open Democracy News Analysis - American journalism: back at ground zero, Sidney Blumenthal - Comments

Peter Maffia on "Walter Lippmann and American journalism today"

Peter Maffia — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:51:55 +0000

Blumenthal fails to mentions the independent journalists that exist. While showing the need for noncommercial journalism he does not adress any alternatives. This is sad. Furthermore I have doubts whether the basic theses of the text are really resilient. A journalist can just give his description/interpretion of what happened. He does not have "access to the facts" nor do we. Thats why we have to discuss. If truth exists it can only become present in the discourse. It is the structure of the public which does determine the prejudices one does use for judgment (statistically seen). So there's not only need for a revitalisation of the journalistic culture (this way i do understand the text), but even more need for a change of the structure of the public. As long as journalism is commercial, it will be too dependent from power (and power will be too dependent from journalism) for journalism to be free. @alfredo even if sydney's gonna be president, is he supposed to say "everyone report the truth now" and then some wonder will happen and all truth will come out? I also wonder why the silence about 9/11 in such a text - while it is directly in the middle of the controversy. Journalism can never be free, the media can not be open when such fundamental suspicions as the theory that 9/11 was an inside job or the theory that the planes we saw on tv that day and thousand times after that where video fakes are not discussed. The corporate media is accused of crimes and it will not take part in it's own conviction.

alfredo.bremont on "Walter Lippmann and American journalism today"

alfredo.bremont — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:57:56 +0000

well Sydney as i said before you are set to become president of the Americas. and it is an offer you cannot refuse. moreover beside Noah Chomsky there is no fit men at the moment to take the nation back to its own roots. rebuild it and reshaped fitted to the new century. courage and a firm mind and you will see that you have always being the men that the nation once needed and now more than ever demands.

jk.rinciari on "Walter Lippmann and American journalism today"

jk.rinciari — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 05:31:55 +0000

As usual, Sidney Blumenthal edifes albeit, perhaps a bit too wordy. But, his compass is large and all encompassing. I try not to miss him. His analysis of how journalism thinks it is being objective by simply presenting polar opposite views no matter how loony, is insightful and apparently accurate, and a disaster for learning anything useful. And, just the terms used - Liberal, Conservative masks over the true identity of issues that actualy contain catagories of more human emotional consideration - compassion, reactionary, life enhancing, fear, - the real issues we are always facing. But, they are easy handles for the bull throwers. Sidney Blumenthal is one very bright light in the darkness. The real American popular literature is written in the jingoism of advertising, our native tongue. Thus goes the 5th column. It might be more honest to just show photographs and video with no words whatsoever in our media. But that too would be manipulated.

SamEllison on "Walter Lippmann and American journalism today"

SamEllison — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:10:19 +0000

To answer the commenter; Google searches give one the most popular or clicked upon News list, not the most truthful. The reporting done on cable news of the Duke lacrosse team rape case was a symptom of trying to catch the magic of Fox News's popularity. Europe should be familiar with this type of coverage from Sky News, a sister network to Fox News. As I was reading this piece, the day after the Washington Post published some of former Secy of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's "Snowflake Memos", I was reminded of the story of the Lincoln Group. The Lincoln Group, recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars from Rummy's Pentagon to print propaganda overseas. Also a series of articles by James Bamford starting with "The Man Who Sold the War" http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/8798997/the_man_who_sold_the_war And the chilling final sentence of the link above, "'We lost control of the context," Rendon warned. "That has to be fixed for the next war.'"

jdubow on "Walter Lippmann and American journalism today"

jdubow — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:49:10 +0000

Blumenthal's argument is a well written and researched brief against, who else, George Bush and his administration in particular and conservatives in general. Yet his arguments of bias are more testimonial than analytical. When about 90% of the media staffers making political donations donate to liberals and 95% of college professors do likewise, we don't have a problem with too much conservative influence on the news. The problem is with a media monoculture. To whit, Google News lists a news item and hyperlinks to all other articles available to them, typically hundreds. When I go through them I see what amounts to a single American story, typically Politically Correct liberal and typically making the same points and often the same words. Why do we need so many people saying the same thing. The monoculture has a simplistic world model, namely that the more suffering ones group had under white European colonialism, the more politically correct that group is and the less one is allowed to criticize them. Concurrently, the group at the bottom, white males, is either to be made invisible or criticized at every turn. Unfortunately the groups in the correct class have a record of violence, genocide and intolerance that is worse than the West and that is far from morally correct. Thus when an Arab group commits an atrocity the degree of atrocity is mirrored in the degree and intensity of criticism of George Bush and the US. As I recall the coverage at the beginning of the Iraq war the mainstream media opposed it and encouraged the US to withdraw and virtually sue for peace. Look it up. The liberal media has reached a point where it coopts the future. I recall sitting at a restaurant in Boston and hearing an interview for the Boston Globe where the interviewer was glad the interviewee was liberal because they don't like conservatives there. There are hundreds of examples. A study of the media by either the PEW or other foundation relative to the Israel -Hezbollah war of 2006 concluded that the media was a major influence in the war in turning public opinion against Israel and protecting Hezbollah. Media coverage of Gender and Family issues reads as if it is vetted and controlled out of NOW headquarters. Young males are in a developmental black hole but the media are still in denial and refuse to publish anything that suggests attention to them is warranted. A good friend of mine was a ranking official in the US patent office and told me he secretly recorded his interviews in order to assure himself that he wasn't suffering from Alzheimers since he had no memory of what the reporter presented in the media. The coverage of the Duke Lacrosse team was a symptom of the disease, and to my knowledge nothing has been done to either the perpetrators or to the editors to make sure something like this doesn't happen again. In essence, the media has a ranking of politically good and politically bad groups and uplifts those favored and trashes or ignores the unfavored. This is a spin on the old formula "show me the person and I'll show you the coverage". The paragraph you quote by Lippman, beginning ""Just as the most poisonous form of disorder is the mob incited from high places, the most immoral act the immorality of a government, so the most destructive form of untruth is sophistry and propaganda by those whose profession it is to report the news...... is dispositive here. The media publishes too much counterfactual material, is too uniform and predictable in its coverage and too self-righteous to recognize that the quality of the product has been degraded over the past thirty years. Perhaps we ought to encourage Toyota to open up a newspaper in Washington DC remind us what quality in journalism is all about.

American journalism: back at ground zero, Sidney Blumenthal

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 14:56:03 +0000

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was the most influential American journalist of the 20th century. Born into one of the German-Jewish "our crowd" families of New York City, he began his career as a cub reporter for Lincoln Steffens, the crusading investigative journalist, then became one of the original editors of the New Republic, and was recruited to write speeches for President Woodrow Wilson and help formulate his plan to make the world "safe for democracy", the "fourteen points". In the 1920s, Lippmann became editorial director of the New York World, then a major daily newspaper with a Democratic orientation. When it folded, the New York Herald Tribune offered him a column, which, with the Washington Post, served as his journalistic base for almost fifty years.

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