The dominant US/Western fourth estate long ago abandoned journalism as it’s supposed to be — serving the imperial state and monied interests exclusively. Real news, information, and analysis are still available from independent credible sources unbeholden to powerful interests, mainly online.
America’s leading print proliferator of managed news misinformation and disinformation on issues mattering most NYT earlier asked: “Who will tell the truth about the free press?” Clearly not the self-styled newspaper of record, operating exclusively as a mouthpiece for powerful interests, featuring the official narrative exclusively at the expense of “all the news that’s fit to print” — banned in its daily editions on major domestic and geopolitical issues. CNN is the most untrustworthy name in television news.
Establishment print and electronic media reports in the US and other Western countries are polar opposite how the American Press Institute defines journalism, saying:
It’s “the gathering, assessing, creating, and presenting news and information,” adding: Its “characteristics and practices…separate journalism from other forms of communication…mak(ing) it indispensable to democratic societies.”“(J)ournalism provide(s) citizens with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies, and their governments.”
What passes for dominant fourth estate reporting in the US replicates how all totalitarian societies operate — controlling the message, suppressing vital information essential for everyone to know about how their government operates at home and abroad.
Since the early 1990s, the Center for Democracy & Technology’s PR Watch reported on “spin…disinformation (and) fake news.” The term disinformation may have originated from Soviet Russia’s dezinformacija — first used during the early Cold War years.
In the 17th century, Samuel Johnson used the term misinformation in remarks about the King of Prussia. In 1620, Francis Bacon noted what he called a “confirmation bias” that undermines trust and truth. A modern translation of philosopher Thomas Brown’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) would be “An Epidemic of Fake News.”
Today’s corporate controlled conventional and social media are platforms for disinformation — suppressing what’s essential for everyone to know. The NYT, CNN and other establishment media feature managed news misinformation and disinformation daily.
Defying its fake news on major domestic and geopolitical issues, the Times said the US and other nations depend on a free press. Democracy in the US and West are fantasy versions, the real thing banned. Nor are their major media free and open — notably because the dominant fourth estate is concentrated in few corporate hands.
In the West, six major corporations own and control over 90% of the media: Comcast’s NBC Universal, AT&T/Time Warner, Disney, News Corp., Viacom, and Germany’s Bertelsmann.
The “truth about a free press…in the United States and around the world” is that it’s only available from reliable independent sources — never from establishment ones like the Times and likeminded press agents for wealth, power, and privilege.
Following them assures knowing only what dark forces want people to know — nothing about major domestic and geopolitical issues affecting the public welfare.