When did the MSM lose its way?

[yvr girl]

When did fulfilling corporate objectives become more important than fulfilling the public trust?

I remember the days when reporters had to earn their stripes as foreign correspondents. I remember images from Vietnam when I was only four.

A couple of newspaper reporters brought down a president. Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America.

Was it an insidious creep or is there an event we can point to?

[indepat]

1. The MSM lost its way when it put politics and greed before its patriotic

duty to keep the people informed.

[Skink]

2. 1972

Read Fear and loathing on the Campaign Trail. HST makes observations on the campaign and the media.

[ailsagirl]

3. They've been "out there" for a long time. They still insist that

Oswald killed JFK. Imagine. After all these years. You won't find a mainstream media outlet that believes (that is, will admit to) there was a conspiracy.

Put me down for the "insidious creep" theory.

[Evergreen Emerald]

4. The neo-cons learned from history. They knew as long as the press

...was free, they would have trouble with their agenda. They set out systematically destroying the freedom of the press and one of the checks and balances of our system. It was brilliant actually. We enjoyed it for so long and took it for granted that we barely noticed at first. Now, we complain, but to what end?

They are nearly unencumbered in their quest in Iraq / Iran and at home with their propoganda machine fully operational. The masses remain ignorant and gullible and susceptible to believe anything they are feed. Those of us who disagree are yelling in the wind--barely heard and always discounted. The proof of their lies is hidden and goes unnoticed by those masses.

What they did not count on was the internet. They did not realize how quickly the technology would advance. The only ability we have of gaining information that is not state controlled is the internet. So, while they formulate the next assault on our freedom in information, they try to minimize, ridicule, demean the news from the internet.

[annabanana]

19. I think you have it

in a nutshell..
The internet caught them off guard and they are rushing to figure out ways to neutralize it.

If we are to have any chance of saving this country it will be in what happens between these three componenets:
1) the internet
2) voter verified paper ballots
3) 2006 midterm elections

We really haven't much time to get it together.

[tsuki]

5. When being a part of the Beltway Powerful Elite became more important

than reporting on it.

[Protagoras]

6. Read Elmer Gantry

or watch Citizen Kane...or even Mr.Smith goes to Washington.

The press has never been as free or unbiased as we'd like to believe. In the end it's always been a business that served the almighty Dollar.

[yvr girl]

10. I know that's true to a certain extent

Back in the 30's the British media did not report about the King's affair with a married woman. I know it's a bit of a tabloid story but big news considering the times and that he was forced to abdicate.

A gentleman's agreement prevented the British people hearing about it. It was reported in other countries.

It seems to me, that the media use to attract activist type people. Reporters wanted to uncover the truth. Now they just want to be famous. Perhaps real truth-tellers got fed up with the corporate bullshit and fought in other ways. Their influence is sorely missed.

[Protagoras]

15. True the character of reporters does seem to have changed

Editors and owners may have always been of a kind.

But I do suspect that we don't have nearly as many people who go to journalism school and study photojournalism etc who think ..."I WANT TO GET THE TRUTH OUT".

Instead the only thing going thru far too many minds is "Will my hair look good on TV?"

How do we reclaim journalism in order to grow new crops of journalists?

[davekriss]

7. 1987

When the courts overturned the Fairness Doctrine, which up to then was an FCC regulation that said, for the priviledge of broadcasting for profit over the public airwaves, a broadcaster (1) must broadcast news, (2) must cover all sides of issues of controversy. The Congress did manage to pass a resurrection of the Fairness Doctrine that would've survived the court challenge, but George Herbert Walker Bush vetoed it in 1989. There have been a few attempts since but basically all impulses to fairness, when they appear, are lobbied out of existence.

More destructive are the changes to the Rule of Sevens, another FCC regulation, which said no organization can own more than 7 television stations, 7 radio stations, and 7 newspapers in any given market. It since has been bumped up to, now, no organization can exceed more than a 35% market reach (that's not "share", just "reach" -- the possibility of reaching 35% of the nation via the priviledges of media ownership).

A result of the loosening is that we now have a near-monopolized media. Whereas in 1980 more than 2,000 companies owned the 29,000 or so major media outlets, today the major media are owned by 6 mega-firms.

If you don't think the concentration of ownership and elimination of the need to feign "fairness" impacts the permitted agenda, then I have a bridge in NY I want to sell you.

[Dulcinea]

8. Corporate ownership of the media has destroyed the industry.

Instead of fulfilling the public's right to know, they're not accountable to anyone but the stockholders. They're now expected to turn a 30% profit (or thereabouts), which is why we see drivel like the runaway bride, the crane mess in Atlanta, & Scott Peterson (all LOCAL stories, not NATIONAL or WORLD stories) instead of real news, like the crisis in Darfur.

Just my 2 cents.

[gumby]

9. Robert Parry writes about this.

He got kicked out of the MSM for exposing Iran-Contra.

His latest article is also about the failures of the MSM
http://www.consortiumnews.com/

[RBHam]

11. Operation Mockingbird

MOCKINGBIRD
The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA

excerpt:
It was conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid period of the cold war, when the CIA began a systematic infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets.

In this period, the American intelligence services competed with communist activists abroad to influence European labor unions. With or without the cooperation of local governments, Frank Wisner, an undercover State Department official assigned to the Foreign Service, rounded up students abroad to enter the cold war underground of covert operations on behalf of his Office of Policy Coordination. Philip Graham, __a graduate of the Army Intelligence School in Harrisburg, PA, then publisher of the Washington Post., was taken under Wisner's wing to direct the program code-named Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

"By the early 1950s," writes formerVillage Voice reporter Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great, "Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a former CIA analyst." The network was overseen by Allen Dulles, a templar for German and American corporations who wanted their points of view represented in the public print. Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced 25 newspapers and wire agencies consenting to act as organs of CIA propaganda. Many of these were already run by men with reactionary views, among them William Paley (CBS), C.D. Jackson (Fortune), Henry Luce (Time) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).

Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have since been appalled to f__ind in FOIA documents that agents boasting in CIA office memos of their pride in having placed "important assets" inside every major news publication in the country. It was not until 1982 that the Agency openly admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field.

more...
http://www.freedomofthepress.net/mockingbird.htm

CIA Disinformation in Action,
Operation Mockingbird and the Washington Post

excerpt:
The very lengthy (25 pages typwritten) document below is actually a letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes, in which he takes the Post to task for decades of disinformation - typically in the form of combating what the Post likes to describe as 'conspiracy theory' which, in the end, turns out to be conspiracy fact. This uncopyrighted document was borrowed with permission from Michael Rivero's excellent http://www.whatreallyhappened.com Web site. In an unusual format, Holmes carefully documents each accusation with footnotes, a valuable tool for the reader. This is no mere rant, no mere opinionated dissatisfaction, no angry response dashed off without thinking. No, it is an indictment. Nestled within the over 100 footnotes and the not quite as many individual examples of supression and distrotions of truth, and even fabrications of 'truth', is a root-most clue to the real problem - a problem which reader should take care not to miss grasping...

That is the covert role played by the Washington Post in CIA's Operation Mockingbird, which is the infiltration and control of American media to insure that you and I never quite hear the truth as it really is. You will learn how the owner/publisher of the Post, Phillip Graham and graduate of the Army Intelligence School was literally the founding director of Operation Mockingbird on behalf of CIA. The significance is amplified when it is understood that Mockingbird was not simply the sell out of a newspaper. It was the organized infiltration and in some cases the actual take over of the top 25 newpapers in the United States, major television networks, high-profile magazines, the wire services (Reuters was an outright CIA owned and operated front until 'sold' to 'private' interests) and even motion picture studios. Since then, of course, it has expanded further. For more information, visit Rivero's site and read the excellent piece found there by author Alex Constantine, Tales From They Crypt.

We might expect a fascist dictatorship to use the motto-policy of "Do what we tell you or else!" We would prefer to believe that our own democratic and free nation's motto-policy would be "Do what you think best." However, thanks to a secret government and CIA, it is actually "Do what we tell you to think best." That may have been what Eisenhower was warning us about when he coined the the phrase "military industrial complex" in his farewell address. In my own writing I have followed his lead and updated the phrase to that of simply: MIIM, the Military Industrial Intelligence Media complex. Subscribe to the Washington Post, dear sheep, and welcome to the New World Order. Or, listen to Holmes and decide for yourself. It is still your choice to make, despite what they would have you believe...

more...

http://educate-yourself.org/cn/ciadisinfoinaction28mar05.shtml

[HawkerHurricane]

12. It started in 1964...

when a free press allegedly cost Goldwater the election. By telling the TRUTH about what Goldwater said he believed, the free press created a movement... a movement that sought to be FAIR ("Fair" defined as never saying anything bad about conservativism) and BALANCED ("Balanced" defined as always having a conservative speak after a nuetral or non-conservative view to give the proper 'spin' on the subject). There is a reason why Fox News chose that motto...

[radar]

13. BartCop has mentioned Rush Limbaugh

...As a factor; being able to spew what he claims, not be held accountable ("hey - it's only entertainment!") and make millions.
Leading others to see an easy way to make a buck.

The majority of Americans don't have the patience they used to. No time for doing research or checking details - just give 'em a quick, abbreviated highlight reel; cliff note the cliff notes.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. I first noticed in the 1980s

most specifically circa 1983.

That's when I heard the two versions of the invasion of Grenada. First there was the official U.S. version, carried on the major networks and NPR, which said that U.S. troops were going in to overthrow a Cuban-inspired dictatorship and to save the American medical students, and since no reporters were allowed along, there was no way to find out what was happening.

The second version was the Canadian version, the one I heard on As It Happens, which was broadcast on MInnesota Public Radio. Their reporters weren't allowed in Grenada either, so instead of fretting that they were dependent on U.S. military press releases,they simply picked up the phone and called the British High Commission and the president of the medical school. That's where I learned that the Cuban influence was 500 construction workers, that the "dictators" were a faction of the Grenadan government who thought the previous government was "soft on Reagan," and that the leader of the coup had told the president of the medical school personally that the students were welcome to stay and would not be harmed, and if rogue soldiers happened to hassle them, there was a phone number they could call.

We didn't hear any of this in the States. Instead, we got Time and Newsweek showing the evacuated medical students kissing the ground as they landed in the U.S. (Like it's hard to get students to ham it up for the cameras) and showing grafitti that said, "God bless America--Thank you President Reagan." We were treated to TV pictures of Americans cheering and waving flags, as if the U.S. military had just defeated the Nazis instead of locking down an essentially undefended island 30 miles long and 20 miles wide.

In about 1987, former Wall Street Journal Reporter Jonathan Kwitny came out with a book called Endless Enemies, an exposé of the stupidity of so much American foreign policy. He had a chapter on Grenada, and he confirmed everything that was on the Canadian broadcast. You never read about that in the mass media, though. There the "heroic" version of the story stands till this day.

That was my most striking introduction to the news media as mouthpiece for government policy.

[KG]

16. the MSM has always been pro-war - any war.

[kaitykaity]

17. 1987 when Bork struck down the Fairness Doctrine.

Also, Ben Bagdakian chronicles this in "The Media Monopoly"
about consolidatio of ownership and all of a sudden the need
for news departments to turn a profit.

[omega minimo]

18. ...ramped up after Bush War I, when censored war media techniques

began infecting regular television programming in the 90's.

[bemildred]

20. They have never served the public. Ever. nt

[H2O Man]

21. Some individual reporters have, but

the media as a business never has. It was set up to make money, not to be the "free press" mentioned in the Constitution.