It is the job of the Fourth Estate to act as a check and a restraint on the others, to illumine the dark corners of Ministries, to debunk the bureaucrat, to throw often unwelcome light on the measures and motives of our rulers. ‘News’, as Hearst once remarked, ‘is something which somebody wants suppressed: all the rest is advertising’. That job is an essential one and it is bound to be unpopular; indeed, in a democracy, it may be argued that the more unpopular the newspapers are with the politicians the better they are performing their most vital task.
– Brian R. Roberts from a October 29, 1955 article in the London periodical “Time & Tide”
I’ve used the above quote before, and it is one that many others have paraphrased in various ways over the past century. The key point is that news is supposed to be delivered by people who do not have direct financial conflicts of interests that will cause their news or opinions to be biased based on receiving a fat paycheck from an outside entity. If such conflicts exist, they should at the very least be disclosed. It’s hilarious that so many pundits call Glenn Greenwald an “activist” and not a “journalist,” when it is clear he is delivering information based on a genuine passion for civil liberties. Many of these same people that accuse Glenn of “activism” are paid shills for public relations (PR) firms that represent large corporate clients and special interests. Even worse, it is almost never admitted on air. I’d much rather a person report the news biased with a genuine passion for a cause than based on a bias that revolves around his or her bank account size.
I’ve been waiting for someone to put together a more comprehensive article on this topic, because while many people recognize that television news is nothing more than tabloid garbage or statist/corporate propaganda, most people don’t understand the inner workings of it all. One of the primary reasons television news is so bad is because the so-called “experts” or pundits are actually quite often highly paid spokespeople for special interests, something which is disgracefully almost never disclosed by the anchors.
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The name Ray McGovern should be familiar to longtime readers of Liberty Blitzkrieg. The former C.I.A. analyst has been a vocal critic of the oligarch cesspool of fraud and deception that these United States has decayed into. I highlighted some of his criticisms a year ago in the post, Ray McGovern: “Obama is Afraid of the C.I.A.”, in which he memorably stated: