I'm afraid, however, that that battle is being lost today. The mere fact that Arkin's public resignation from NBC is so dramatic shows how rare it is for working journalists to take a stand today. Perhaps it is because jobs in the news media are so much harder to come by in an era of mass layoffs, downsizing and the folding of so many news organizations. Back in the late '60s it wasn't exactly easy to get a start in journalism (it took me a year to land a reporting job after graduating from college), but it was at least possible, and for those who had experience, leaving one job for another was not that difficult. In my own case, I didn't have to be particularly heroic in taking a stand when my article was blocked at the Daily News. I was able to move quickly from that job to one as an investigative reporter/producer at KCET-TV's "28-Tonight" investigative news program, actually earning a slightly higher salary into the bargain.
That would be harder to do these days.
Still, the cost of media concentration and corporate consolidation has been dear when it comes to truth and access to reliable and critical information about what is going on in the country and the world. The level of ignorance among the American public about critical issues like the metastasizing police state apparatus, about US imperial policy around the globe, about the vast political power of the military-industrial complex, about the true scale of the threat posed by climate change, and even about such things as the real scale of entrenched poverty in America, is incredible. It is why there is such public support for more spending on law enforcement, for cutting of welfare programs like Food Stamps and Medicaid, for attacks on immigration, and for ending laws limiting carbon emissions by vehicles, power plants and factories.
It's not that there aren't sources of accurate information about all these things and more in the alternative media sphere -- sites like Counterpunch, Consortium News, Truthdig, Oped News or ThisCantBeHappening.net -- but because people have to actively search out those sources of information, while the corporate media are readily available and in-your-face on newspaper front pages and on TV, they can't really compete. This is true even with the help of social media, which tend only to reinforce the views of those who are already convinced, effectively amplifying the divide between the informed and the misinformed.
In my own work, I've seen how this works most recently with the cover story I just did for the Nation magazine. Exposing how the Pentagon has, for decades, been committing an epic fraud in its "accounting for its vast expenditures on war and weapons, the article: "Exclusive: The Pentagon's Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed" elicited tremendous response in the alternative media, with literally dozens of local and national radio news programs asking for interviews, and many online news sites running links to the full story on the Nation's website, not one single corporate media news department reported on the story or asked to schedule an interview. Not one, although this story explained that the Pentagon has been making up its budget numbers in submissions to Congressional oversight committees, creating over $21 trillion in fake numbers over the course of just 17 years.
The only mainstream news organization to even mention the story was the Washington Post, and then it was only to attack newly elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for tweeting, slightly inaccurately, that the Nation article showed there was enough "secret funds" available at the Pentagon to finance two-thirds of the cost of a Medicare-for-All program for ten years. Ironically, the Post "fact check" column said the Nation article was "accurate," but that Representative-elect Ocasio has "gotten it wrong."
One would think that if the Nation article "had it right," someone at the Post would have then reported on the story itself, but that was not of interest to the Bezos rag. Only trashing a new progressive, self-described socialist member of Congress was on the agenda.
And that's basically where things are now with our national news media. Some news organizations like MSNBC, CNN, the NY Times and the Washington Post may think that attacking the Trump administration and its policies counts as being bold and journalistically upstanding. But standing firmly for the Establishment, especially when it comes to US imperial policies and US militarism, and keeping any serious critique of what we, back in the '60s, disparagingly and accurately referred to as "the System," safely beyond of the realm of broad and accepted public discourse, as they are simultaneously doing, gives the lie to that mischaracterization of the supposed "Fourth Estate" role they are playing.
DAVE LINDORFF, a veteran award-winning journalist for nearly half a century, is a member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, JESS GUH, GARY LINDORFF, ALFREDO LOPEZ, LINN WASHINGTON, JR., and the late CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
(Article changed on January 5, 2019 at 18:48)
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