JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Accountability in news?

You must be kidding.

Rupert Murdoch’s key to success in all his news operations was to understand what an utterly false and sentimental idea that has become and to offer the globs of raw meat that attracts viewers and readers.

Fox News is the perfect example. It contains almost no genuine news. It frequently plays the role of obvious propaganda outlet. It has no accountability. And it laughs at the ideas of scrupulousness and ethics.

Even though News of the World and Fox are the absolute trash pits of the news world, respectable papers like the Globe and Mail are not so far removed from them as your editors would like to think.

You play games with readers all the time, from the selection of pictures used to the titling of stories.

And the editorials on the editorial page have become a disgrace of hypocrisy and half-baked notions.

Your pretensions in political endorsements are laughable, and you should be ashamed of even still carrying on that hack tradition intended to buy you favor from politicians.

That grand old lady of pomposity, The New York Times, has a long record of dishonesty and favortism. On more than one occasion, it has kept CIA plants working in its newsroom, writing deliberately manipulated stuff, and gone after certain people in its pages based on secret tips from that most disreputable of all police agencies, the FBI. On many matters, e.g. Israeli affairs, it makes no pretense of showing fairness in its stories. It also pompously pretends to endorse things only serving its own interests.

The late I.F. Stone, an extraordinary and genuine journalist, warned people again and again that you must read between the lines and that you must compare what other sources say.

Unfortunately, a good part of the population only has the patience, and perhaps the understanding, to absorb headlines and sound bites. Your industry, and it is an industry not a cause, knows that and continues to play on it.

The truth is that most journalists are either heavily prejudiced or bent or not very competent or lazy. Stories are often rewritten press releases. The idea of being “embedded” with the military is utterly dishonest and contemptible.

The ideal of the journalist dedicated to the truth almost does not exist. A few people in my lifetime – like the late I.F. Stone, Semour Hersh, Anthony Summers, Robert Fisk, and a few others – did or do what journalists are supposed to do.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JOHN DOYLE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Fox News is literally an oxymoron.

CNN is almost as bad, often caught with its pants down playing nasty games.

ABC/NBC/CBS are all owned by huge corporations, and they all bend their tone and coverage to the needs of the Pentagon.

Americans – whom polls show get most of their news from television – are unbelievably poorly informed when it comes to world affairs.

It’s a ghastly and dangerous situation for a superpower and/or a democratic country.

CBC is far from perfect in its news, but at least – and this is no small thing – it offers a different point of view, inherently different owing to its financing.

Even if one were to grant a “liberal bias” in CBC – which I do not, that being another conservative copycat line from the Newt Gingrich twenty years ago – so what?

The truth in politics and world affairs is always to be discovered. It is never presented outright by anyone anywhere.

But an interested citizen may garner a good deal of the truth by reading and listening to different sources and interpolating and extrapolating. It is the technique of the late, great independent journalist, I.F. Stone.

I regularly catch errors and biased presentations on CBC, but the situation is no better, likely worse, with private broadcasters. Indeed, the late, unlamented CanWest surely was as low in journalistic ethics and as poor in quality as we’ve ever had.