Reply #25: Absolutely correct. The true bias in U.S. corporate journalism... [View All]

[newswolf56]

is "anything for the bottom line" -- which typically means pandering to the lowest common (bourgeois/public) denominator: missing (white blonde) co-eds, ghetto violence (whether imaginary or real), natural disasters, other tales told by idiots, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," the circus component of the modern variant of bread and circuses.

The one exception -- the one circumstance in which there is genuine bias and real censorship -- is of any story that accurately reflects the savage underbelly of capitalism or calls into question any of the capitalist shibboleths. Note for example the methodical suppression of stories about the aftermath of Bhopal, Exxon Valdez or Enron, or the runaway Enron-like corruption in Iraq and New Orleans, both intimately associated with Halliburton and the Republican money machine.

A superb overview of how this came to be is Doug Underwood's thoroughly researched When MBAs Rule the Newsroom (Columbia University Press; New York: 1993). The hardcover version is priced at $70 -- an obvious ploy to keep it out of the hands of the general public -- but used paperback versions are available online for as little as $5.

The one point to which Underwood gives far too little emphasis is the influence of corporate personnel-office ("human resources") polices on the modern newsroom's collective consciousness. In former times (as when I got my start in journalism and until approximately the '80s), editorial personnel were hired directly by the supervising editors for whom they would work: intelligence, skill and talent (demonstrated or potential) were the chief intellectual criteria upon which reporters were chosen; driving curiosity, individualism, a sense of irony and a penchant for iconoclasm -- especially the ability to boldly ask "unthinkable" questions -- were the primary psychological requirements. But the media monopolies changed all that, adopting the hiring policies characteristic of all giant corporations: this means, first, that all job applicants have to be vetted by the personnel office before they are passed on to an editor and, secondly, that the vetting process -- typical of Big Business -- is intended to weed out everyone who possesses even a trace of the psychological independence that was formerly THE identifying trait of the U.S. print journalist. Instead the only acceptable hires are now typical corporate drones: lockstep conformists, malevolently bourgeois, whose greatest expressions of selfhood are not in their reporting ability but in brown-nosing, back-stabbing and ratting out their colleagues. Thus the content of modern corporate journalism and the lynch-mob reporting of modern "journalists." The exceptions -- among them Helen Thomas -- are fewer with each passing season.

As a major-newspaper colleague says while counting -- with the zeal of a short-timer in Vietnam -- the days to retirement: "One of the reasons I went into journalism was because I didn't want to work in an insurance office. But then a monopoly bought the paper. Now because of the kind of people the company hires, it's not only an insurance office, but an insurance office from hell."

(For those who don't know, I am a semi-retired newspaperman, veteran of a reporting and editing career that spans 45 years and includes work on both mainstream and alternative publications.)