For his book, The Man Who Owns the News, author Michael Wolff interviewed the reporters and editors employed by Murdock. Murdock’s ultra-conservative positions are well known by all. Often, he makes the decision what will and what will not be reported, and what direction the editorials will take, and everyone also knows full well that to dare transgress summons immediate termination. It’s nothing but the most rank, unapologetic, unrepentant, bare-knuckles intimidating coercion.
President Richard Nixon kept an “enemies list.” Most prevalent among those on it were reporters and columnists who reported on and opined over the many lying machinations, misanthropies, bigotries, and just plain moral rot that composed the president and many of those within the administration. Were it not for a vigorous and courageous free press, Watergate would have remained naught but the name of a hotel in Washington.
Over the past eight years the world witnessed what former Nixon counsel John Dean wrote of as a Worse than Watergate administration that reigned freely, the consequence of a cowed press and of a press that had been largely eviscerated of serious investigative inclinations, efforts, and/or abilities.
Very few metropolitan centers in the US are today served by more than one daily. And those are but feint, pretending images of the sort of vigilant guardians of a free people’s democracy that Jefferson and Burke envisioned. The overwhelming majority now rely entirely on AP as their reporting source for news that isn’t completely local. Furthermore, few, if any, have reporters on staff to actually dig in the local dirt, relying instead on corporate and civic announcements, first-responder radio transmissions, and impossible to overlook natural disasters as the grist of their news content.
Make no mistake, the Internet is a fine and valuable resource. I use it heavily, subscribing to a number of newspapers and other sources I check often throughout the day. But I know that every on-line source is like my ribs: nothing absent the spine that supports them. And it’s a paltry few remaining with the resources and the passionate desire to inflict discomfort on the comfortable.
Folks may not care for the editorial positions of the New York Times or the Washington Post, and their reporters may not always be as infallibly perfect in their jobs as you or I, but, by every measure, they remain among the rapidly dwindling last protectors of our freedoms. Maybe it’s a majority, or only a sizable minority, that takes our freedoms for granted, that doesn’t care about “any of that stuff,” or whether nothing remains but the sports section.
Much akin to the old saw, “Don’t want a drink of water ‘til the well’s run dry,” songwriter Joni Mitchell wrote Big Yellow Taxi. Among the lyrics are these: “Don’t it always seem to go, That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone . . .”
If this third one is the charm, and Rupert Murdock has his way and is all we’ll have left, however I‘ll speak for no one but myself, the first two won’t matter at all. You can call this land America, or anything you like, but ‘America’ will be yesterday’s news.
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