Who Manufactures the "News" We Receive?

Here’s a quote from today’s edition of The Writer’s Almanac that I hope readers will find relevant:

Today is the birthday of … pioneering broadcast journalist Fred W. Friendly (pictured)….a large persuasive man, with strongly held opinions, (who) frequently butted heads with the network executives over their commitment to hard news over commercial interests. His forthright criticism of the network’s priorities caused him to leave CBS in 1966 when coverage of a hearing on Vietnam was scrapped in place of a rerun of I Love Lucy.

Friendly was an outspoken advocate for fairness and ethics in journalism, and after leaving CBS, he developed a series of popular seminars for public television that brought together journalists, educators, and politicians to discuss the most pressing issues of the day. He died at his home in the Bronx in 1998 at the age of 82. His colleague Dan Rather remembered him as “a fierce and mighty warrior for the best […] principles in journalism, […] for his friends, and for his country. He never gave up, he never gave in; he never backed down, and he never backed up.”

How far we’ve fallen.  At the risk of sounding cynical, it doesn’t seem at all likely that we’ll ever have another Fred Friendly in mainstream news, does it? Part of the reason is the prioritization of the “commercial interests over hard news” identified above.  The other part (and the two are related) is the push towards conformity with the main message points of government and the corporate interests that control it.  I write whatever I feel like, but I do this at the expense of totally alienating myself from the world of communication to the masses.

If this seems paranoid or “victimy,” ask yourself this: Why doesn’t the mainstream news devote any real attention to the crime of the epoch, ExxonMobil’s 35-year-long lie about the causal link between fossil fuels and climate change, and its decision to spend untold millions of dollars in disinformation campaigns to cover up the truth?

As legendary environmentalist Bill McKibben notes, we need to be furious about this.  But, to accomplish that, the common American has to know what happened.  The fact that this isn’t all over the news is simply disgusting.  But I’m not sure how we fix this; once our ideas become manufactured by a centralized point of control, it’s not easy recreating true, objective coverage of the most important things going down in our world.

As always, I welcome ideas related to correcting this mess.