Censorship and the dying rags

by Brenda Norrell
CENSORED NEWS
News of Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights

It is becoming popular to moan the death of US newspapers. Americans like to be romantic, nostalgic, when things pass on. But the truth is newspapers are not just dying because of the Internet, shrinking advertising and dismal profits.

US newspapers are dying because they became the prostitutes of commercialism and stopped telling the truth. Many people stopped buying newspapers because they became the rags of a corrupt industry. Too many journalists swallowed their pride, ignored their integrity and did what they had to do to pay the mortgage. They followed the marching orders of editors and publishers who forgot, or never knew, what journalism was intended to do.

Television news became entertainment, a boiling sea of lies and half truths. It focuses on a few murders to hypnotize Americans. It sensationalizes and fuels the inherent racism. When it comes to promoting the war and warmongering corporations, no one does it better than television news, regurgitating US press releases as if those were truth.

For readers of newspapers, it became too hard to tell the wag-the-dog spin of the press releases of politicians and corporations from real news and real truth. For corporations and politicians, it became too easy to take their lush profits and threaten a lawsuit whenever the real truth was exposed. The corporations and politicians learned how to kill off the good journalists, whether it was with the threat of a million dollar lawsuit, a bloody murder on the backroads or streets of Mexico or an explosion in Iraq...[Story continued here]