Thursday, July 19, 2012

The relentless decline of the mainstream news media...

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In the longer historical view, the news media’s decline in public confidence can be correlated with the demise of American journalism and the nation’s transformation from a democracy to a plutocracy of, by and for the comfortable.

Two years before the Washington Post’s 1973 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Watergate scandal, Lewis F. Powell Jr., then a corporate lawyer from Richmond, sent a confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urging an all-out attack on anti-corporate elements in society that dominated the times. The targets he identified included the college campus, politicians and the media.

Powell, whom Richard Nixon would nominate to the Supreme Court two months later, titled the memo Attack on American Free Enterprise System and singled out television news for enabling progressive icons like Ralph Nader and William Kunstler.

“Much of the media … either voluntarily accords unique publicity to these ‘attackers’ or at least allows them to exploit the media for their purposes,” he wrote. “This is especially true of television, which now plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people.” Full story...

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