Here are those writers that regularly inform readers about important events occurring in the Middle East and Central Asia that you won't find in your newspaper: John Pilger an Australian born independent journalist and documentary maker, Eric Margolis, an independent writer, formerly with the Toronto Sun, Pepe Escobar of the Asian Times, and Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for the U.K. Independent; they exemplify journalism at its best.
The national media and its collection of pseudo journalists have largely become facilitators of war. When G.W. Bush was fabricating his reasons for attacking Iraq, these controlled pundits were busy beating the drums of war to generate public support. Never mind that there was plenty of evidence that indicated that there were no weapons of destruction in Iraq; the media ignored all the facts and shamelessly did the bidding of Bush and his cadre of war hawks. And this media continues to do the same thing with regard to the illogical, irrational wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, plus the latest target, Libya.
Why is it that I find these foreign-based writers and others like them to be so much more factual and objective in their reporting of events, specifically military conflicts? It is simply because they are either independent writers or they work for news organizations that are still dedicated to the principles of truth in reporting. They do not have to live in constant fear of losing their jobs as those in the American media do.
So as America continues to sink deeper into the quagmires of war don't expect the mainstream journalists of this nation to report events factually and truthfully or to analyze and debate the wisdom of continuing the agenda of war. They are not going to do it, it is not in their blood, and they will simply not jeopardize their livelihoods to become modern-day patriots.
To be fair I need to identify the one element in journalism that is still reporting the facts and the truth to the American people, be it about the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the fraudulent banking system or the corruption in Washington D.C. These are the many respected authors of books who are able to do this because of their independence and the fact that there are still publishers who stand by free, independent thinking. The only problem is that these many great books do not have the circulation to make a major impact on conditions in America.
What we badly need is a revolutionary new form of journalism that is free of the constraints that currently plague this profession. The good news is that it's already here in the beginning stages; it's the massive power of the internet and it's being aided and abetted by the exploding growth of the social networking services Twitter and Facebook that are connecting many millions of people around the entire world. This combination of the internet and social networking has a tremendous potential for restoring the power and the credibility of the journalism profession.
As a part of this revolution we are already witnessing a massive drop off of newspaper circulation as more and more people turn to the internet for their news. Radio and television are largely under the control of the right wing conservative movement and their audiences are heavily skewed toward that ideology. It is entirely conceivable that, in the future, this new form of journalism could completely overwhelm the newspapers and the radio and TV in the reporting of news, and render them obsolete.
However, a great danger exists in the evolution of such a powerful new form of journalism and that is the massive influence of the corporate power brokers who are already trying to establish the means to control and censor the internet. They cannot and must not be allowed to gain the same suffocating grip on the communicative capabilities of the internet that they have so successfully done to the existing national media.
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