John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MANUEL ROIG-FRANZIA AND PAUL FARHI IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“Breitbart News Network, accused of being a mouthpiece for xenophobes, racists and misogynists – and thrown into the spotlight this week by the resignation of its poster boy Milo Yiannopoulos for remarks on paedophilia – is so right wing it makes Fox News look like the BBC. Now that its former boss Steve Bannon is Trump’s chief strategist, nothing stands between its extremist stance and US presidential policy.”

There is no such thing as an unbiased press, always and everywhere.

Whoever pays for a press organization plus whoever feeds it information – those are the people whose interests are served by the organization.

There are no exceptions.

If you read only The Independent or only The New York Times or only Pravda, you will, to a certainty, be misinformed on certain important matters.

Saying anything else is just pure fantasy.

So, in a sense, the critics of new press organizations like Breitbart are correct – it is biased – but they are also wrong because everything else you can possibly read is also biased.

The critics are telling a partial truth, a partial truth being by its very nature not the truth at all.

That is the fundamental reason why the whole “fake news” controversy is itself fake. It’s just a new slogan from one of several biased sources attacking others.

You know the old warning about how nothing is actually free, no matter what the advertising claims say otherwise?

Well, it is exactly the same with accurate information. No one is offering it to you free, or even at the very modest price of a daily newspaper. Just think of the great cost of higher education or superb skills training of any kind.

Information, accurate information, is costly, and not always being measured in currency. It is often measured in the hard effort needed to obtain it.

The only way a conscientious individual can try to be informed, on either politically sensitive or international policy matters, is to read, or listen to, a significant variety of sources.

You must then interpolate, taking into account what each of them is trying hide or feature, and judge roughly where truth is.

It is much what a juror must do in a criminal trial, listening to two sides make arguments in opposite directions. The juror judges everything from the tone of voice to the facial expressions to determine who may be telling truth.

Lawyers know, too, and quite famously, that eyewitnesses are often highly undependable, peoples’ perceptions and mental abilities to process them varying greatly, to say nothing of vast differences in the quality of memories. Yet jurors still must make a determination in a trial based at least in part on what they say.

As a citizen, you are in a sense a juror in a trial, the trial of the veracity of your own press and your own government.

We all understand that government does many things for which it has no mandate from the people. And we all understand that the commercial press almost always supports a government in these deceptive acts.

If you look back, you’ll have a hard time finding press organizations who worked against Tony Blair’s criminal invasion and mass murder. And the same for Lyndon Johnson when he first started the holocaust in Vietnam (eventually, about 3 million Vietnamese were slaughtered, and for nothing but embracing the wrong loyalty).

By the way, the method for getting at approximate truth would be the same even if you were getting information directly from folks like CIA or MI6, organizations which also have tremendous bias and always use their privileged positions to influence their audience of high government officials in the direction they want them to go.

So-called “big intelligence” is infamous both for offering what it knows high government officials want to hear and for using their intimate access to advocate for things they themselves desire. There is simply no known way of avoiding this inevitable set of behaviors.

That is one of the reasons why Trump does not hold these people in quite the same regard as they themselves think that they should be held. The truth is, President Kennedy felt exactly the same way about the CIA. He just didn’t have the kind of personality Trump has, one which just blurts out what he is thinking.

We have many historical examples demonstrating the fact of security service bias and dishonesty -e.g., the CIA during the height of the Cold War never got its annual estimates of the USSR even close to right. The reason: they always wanted large increases in budget for themselves and for the armed forces, and they got them.

Honest journalism? It simply does not exist. Free press? A wise man in America said many decades ago that the only way to have a free press is to own one.

 

 

 

 

 

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.