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Today's Top News
07.02.09 - 11:22 AM
All The News That's Fit To Print, at 25,000 Bucks A Pop
For those of us who have long labored for or believed in a free press, a truly appalling CD news
piece about the Washington Post's new "salons" offering health care and
other lobbyists the chance of access via "a collegial evening" with
Obama officials, Congresspeople, business leaders and editors, "those
powerful few" who make policy – all for a mere $25,000 a shot. I know newspapers are hurting, but do they have to abandon all ethical standards to survive, and if so, do we want them to?
"A people that wants to be free must arm itself with a free press" – investigative journalist George Seldes.
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3 Comments so far
Show AllBeginning with the "sit ins" of the civil rights struggle in 1961 I concluded that the slogan ought to be "all the news that's print to fit" the NYT's prejudice. The notion that the NYT is "free" is laughable.
Country club dues were always intended to weed out the likes of you and me.
To describe this "service" as a desperate measure to obtain new sources of revenue is not correct.
The corporate media long abdicated their vital role in a democracy for acquiring their key function in the superstructure of economic and political power. They are the third member of the triumvirate of consolidated power (corporate power and corporate-controlled government being the other two) that characterizes our post-democracy, post-enlightenment world. Their vital role is to control the flow of information to the masses so that mass popular resistance becomes impossible.
We are long, long overdue for organizing mass militant CD actions and occupations of the offices of the corporate media.