Relentless and principled, George Seldes and his wife Helen -- from their kitchen table -- built In Fact to a circulation of 175,000 copies. But the advent of McCarthyism, assisted by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, brought a campaign of harassment and intimidation against subscribers that forced closure of the publication in 1950.
A torch passed to another stubbornly independent journalist, I.F. Stone. While not explicitly engaged in media criticism, I.F. Stone's Weekly, founded in 1953, largely picked up where In Fact left off.
Stone's blunt assessments informed his work. "Every government is run by liars, and nothing they say should be believed," he said. Such skepticism pursued truth -- and the democratic goal of the truly informed consent of the governed. Stone kept busy debunking key deceptions that major media outlets were propagating.
Like so many others, I came to see huge discrepancies between the realities I observed on the ground and the coverage that existed -- or didn't exist -- in mainline corporate news media. My own path led me to become a media critic during the 1980s, after more than a decade of involvement in journalism mixed with activism.
Later, I learned about the passionate work of media criticism by Upton Sinclair, George Seldes and I.F. Stone. I grew to identify with their struggles as writers drawn into fighting the corporate media of their eras.
I was fortunate enough to meet George Seldes. On a warm spring day in 1988, I drove through New England countryside with Martin A. Lee, then editor of the magazine Extra!, published by the media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), which remains today's vibrant successor to In Fact. We were headed to visit Seldes, then 97 years old and living by himself in a house in a small Vermont town.
For six hours, Seldes graciously hosted us while sharing vivid recollections of his journalistic career. He had remarkably sharp memories of firsthand reporting on pivotal world events as distant as the close of the First World War. On a table in one room was a huge pair of scissors atop a pile of clippings; he was still cutting articles out of newspapers. "There are too many to file," he said. "I can hardly keep up with them."
As Martin and I later wrote (in our book "Unreliable Sources"), "Seldes remained an American individualist in the best sense, combining an unpretentious, fiercely independent, intellectual ethic with an unwavering commitment to social justice. For us he was a living inspiration, someone who had supreme confidence in the power of ideas and the capacity of people to see through the hypocrisy of politicians and media pundits. Seldes never stopped believing that the essence of a democratic society is an enlightened, well-informed citizenry."
Such a tenacious belief is what makes media criticism -- and truly independent journalism -- vital to the future of our world.
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