Caitlin Johnstone
Mass media narrative managers
have been throwing a fit ever since Senator Bernie Sanders criticized The
Washington Post for providing unfair coverage of him at a New Hampshire
town hall on Monday.
“Anybody here know how much
Amazon paid in taxes last year?” Sanders asked the crowd.
“Nothing!” the crowd answered
back.
“See, and I talk about that
all of the time, and then I wonder why The Washington Post, which is owned
by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn’t write particularly good articles about
me. I don’t know why,” Sanders said.
The reaction has been swift
and furious. Outlets ranging from NPR to CNN to Fox
News have claimed that Sanders’ comments are “Trump-like” and “echoing
Trump”. CNN’s segment on the story insinuated multiple times that
there is no
evidence for Sanders’ claims of biased coverage by
WaPo.
“Sen. Sanders is a member of a
large club of politicians — of every ideology — who complain about their
coverage,” reads
a statement by WaPo Executive Editor Marty Baron. “Contrary to the
conspiracy theory the senator seems to favor, Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to
operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest.”
All of these people are lying.
During the hottest and most contentious point in the 2016 presidential
primary, Fair.org
documented the fact that The Washington Post published no
fewer than sixteen smear pieces about Sanders in the span of sixteen hours.
This sixteen-hour window included Sanders’ debate with Hillary Clinton in the
tightly contested state Michigan, where Sanders went on to score a narrow
but hugely significant upset victory. To say that WaPo has a history
of bias against Sanders is not conspiratorial, Trumpian or lacking in evidence,
it’s an intellectually honest acknowledgement of an undeniable and
well-documented fact.
As of this writing I have not
yet seen a single one of the outlets decrying Sanders’ comments about The
Washington Post make any reference at all to those sixteen WaPo smear
pieces in sixteen hours. This is journalistic malpractice, as is the suggestion
that there is no evidence of bias in WaPo’s reporting about Sanders. While
huffily protesting the insinuation that a plutocrat-owned media outlet might
not give honest coverage to a politician campaigning on the taxation of
plutocrats, these media industrial complex narrative managers are themselves
churning out dishonest coverage. They’re doing the thing that they insist they
don’t do.
Some have gone so far as to
call Sanders’ self-evident and completely undeniable accusation of bias
“dangerous”.
“This seems like a really
dangerous line, continued accusations against the media with no basis in fact
or evidence provided,” said CNN anchor Poppy
Harlow after running a clip of Sanders’ campaign manager criticizing
corporate influence in the media.
CNN anchor says Bernie and his
campaign manager @fshakir calling out
the media’s pro-corporate bias is a “really dangerous line.”
Of course, what is actually
dangerous is placing blind faith in a mass media institution for no reason
other than to prevent that institution’s representatives from getting outraged
and indignant when you don’t.
There is no legitimate reason
to give mass media institutions the benefit of the doubt in any area
whatsoever; their outrage and indignation is based on nothing other than their
own self-appointed position as arbiters of truth and reality. There is no law
that says plutocratic media must be trusted by the public and praised by
politicians, and if there were that law would belong in the toilet. Their whole
entire argument, when you boil it right down, is that nobody should distrust
the mass media because when they do it hurts the mass media’s feelings. This is
not a valid argument to make.
This is especially true
of The Washington Post, which is
wholly owned by a CIA contractor and never discloses this conflict of
interest when reporting on the US intelligence community as per standard
journalistic protocol. This same CIA contractor, who is also the wealthiest
plutocrat in the world, sits
on a Pentagon advisory board and is according
to some experts working to control the underlying infrastructure of
the entire economy. To suggest that a newspaper that is owned by such a figure
has in any way earned the benefit of the doubt is insane. The world’s most
adept plutocrat did not invest in the purchase of The Washington Post because
he expected newspapers to make a profitable resurgence. That did not happen.
All plutocrats, once their
wealth control grows to a certain size, begin buying up narrative control to
ensure the perpetuation of the status quo they’ve built their fortune upon.
They all have public relations firms, many of them fund influential think
tanks, many use corporate lobbying and advertising incentives, some buy up
media shares, and some buy up entire media outlets. Bezos did the latter.
No branch of the US government
could get away with holding the stated position that they are entitled to the
trust of the public and that any distrust is dangerous and unfounded. The
entire system of checks and balances built into the US governmental system are
there solely out of a distrust of unchecked power. Unchecked power of course
exists in America, but no branch of its government could ever get away with
openly claiming that the total trust of the public is their property that they
own. Yet this is exactly what the talking heads of the plutocratic media do
whenever any public figure on the left or the right has the temerity to claim
that they are untrustworthy. They demand more trust than the government
despite their
inseparable entanglements with the same plutocratic class that is deeply entangled with
that same government.
Many journalists - either for
self-serving reasons or due to genuine befuddlement - are completely
misinterpreting Bernie's media critique. The person who explained it most
clearly was Noam Chomsky in this 90-second answer to an equally confused BBC
host. This will clear it up:
Journalist Glenn Greenwald
pushed back against the public freakout of these narrative managers by
tweeting a popular Noam Chomsky video with the caption, “Many
journalists – either for self-serving reasons or due to genuine befuddlement –
are completely misinterpreting Bernie’s media critique. The person who
explained it most clearly was Noam Chomsky in this 90-second answer to an
equally confused BBC host. This will clear it up:”
“It’s kind of shocking to
listen to journalists mangle Bernie’s media critique of corporate ownership as
though it’s some exotic thing he invented today,” Greenwald added. “It’s basic media
criticism going back to Orwell.”
“I’m just interested in this
because I was brought up like a lot of people, probably post-Watergate film and
so on to believe that journalism was a crusading craft and there were a lot of
disputatious, stroppy, difficult people in journalism, and I have to say, I
think I know some of them,” British journalist Andrew Marr is seen saying in
the video in objection to Chomsky’s criticisms of the media.
“Well, I know some of the
best, and best known investigative reporters in the United States, I won’t
mention names, whose attitude towards the media is much more cynical than
mine,” Chomsky replied. “In fact, they regard the media as a sham. And they
know, and they consciously talk about how they try to play it like a violin. If
they see a little opening, they’ll try to squeeze something in that ordinarily
wouldn’t make it through. And it’s perfectly true that the majority – I’m sure
you’re speaking for the majority of journalists who are trained, have it driven
into their heads, that this is a crusading profession, adversarial, we stand up
against power. A very self-serving view. On the other hand, in my opinion, I
hate to make a value judgement but, the better journalists and in fact the ones
who are often regarded as the best journalists have quite a different picture.
And I think a very realistic one.”
“How can you know that I’m
self-censoring? How can you know that journalists are-” Marr objected.
“I’m not saying you’re
self-censoring,” Chomsky replied. “I’m sure you believe everything you’re
saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you
wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
WaPo’s executive editor can
try to pin the label “conspiracy theory” on these observations all he likes,
but there is no reason to believe that it is pure coincidence that the
plutocrat-controlled media display a consistent bias in favor of the status quo
upon which those plutocrats have built their respective empires. This doesn’t
mean that Jeff Bezos is personally on the phone with Washington Postreporters
all day telling them what to write and what not to write, but to suggest that
the man signing everyone’s paychecks from the very highest level has no way of
exerting any influence at all upon the publication’s overall output is just
silly. Again, the man bought The Washington Post for a reason, and it
wasn’t to sell newspapers.
The public should be far more skeptical
of the mass media, not less. Ignore their shrill, baseless objections and
continue exposing them for what they are.
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