There's no money in a story that can't make it past the censors in the first place. Here's an alarming passage--you may have seen it before--which illustrates this sad fact better than anything I can convey.

It's a quote from pre-eminent New York journalist John Swinton, the chief editorial writer of the New York Times from 1860 to 1870. Swinton, who was the guest of honor at a banquet "given by him and the leaders of his craft," made the following statement in response to another's toast to the Independent Press:

There is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is in the small towns. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write his opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that they would never appear in print....The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread. You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an 'Independent Press.' We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

(Source: Labor's Untold Story, United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, New York, 1955, p. 81)

"The tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes"...One might argue that even though a hundred years have passed since Swinton outraged his colleagues with this statement, things have not changed much since then. Right now in America we have ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN, with a smattering of other "independent" networks, none of which have anywhere near the same pull as the big networks. Then we have the Associated Press, Reuters and UPI, and a thousand relatively miniscule presses with similarly insignificant pull.

Why does it cost $1.3 million to advertise during the Academy Awards for 30 seconds, while it costs $100 for a full page ad in my local paper? The answer is obvious. No doubt about it, there is still a monopoly on "news," and none of the big players will give the time of day to views that so violently oppose mainstream assumptions.

 

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