Stephen Lendman Sums Up the Media
Stephen Lendman Sums Up the Media
How to Succeed in Western Media Without Really Trying
by Stephen Lendman (stephenlendman.org – Home – Stephen Lendman)
Most important is loyalty to monied interests, war-profiteers, and the imperial state – serving as their press agents, abandoning fundamental journalistic principles, learning how to lie well, along with leaving honesty and integrity at home when heading for work.
Julian Assange offered his own recommended strategy for success. It’s simple, he said. Blame Russia for everything.
“You can do it” – without really trying.
“1) Pick random globally newsworthy event.
Russian press will also be reporting it by definition.
2) Write story: Russian state secretly behind globally newsworthy event as proved by their press reporting it.
3) Profit!”
Bashing Russia works, the bandwagon effect when everybody does it, following the same script.
Saying it makes it so. Repeating it ad nauseam works best. Lying is simpler than truth-telling – no evidence needed, no sources required.
Citing the usual unnamed ones works fine. Who’ll check? Lying pays well in America and other Western countries, truth-tellers shunted, contradicting the official narrative not tolerated.
Western major media are deplorable, truth-telling a lost art in their publications and broadcasts. The fourth estate, dominated by corporate giants, feature disinformation, fake news and advocacy instead of what legitimate journalism is supposed to be.
It’s shocking how low major media reporting has sunk. It’s biased, sensationalist, irresponsible rubbish, what Project Censored calls “junk food news.”
Major media are in cahoots with other powerful interests, government and private. Free and open societies are threatened when propagandists pose as journalists, letting fiction substitute for facts, stifling the free flow of content, shutting out dissent, working as paid liars, what famed journalist George Seldes called “prostitutes of the press.”
Imperial wars are called liberating ones, humanitarian intervention and responsibility to protect. Civil liberties are suppressed for our own good.
Beneficial social justice is considered heresy. The marketplace works best, we’re told, so let it. Patriotism means going along with what harms our welfare.
Independent journalism is the only legitimate kind, notably digital democracy, threatened by administration efforts to control Internet content.
Facebook, Twitter and other social media are willing accomplices. So are Google and other search engines, censoring and suppressing content, flagrantly violating the most vital of all constitutional rights – media and speech freedom.
During pre-television days, noted journalist and author AJ Liebling once said “(p)eople everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.”
HL Mencken called US journalism “predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.”
He explained why major media sanitize news, filtering out unwanted content, saying:
“The most dangerous (person) to any government is (anyone) able to think things out for himself (or herself), without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.”
“Almost inevitably (they come) to the conclusion that the government…is dishonest, insane, and intolerable…”
The state of Western media today is too deplorable to fix. Independent sources provide the only reliable news, information and analysis, no others.
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My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
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Stephen Lendman
Stephen Lendman
Stephen Lendman was born in 1934 in Boston, MA. In 1956, he received a BA from Harvard University. Two years of US Army service followed, then an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960. After working seven years as a marketing research analyst, he joined the Lendman Group family business in 1967. He remained there until retiring at year end 1999. Writing on major world and national issues began in summer 2005. In early 2007, radio hosting followed. Lendman now hosts the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network three times weekly. Distinguished guests are featured. Listen live or archived. Major world and national issues are discussed. Lendman is a 2008 Project Censored winner and 2011 Mexican Journalists Club international journalism award recipient.
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