President Obama, in his visit to China, held a "town meeting" with
Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the
value of freedom of information, saying that he is a "supporter of
non-censorship" and that open access to information was a "source of
strength."
TV host Lou Dobbs abruptly quit his CNN
program yesterday, bringing a sudden end to a television program most
notable for its remarkably one-sided presentation of immigration issues.
Of all the Big Lies told by the pooh-bahs of talk radio - that our
biracial president hates white people, that global warming is a hoax,
that a public health care plan to compete with private insurers equals
socialism - the most desperate and deluded is this: that the so-called
Fairness Doctrine would squash free speech.
Nonsense.
The Fairness Doctrine would not stop talk radio hosts from
spewing the invective that has made them so fabulously wealthy. All it
would do is subject their invective to a real-time reality check.
Suppose President Obama and his aides had decided to take on the worst offender among the big insurance companies this fall.
Suppose the White House had highlighted the failure of the company to
provide quality care, the abuses in which it has engaged and the
behind-the-scenes campaigning by a self-interested corporation to
influence the health-care debate in a manner that helps it while
harming Americans.
The mainstream media has failed miserably in its coverage of
the healthcare reform discussion in this nation. There have been ample reports
about that. And it hasn't been until the presence of cameras and
reporters could stir the pot of controversy in a ratings-readership-web traffic
sort of way with minimal actual journalism work that most of the major media
outlets have tried even minimally to provide comprehensive coverage from which
Americans could learn facts about whatever reform plan was planned.
How often are employees allowed to work on projects that might put some
of the people they work for out of business? That's the conflict of
interest that journalists reporting on the healthcare reform debate are
often put in by the boards of media corporations they work for, which
frequently include representatives of the insurance industry.
There are days when one's reminded why one works in independent media. August 1st was one of those days, when the New York Times ran a front page media story that might as well have been headlined: GE and Fox Hush Hosts For Profits.
Few
of us still labor under the delusion that what we are told is the 'news' is necessarily an unbiased reporting of
fact. Depending on your political
leaning, you probably perceive it as either liberal propaganda or rightwing
spew.
The ability of the corporate state to
pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured
goods to the masses is gone. The pernicious idea that democracy lies in
the choice between competing brands and the freedom to accumulate vast
sums of personal wealth at the expense of others has collapsed. The
conflation of freedom with the free market has been exposed as a sham.
The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the
middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out and people
get a taste of Bill Clinton's draconian welfare reform.
