The End of Objective Journalism and the Rise of the Corporate-Media State

The Industrial Age ended in the 1960’s with the beginning of a new era which would be called the Information Age; an era which promised the liberation of humanity from a world of labor and economic hardship, and which heralded the dawn of a new age of knowledge, understanding and prosperity.

The changes brought about by the Information Age are ultimately transforming the balance of power between the individual and our social institutions as more information is now available to everyone, yet control of this information is accumulating in the hands of an increasingly small group of global corporations.

The impact of this concentration of media power is altering the very soul of our society while also changing the relationship between these corporations and the state.

One the most profound changes have been the impact upon the profession of Journalism and its primary domain, the media.

Modern journalism evolved during the enlightenment, based upon the core principles that mankind is by nature basically good, rational and intelligent, and that men can differentiate between what is important from what is irrelevant, what is good from what is bad, and ultimately between truth and lies or what may be more appropriately called propaganda.

These core principles were codified in the standards of professional journalism which include truth, accuracy, reliability, balance and objectivity termed the Journalist Model. In essence, “the nature of journalism is to seek the truth.”[1]

The Information Age has brought about fundamental changes to the Journalist Model and to the world of media; with the most profound being the complete transfer of dominant media power from the written journalistic forms (newspapers, periodicals and books) to the elevation of television as the uncontested monopoly over what is today called mainstream media.

It is through the medium of television that the most profound changes in the Journalist Model have occurred.

The Total Dominance of Television

The total dominance of television as a media monopoly cannot be overstated. To this point, Chris Hedges in his book, The Empire of Illusion writes: “Television, a medium built around the skillful manipulation of images, ones that can overpower reality, is our primary form of mass communication…

Television speaks in a language of familiar, comforting clichés and exciting images. Its format, from reality shows to sit-coms, is predictable. It provides a mass, virtual experience that colors the way many people speak and interact with one another.

It creates a false sense of intimacy with our elite – celebrity actors, news people, politicians, business tycoons, and sports stars. And everything and everyone that television transmits is validated and enhanced by the medium.

If a person is not seen on television, on some level he or she is not important. Television confers authority and power. It is the final arbitrator for what matters in life.”[2]

Television and the advancing technologies of the Information Age have murdered objective journalism; It died a martyr’s death, going silently into the night, somewhere between the first Gulf War and the disaster marathon coverage of the attack on 911, while only a few seemed to observe its passing.

Experts in media studies noted the death of the editorial function, the loss of objectivity and editorial inquiry as the media format of television news has evolved into a type of Reality TV show, exemplified by the “Disaster Marathon” news reporting and the now all too common “Breaking News” genre.

The public no longer watches the news to understand the day’s events, but rather is glued to television’s live footage to experience the news; objective analysis, editorial review, or even understanding the context of the new is no longer relevant.

The public only desires to experience the profound video footage, sharing the emotional impact of events, or the pain of the victims, while gazing at the high definition images of the latest disaster event, whether natural or man-made.

As the technology of television has advanced, viewers are now treated to a “real life experience” of the news.

Up close and personal, the events are viewed as if “live” in the viewer’s own living room, and as the volume of news sources has grown exponentially; from CNN and the other devoted news networks, to the video footage captured by the latest citizen reporting on the smart phone or video camera, the public is exposed to an avalanche of news images which has left them adrift in a flood of high tech news content, enabling the viewer to see and hear, and even “feel” the events, just like being there.

Lost within this sensory overload of images which are largely understood only for their emotional content is any objective analysis of what is actually happening.

And rarely do any of the national media sources ever deviate from the official narrative explaining the color images flashing in front of the viewer’s eyes. The world where “less is more” has been replaced with a world where “more” is now the goal of news content; more spectacular video footage, more breaking news, more live action and more emotion framing yet, in reality, “more” has become a disaster. Kampf writes:

Viewers and internet users around the globe follow events, literally and metaphorically, on ‘wide’ and ‘flat’ screens, in ‘high definition’. Paradoxically, as we will show, the better the quality of viewing, the less the understanding of what we see.”[3]

“To cite Martin Bell, the admired British journalist, in contemporary television coverage of armed conflict, “the screens become screens also in the traditional sense of blocking the view and filtering out the light.[4]

Say Good Night to the Editors

Also lost to viewers’ attention is the profound absence of editorial content in the steady flow of the daily news. The editor, whose role was central to maintaining the balance of objectivity in the Journalistic model, has been lost.

And once the center failed to hold, the whole model was easily destroyed. “The success of CNN is the symbol of failure… it represents the beginning of the end of journalism as we have known it… it also uses the satellite to distribute the news as quickly as possible. At first glance, this sounds like the ideal deployment of the new media technology. The only trouble is that it eliminates the editor.

Rather than collecting information and trying to make sense of it in time for the evening news broadcast, the CNN ideal is to do simultaneous, almost-live editing, or better yet, no editing at all. CNN journalism almost wants to be wrong.”[5] Kampf states,

The move to television had a massive impact on the profession …. It did not take long for journalists to understand that the order of the day has become authenticity, live action and drama, all of which have contributed to creating a new model, that we entitle ‘performance journalism’. In the new environment, ‘liveness’, the moving image, and the penetrating voice, replace the printed word. It is an environment of images, not of letters; of stories, not of issues; of people, emotions and actions, and not of cognitive analysis.”[6]

The Corporate-Media State – a Global News Monopoly

Beyond the move to television and the transition from objective journalism to emotional reporting, live action and drama; another more powerful change was occurring outside of the view of most observers. Globalist corporations have been consolidating ownership of the world’s major news organizations.

Even more alarming than the consolidation of global media power into the hands of a few organizations is the fact that 18 out of the top 20 global media giants are also corporate members of the Council on Foreign Relations, a private globalist think tank, whose openly stated agenda is the promotion of a global government, which by definition necessitates the subversion of state sovereignty, along with the advocacy of a global socialist agenda.

The executives who control the global media giants also share membership within several of the world’s secret societies such as the Skull and Bones Fraternity and the various globalists groups such as The Bilderberg Group.

The Bilderberg membership is made up of Kings, Queens, Princes, Chancellors, Prime Ministers, Presidents, Ambassadors, Secretaries of State, Wall Street investors, international bankers, news media executives, and wealthy industrialist. Their meetings are by ‘invitation only’, and no ‘outsiders’ are allowed, except by special invitation… the news media are always present at these meetings. Even though the media moguls attend these secret meetings, they do not file reports about the Elite Bilderberg activities during their meetings.[7]

For over 14 years, Daniel Estulin investigated and researched the Bilderberg Group’s far-reaching influence … in his book, ‘The True Story of the Bilderberg Group’ he reveals the Group is ‘a shadow world government….

Bilderbergers want to supplant individual nation-state sovereignty with an all-powerful global government, corporate controlled, and check-mated by militarized enforcement…. The global media giants control everything we see, hear and read – through television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, films, and large portions of the Internet. Their top officials and some journalists attend Bilderberg meetings – on condition they report nothing.[8]

The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.[9]

Scholars in the media field argue the end of objective journalism is the result of many factors: commercialism of the news, competition for ratings, and the new technologies which support an action oriented “live reporting” of the news.

Each of these factors have clearly influenced the change in format, but it is the global media corporations who, having consolidated ownership of the global media, now control virtually all content; they now have direct control over the news content and media format, which has by design, killed objective journalism.

Hedges states this quite clearly:

Corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch, or hear. It imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. It diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip… Television journalism is largely a farce. Celebrity reporters, masquerading as journalists make millions a year and give a platform to the powerful and the famous so they can spin, equivocate, and lie. Sitting in a studio, putting on makeup, and chatting with Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, or Lawrence Summers has little to do with journalism.[10]

Russert, like Cramer, when exposed as complicit in the dissemination of misinformation [propaganda], attempted to portray himself as an innocent victim, as did New York Times reporter Judy Miller, who, along with her colleague Michael Gordon, worked largely as stenographers for the Bush White House during the propaganda campaign to invade Iraq.

Once the administration claims justifying the war had been exposed as falsehoods, Miller quipped that she was ‘only as good as my sources.’ This logic upends the traditional role of reporting, which should always begin with the assumption that those in power have an agenda and are rarely bound to the truth. All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, and it is the job of the journalist to do the hard, tedious reporting to expose these lies. It is the job of courtiers to feed off the scraps tossed to them by the powerful and serve the interests of the power elite.”[11]

The corporate elite, who now control the major media organizations and the news disseminated within the global media, destroyed objective journalism for a reason: they wanted to replace it with a new media format based upon, and designed around, the science of propaganda, with the express purpose, of altering not only public opinion, but the understanding and belief systems of the public as well.

As we shall from the evidence below, the content changes have gone far beyond mere propaganda, all the way to the introduction of new media methods more appropriately described as systems of hypnosis or mind control.

Footnotes:

Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Striking the Balance, Audience Interests, Business Pressures and Journalists’ Values, March 30, 1999, p1.
Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (New York: Nation Books, July 2009), p 45.
Zohar Kampf and Tamar Liebes, Transforming Media Coverage of Violent Conflicts: The New Face of War Draft version 13 January 2013, p8.
M. (1998) ‘The Journalism of Attachment’ In M. Kieran (ed.) Media Ethics, London: Routledge, 15-22.
Elihu Katz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem , The End of Journalism? Notes on Watching the War, Journa1 of Communication, Summer 1992 p 9.
Zohar Kampf and Tamar Liebes, Transforming Media Coverage of Violent Conflicts: The New Face of War Draft version 13 January 2013, p29.
Robert Gaylon Ross, Sr, The brief descriptions of the major Elite organizations, the Bilderbergs (BB), Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and Trilateral Commission (TC).
Stephen Lendman, The True story of the Bilderberg Group, Global Research, May 15, 2013.
Corporate Medias Threat to Democracy, Quote by Noam Chomsky, American linguist and US media critic.
Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, New York: Nation Books, July 2009, p 169.
Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, New York: Nation Books, July 2009, p 174.

Website: BenjaminBaruch.net

Source of Graphic: Frugal Dad