’s richest people can’t help but project the mindset of their
owners.” Taibbi, an award-winning journalist with lots
of experience in the news media industry, writes that
pro-establishment narratives are advanced in mainstream press not because some
explicit order is handed down by a media-owning oligarch, but because “We all
know what takes will and will not earn attaboys in newsrooms.”
Taibbi writes the following:
“The news media is now loathed
in the same way banks, tobacco companies, and health insurance companies are,
and it refuses to understand this. Mistakes like WMDs are a problem, but the
media’s biggest issue is exactly its bubble-ness, and clubby inability to
respond to criticism in any way except to denounce it as misinformation and
error. Equating all criticism of media with Trumpism is pouring gasoline on the
fire.
“The public is not stupid. It
sees that companies like CNN and NBC are billion-dollar properties, pushing
shows anchored by big-city millionaires. A Vanderbilt like Anderson Cooper or a
half-wit legacy pledge like Chris Cuomo shoveling coal for Comcast, Amazon,
AT&T, or Rupert Murdoch is the standard setup.”
Taibbi is correct. Trust in
the mass media continues to plummet, and these stupid, nonsensical hissy
fits they throw whenever criticized are only making it worse.
What cracks me up most about
all this is that the faux outrage over Sanders’ criticisms of The
Washington Post was completely unnecessary for everyone involved. They
could have just ignored it and let the news churn bury it, but they’re so
insulated in their little echo chambers that they seriously believed they could
get the public rallying to their defense on this. The general consensus was
something like “Ah ha! Bernie did that media-criticizing thing that we all
agreed nobody’s allowed to do anymore! We’ve got him this time, boys!”
And all they accomplished in doing
this was giving honest journalists an opportunity to inform the public about
the insider tricks of their trade. You may be absolutely certain that the
information that has been given to the public by Cohen, Ball, Enjati and Taibbi
will remain in high circulation throughout the Sanders campaign in response to
the increasingly shrill torrent of establishment smears, breaking the spell of
mainstream media trust for all who view it.
All these damning insider
criticisms of the mainstream American press are coming out at the same
time a new Rasmussen poll finds that less than one third of
the US population believes the story they’re being told by the corporate media
about the highly suspicious death of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Despite the mass media’s mad push to tar anyone questioning
the official narrative about Epstein as a loony “conspiracy theorist”, only 29
percent of those surveyed reported that they believed Epstein had committed
suicide as they’ve been told, while 42 percent believe he was murdered. Never
in my life have I seen such a widespread and instantaneous rejection of an
establishment-promulgated narrative in the United States.
This is hugely
significant. The entire imperial oppression machine is held together with
aggressive plutocratic propaganda; the ability of the ruling class to
manipulate the way people think, act and vote is the only thing stopping the
public from using the power of their numbers to force real changes and create a
new system that is not built upon endless war, ecocide and exploitation. The
mass media propaganda engine is now at its weakest and most vulnerable point
ever, and the narrative managers’ attempts to regain control are only exposing
them more severely.
Power is the ability to
control what happens. Absolute power is the ability to control what
people think about what happens. Our rulers are rapidly losing this
absolute power.
People are waking up.
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