Mike wrote:
We in the US, need to be sure that we remind ourselves that our press has
quite often been restricted both by government and by self-imposed
restrictions put on individual journalists and certain stories by privately
held media groups with conflicting interests. While we like to tout our 1st
Amendment, the idea of a free press is more pervasive than the actuality.
Some examples of wide-spread restrictions on the US press:
*No coverage given to the oppression of Blacks and other minorities from
1600's to early 1960's.
*No coverage given to government sponsored pogroms and massacres such as
military actions against striking workers in the early part of the 20th
century, the assault on the WWI "Bonus Marchers", and probably many more
that aren't widely known including numerous outrages against the indigenous
peoples that were here first.
We often look at past events through our societal eyes instead of thought
the eyes of society at the time. I don't for a minute believe that the
events you mentioned were right, but the media has often taken the position
of correcting what it sees as ills of society. If they, and the people do
not see a wrong, they don't report it. In the above mentioned cases,
unfortunately the majority of the people saw no wrong in what was done.
*No coverage given to the fact that the US President who held office longer
than anybody else used a wheelchair. (One has to wonder if the US would've
recognized the abilities of the disabled far sooner had more been done with
that story.)
It may not have been covered, but it was well known. A swimming pool was
even added in the basement of the White House so he could exercise
regularly. The press at that time respected the right of privacy to an
individual. When he asked not to be photographed that way, they respected
his wishes.
*Very little coverage given to the criminal shennanigans of the Clinton
regime. (That example is interesting because despite claims touting that
the Internet was going to allow even greater freedom of the press, the very
fact that certain stories appeared first on the Web was used to discredit
them.)
I remember almost daily coverage, yet no one seemed to care. There was
another news article on the TV this morning about his behavior in office.
We've gotten ourselves into a situation in which the power of the media to
squelch stories or discredit them is almost as powerful as the media that
is supposed to report these stories. Still, US freedoms are far better than
most. The trouble is that people in the US have grown lazy and are
accustomed to believing what they're told by the popular press. Years
later, historians often fill in the missing bits, as they did in the above
examples.
People want their ears "tickled", that is they want to be told exactly what
they want to hear. Tell them something else and they stop listening, even
if it is the truth.
Gregg
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