What is wrong with America? One major problem: America’s Fourth Estate has abandoned its responsibility to the commonweal. Journalistic objectivity has vanished.
The sacred and traditional role of the Fourth Estate (our professional journalist class) was to serve its nation and the ideals of democracy by acting as the watchdog of the political class, the elite, the monied, the politically connected and those who serve in Congress, and in the executive branch. The newspapers, the radio, and later the TV and the newscasters of the past, worked diligently to expose the foibles, the corruption, the weakness of all those in power. The powerful have always had the means and the desire to bend issues to their own advantage and to retain power. But it was the newspapers, and information media which served to expose those acts to the light of day and to modulate those destructive corrupt behaviors and to inform voters.
But somehow in the last decades that service of the Fourth Estate in USA to the nation and to democracy ended. Its loss is apparent in our crumbling national politics.
Today the establishment media (the Washington Post, New York Times, et al.) serve only one party. They have lost their objectivity. They hide the crimes, criminality, cronyism, foibles and malfeasance of one party, but eagerly exploit, intentionally misrepresent, exaggerate, claim an allegation as a conviction, leak information to damage one party ( and sometimes even generate false stories) of the misdeeds of the other party. They do this for the overt and apparent political advantage of “their” party. Thus the fourth estate in America in the 21st Century has decided against democracy—ignore the will of the people—and the right of people to choose who represents them. They seem to have come to believe that they—the elite intelligentsia class—know best. They have become, rather than the watchdog of malfeasance and corruption, sadly the facilitators of same.
I recall well a comment by long-term and revered former German PM, Angela Merkel, who as a young student in Communist East Germany explained how she got her news in that era when only communist propaganda sheets were were available for her to read. “You had to read between the lines” she said. “You read what the party leaders wrote in the newspapers, and then you had to go that other step and ask; why did they say that? Only then—reading between the lines—was it possible to deduce what was actually happening beyond the Iron curtain, and what were the actual facts and what was happening in the real world.”
Sadly, that’s where we find ourselves today in the USA. Our establishment news media have become just an arm of the establishment government. They support their every statement and policy…no ‘watchdog’, or healthy valid criticism in these sheets. This is a very sad day indeed for freedom. To understand what is really the truth or what is happening we too must read between the lines.
Such behavior of one of the essential components of our democratic system bodes trouble and unrest for our nation.
The media giants can easily mend their ways….will they?
No comments:
Post a Comment