Friends who lived in the former USSR tell us how learned to read between the lines of Pravda, the government newspaper. They certainly didn’t expect to get an honest account of important news from the tightly controlled articles. In the last few days, Drudge has reported Homeland Security considering taking charge of the upcoming election and another site reported a CA postal worker stashing close to 50,000 pieces of mail in her apartment. Why can’t we find info on these stories in the L.A. Times or other establishment papers? Are the stories bogus or is most of the media not even pretending to journalistic standards anymore?
2 thoughts on “All the news?”
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Ideally, freedom of the press was intended to be a good thing with the assumption that journalistic discipline would be exercised by those deemed to be ‘professional’, but, apparently, decadence crept in somewhere, and so the indulgence in individual pleasures rather than valid public interest. In the setting of official objection to Dallas’ team display of love toward its law enforcement families while upholding the right to indulgence in a display of contempt toward San Francisco’s ‘pigs’, and also having read through commentary of the recent kerfuffle between a Chinese official and White House press, I note an air of superiority citing this this particular freedom. However, do we really have anything to be proud of anymore? It would only follow that this is how it all balances out on its own once we become slack in ensuring that we are all balanced; one extreme counters the other. And here we are again, just muck in the middle.
Freedom of the press was a pillar of America and ‘yellow journalism’ certainly existed in previous times. But, just as newspapers are no longer the only or even primary way that people get the news now, the masquerading of opinion as news and the suppression of points of view is more rampant than ever.