The Glue That Holds Chaos Together

This is an interesting piece, as I don't know if I agree or disagree with your point. Journalism should be impartial, in theory, but with today's technology it is pointless to give an ammoral, impartial, report, as the audience can merely view/hear the scene in HD, from a safe distance, and judge for themselves.

Having stated that, I would rather receive an impartial, ammoral, reporting to which I can decide the morality of the situation, rather than have a reporter try to sway me to one side of any given issue.

Of course, if I am watching an opinion piece, I know what to expect, and the morals that apply.

This brings me around to the issue of honesty in reporting. Many people are unaware that it is illegal to lie over the airwaves while reporting the news. It is also illegal to lie to the American public if the lie is coming from an elected official, as this is propaganda. The FCC rules are clear on this, yet it is rarely, if ever, inforced.

To report on a subject without moral shading, may in itself be disingenuous, as the reporter probably has a moral take on the piece to begin with.

We have many paid whores who break the rules and are not sufficiently punished. William Kristol, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and Glen Beck, have all violated the FCC laws concerning "misrepresenting the truth" and propaganda, and the punishment requires a substancial fine and (in the case of propaganda) jail time, yet these "news" talk show hosts are still being paid by people who are conspiring to bring down our nation.

The defense of stating that the talk shows are merely "entertainment" programs, or opinion editorials, does not excuse violaters who "misrepresent the truth", if it is touted as fact. Since the crimes often involve government propaganda (which is illegal), these talk show hosts can be tried for war crimes right along side Cheney and Rove.

If only we had enough moral prosecuters and judges to keep our reporting moral.

Thanks!

No, Mr. Fisk, "we" certainly don't write like that anymore, except perhaps in the breathless enthusiasm of some of the reporters initially "imbedded" with U.S. forces at the start of the Iraq war. Because the pretense to "impartiality" is indeed only that, a pretense, and even when a neutral tone is used, the "facts" are always presented in such a way that a keen-eyed reader can always tell what the writer wants him/her to think. It is the great contribution of American hypocrisy to the journalistic profession and the specialty of such organs as the New York Times, this bogus claim to "impartiality," which has given us such monuments to disingenuousness as the continual handwringing and fingerwagging at "the violence on both sides" during the Reagan-sponsored mini-genocide of Central American peasants in the 1980s, the reporting of acts of Iraqi resistance as "terrorism," and the presentation of the occasional Israeli death at the hands of Palestinians as if it were the equivalent of dozens, indeed hundreds of Palestinian deaths at the hands of Israelis. It is the reason why so many people like myself and the readers of CD no longer buy mainstream newspapers except to see what the two-faced hypocrites are up to. It is also the reason such talented journalists as Chris Hedges and Robert Parry have turned their backs on famously overpaid jobs as the Janus-faced spokespersons of corporate and instituted power.

"'Turn back! Retreat!' shouted the men from the front, 'we're whipped, we're whipped!' They cursed and tugged at their horses' heads and struggled with frenzy to get past." This is William Howard Russell covering the Union rout at Bull Run for The Times.

Sounds more like Iraq and Afghanistan.

A bigger and better story, but one we will never hear:

U.S. Citizens Prefer Morality Over Impartiality.

But I could be wrong !

When the mainstream media is owned by the MIC, journalists are discouraged from letting us see the atrocities of war. As evidenced by the gargantuan Pentagon budget and has always been, war is the oligarchy's preferred cash cow. They're not about to let journalists kill it.

The description of Göring by "the sharp tongue of Rebecca West for The New Yorker at the Nuremberg trials" reminded me of a WWII-era song.

When I was very young - many years ago - my WWII-veteran uncle used to sing a song to me that always made me laugh:

"Hitler, has only one big ball,
Göring, has two but they were small,
Himmler, has something similar,
But poor old Goebbels, has no balls, at all."

There are several versions of "Hitler has only got one ball" - sung to the tune of The Colonel Bogey March.

It is thought that it was first written in August 1939 as propaganda against the Nazis. More recently, Bette Midler even sang it.

"(But) an extraordinary account from a German army medic has finally confirmed what the world long suspected: Hitler only had one testicle.

War veteran Johan Jambor made the revelation to a priest in the 1960s, who wrote it down.

The priest's document has now come to light - 23 years after Jambor's death.

The war tyrant's medical condition has been mocked for years in a British song."

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1945960.ece

The mainstream media still talks of atrocities... "their" atrocities. By which I mean that I doubt that the U.S. media has ever reported on how terrible America's crimes were. Nor do I think that this bogus idea of "objectivity" is such a new idea. Find examples in the past history of the mainstream media where the U.S. military acts were found to be as brutal as the so called "enemy's" and then we can discuss the difference between the media in the past and today.

Too many liberals look back to the past, as if some kind of glorious era has passed us by and we must return to it. And I'm not referring to the movements of the 60's, which may be worth looking back on, I'm referring to the claim that "once upon a time," the media was good, or "once upon a time," corporations didn't have so much power. It's nonsense.

"Impartiality" is not just splitting the difference between good and evil.

I can remember doing without as a child so that we could provide 'Bundles for Britain' and listening to the war news with the RCA's pilot light covered during blackouts. That was then but these days it's only the oligarch's propaganda that's befouling the either. I feel betrayed by the BBC.

You cannot have a corrupted government without having a corrupted press. We have had both, and still have both.

The fact that Obama is less corrupted than Bush is not such a great accomplishment. It is a step in the right direction, but if it isn't followed by another step it will not be enough to fix the problems of society, most of which are caused by greed and unscrupulous corporations.

Just like newspapers should act out of morality (or ethics), so should corporations, elected officials, scientists, and people in general. The problem is when our leaders are acting in an unethical manner, there are very few ways to make them responsible for their actions. Afterall, impeachment was off the table.

www.NotOneMore.US

"Reporting" that avoids the true horros of war, whether through government censorship, or, worse, self-censorship, is not even worthy of being called reporting. The fact of its censoring the "unpleasantness" makes it partial to those who seek to not only continue exploiting the age-old myths of 'patriotic war' but to also control the thoughts and feelings of the populace.

There is no conflict between impartiality and true morality, of course. True morality is composed of truth plus compassion. If you try your very best to report the truth, and its impact on human beings (compassion) you will be impartial in the best and most accurate sense of the word.

Looking at the way the Gaza genocide was reported (or not reported) in the MSM, one doesn't need to bother with questions about impartiality.

As soon as journalists become part of the military, then impartiality is gone and journalists become just another arm of the Government Propaganda Machine.

What has gone from journalism is morality, that and honesty. Every journalist, well most, sell themselves to the highest bidder, to despicable people like Murdoch.

Journalists have become whores who serve the vested interests!

Where can truth be found? Check:

www.dangerouscreation.com

The idea of impartiality existing in reporting applies only to facts. Facts are circumstances, true only as phenomena, as moments in the flow of experience. There is no such thing as impartiality. There is reflection of a con-sensus of a group and that sense in turn reflects the degree to which the environment is one of a common goal or a common process.

Perhaps we are riding an oscillating sine wave of confusion between poles that are at one end a questioning of the pride of 'goal', which has been fostered with so many lies that it has caused insecurity. Insecurity is the 'demonized' because people are waking up to the extent to which the bogey of demonization has been perpetrated for so long. On the other hand, the dignity of process. Process requires the relaxed but attentive engagement with the ambiguous theater-of-the-absurd goal oriented environment. We are divided by fears, anxieties and uncertainties that are, 'in fact', íllusions of a perpetually deferred goal. Political power is in the hands of those who define process.

The sense of freefall might be said to be a theater of ideas/illusions coming home to die. We have resources but it seems that our challenge is to not hoard; neither rights here nor anywhere on the planet. That too is our challenge. Solidarity - not with a set of political dogmas but what it means to be a human being as part of a cosmos.

I don't know when the BBC started to lose it but the last nail in the coffin for me was when they were embedded during the Iraq invasion.

I knew more about what was happening than they did because my information came from diverse sources that were not cocooned like theirs. They had access to the same information as I did but were blinkered. At that point I knew they were finished.

The myth of impartiality -- or 'objectivity' -- does a lot of work, especially for American reporters. It provides a thin excuse allowing them to ignore whole segments of the domestic political discussion (particularly the left -- the real left, not what is called left in popular discourse).

In the case of Israeli atrocities, the commission of atrocities by Hamas -- vastly fewer in number and degree -- nevertheless allows American and British media to pretend that the 'two sides' are equally at fault. To maintain this myth, large parts of the history of Israel is almost entirely excised from popular discussion. The crimes -- terrorism -- of Irgun, the Stern Gang and others in the founding of Israel are largely ignored. Events like the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty are _entirely_ ignored, or when inconveniently unavoidable assigned to "impartial analysts" like Michael Oren (NPR actually did just this on the 40th anniversary of the attack on the Liberty).

The role of Israel in horrors like Sabra and Shatila are papered over. The direct role of the likes of Ariel Sharon in Sabra and Shatila, or the strictly direct hands-on role in atrocities like Qibya, are totally ignored.

To add to Mr. Fisk's examples: Remember Walter Cronkite's expression on hearing that JFK had died. And recall the near-universal response in American media the morning of the 9/11 attacks. If an American journalist had _not_ expressed moral outrage on that day, he or she would have been out of a job. (Remember what happened to Bill Maher not long after.) That American or British journalists can view Israeli atrocities with so little emotion is an indication that most have carefully distanced themselves, physically and emotionally. It is no surprise that most American "reporters" spend little time in the West Bank and even less time in Gaza. They make their homes in Israel, have families their (in the case of the New York Times's Isabel Kershner or Ethan Bronner) and come to identify with a majority racist Israeli populace.

The he said/she said approach allows the BBC or the New York Times or NPR to assert truthfully that they haven't _strictly_ ignored such and such. So they have _a_ moral defense. But just one of many.

The most telling detail is that the same news organizations would never dream of covering Bosnia or Darfur in the way that the cover those events where they have a vested interest (Israel, Central America in the 80s, East Timor, etc.) Medialens did an excellent two-part analysis of British coverage of Bosnia versus coverage of Palestine.

This pattern of distortion, misrepresentation and lying by omission has been _exhaustively_ researched by people like Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Robert Fisk, Edward Herman, Anatole Lieven, Robert McChesney, and many many others. The near-absence of their work from, or the ridiculing of it, in the Times or the BBC or NPR or even The Guardian is evidence of the power of a complete, closed, and coherent delusion.

Stan D. Garde still writes like that:

"Out back is where we brutalize the people. Actually, out back is where we used to brutalize the people but times being what they are we brutalize them all around the corporate lands and gardens now. Stan D. Garde is my name. Let the brutality games begin! For their own good. Brutality is what keeps people in line. Too bad we don’t set aside more often a special time and place for good old fashioned smashing. I miss it. The constant sort of torture we indulge in nowadays seems to me an inferior replacement. Well, nevermind. Let us not lament for the past but celebrate the present and future. Let us begin here, in the Vassals Handbook. The Incorporated Estates of Earth (IEE) commissioned me to write it."

http://apragmaticpolicy.wordpress.com/the-vassals-handbook/

There are still writers who understand the obscenity and immorality of war and other violence, but unlike their predecessors cited by Fisk, they don't have publishers or editors who will tolerate their writing. Their replacements have been bought off by the life-style of the rich and famous.

The first job of any journalist should be to challenge the assertions and positions of those in authority and the second job should be to speak the truth to that power and to the common man and woman in the street as well.

Poet

But, gee whiz...we have Tom Friedman and Bill Kristol.