The United States Could Use Some Separation Of Media And State by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!
(2023-04-14 at 02:00:24 )

The United States Could Use Some Separation Of Media And State by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The United States State Departments spokesperson Ned Price is being replaced by a man named Matthew Miller. Like Mr. Price, Mr. Miller has had extensive prior involvement in both the United States government and the mass media;

Mr. Price is a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and Barack Obama administration National Security Council staffer who for years worked as an NBC News analyst, while Mr. Miller has previously had roles in both the Obama and Biden administrations and spent years as an analyst for MSNBC.

Like every high-level government spokesperson, Mr. Millers job will be to spin the nefarious things the United States empire does in a positive light and deflect inconvenient questions with weasel-worded non-answers. Which also happens to be essentially the same job as the propagandists in the mainstream media.

In journalism school you are taught that there is supposed to be a sharp line between government and the press; journalists are meant to hold the government to account, and there is an obvious conflict of interest there if they are also friends with government officials or are looking to the government as a potential future employer. But at the highest levels of the worlds most powerful government and the worlds most influential media platforms the line between media and state is effectively nonexistent; people flow seamlessly between roles in the media and roles in the government depending on who is in office.

MSNBC analyst Matthew Miller will replace former MSNBC analyst Ned Price as spokesperson for the Biden State Department.-Saagar Enjeti (esaagar) April 12, 2023

We see this indistinctness between government and media with White House press secretaries even more clearly. The current press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is a former analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and the last press secretary Jen Psaki now has her own show on MSNBC. Prior to her stint as White House press secretary Ms Psaki worked as a CNN analyst, and before that she was a spokesperson for the State Department like Mr. Price and Mr. Miller.

At a recent event for the news startup Semafor, Ms Psaki was asked if she considers herself a journalist and she said she does, adding that "to me, journalism is providing information to the public, helping make things clearer, explaining things." Which is a bit funny considering that Ms Psakis political faction has spent the last seven years furiously insisting that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is not a journalist. In liberal brainworms land the worlds greatest journalist is not a journalist at all, but Joe Bidens spin doctor is because she has got a knack for "explaining things".

Lest you get the mistaken impression that this phenomenon is unique to Democrats and their aligned media outlets, it should here be noted that Donald Trumps press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders got a job as a Fox News contributor immediately after resigning from that position, and now she is the governor of Arkansas. Another Donald Trump administration press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, is now an on-air contributor to Fox News, and previously worked for CNN. Doanald Trumps first press secretary Sean Spicer reportedly tried to get jobs with CBS News, CNN, Fox News, ABC News and NBC News after his stint in the White House, but was turned down by all of them because nobody likes him.

Without any clear lines between the media and the state, United States media are not meaningfully different from the state media the west spends so much energy decrying in "tyrannical regimes" like Russia and China. The only difference is that in Tyrannical Regimes the government controls the media, while in Free Democracies the government is the media.

Look at the questions that were asked by journalists at the Pentagon press briefing today. They are all about demanding answers for how the government plans to improve its ability to conceal newsworthy information from the public.-Michael Tracey (mtracey) April 13, 2023

On a related note, journalist Michael Tracey just observed on Twitter that all questions asked during the Pentagon press briefing today about the documents leaked online from the Department of Defense all pertained not to the information contained in those documents, but to the Pentagons failure to keep them from leaking to the public. Rather than trying to obtain more information and transparency from their governments as journalists should, they are actually badgering their government to do more to prevent important information from getting into the hands of journalists.

So I suppose that is another difference between Totalitarian Regimes and Free Democracies: in Totalitarian Regimes the government instructs the media to suppress inconvenient facts, while in Free Democracies the media instruct the government to suppress inconvenient facts.

As it happens the man who allegedly leaked the Pentagon documents, a 21 year-old National Guardsman named Jack Teixeira, was tracked down and named by The New York Times even before his arrest by the Federal Bureau of Investigation!!

The New York Times assembled a crew of a dozen reporters to hunt down the leaker, even using contributing reporting from the empire-funded propaganda firm Bellingcat.

This job typically undertaken solely by federal agents was undertaken first by reporters from the mainstream press; we are just a click or two away from New York Times reporters kicking down the doors of people who leak classified information and shooting their dogs like proper feds!!!

News: NPR becomes first major news org to stop using Twitter, saying that the Elon Musk-owned platform "is taking actions that undermine our credibility."

"We are not putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility.."-Oliver Darcy (oliverdarcy) April 12, 2023

All this while state propaganda outlet NPR continues its ongoing tantrum about Twitter accurately labeling its account "Government Funded", an upgrade from its also-accurate previous designation as "United States state-affiliated media". NPR has now officially rage-quit Twitter in objection to the label on the basis that "the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent," which is hilarious because NPR has no credibility to undermine.

As we discussed recently, NPR receives funding from the United States government, consistently promotes the information interests of the United States government, and is run by the former CEO of the United States governments foreign propaganda network United States Agency for Global Media.

It does not even deserve the label "Government Funded"; it should have the exact same labels as Russian and Chinese state media, because it is not meaningfully different from them.

This was made even funnier by the fact that the United States of Americas literally state-owned media outlet Voice of America is now standing in very unhelpful solidarity with NPR by also objecting to the "Government Funded" label that has been placed on its own account.

Voice of America writes the following in its own "news" reporting on NPRs plight:

VOAs public relations department on Monday also pushed back against Twitters decision, saying the label gives the impression that VOA is not an independent outlet.

Twitter did not respond to VOAs request for comment.

VOA is funded by the United States government through the United States Agency for Global Media, but its editorial independence is protected by regulations and a firewall.

Bridget Serchak, VOAs director of public relations, said that "the label "government funded" is potentially misleading and could be construed as also "government-controlled" - which VOA is most certainly not."

"Our editorial firewall, enshrined in the law, prohibits any interference from government officials at any level in its news coverage and editorial decision-making process," Ms Serchak said in an email. "VOA will continue to emphasize this distinction in our discussions with Twitter, as this new label on our network causes unwarranted and unjustified concern about the accuracy and objectivity of our news coverage."

Any case NPR might have had to protest its label, even just in the public imagination, is obliterated by the VoA (!!) of all things now doing the same sort of couch-fainting routine. Here is a former longtime VoA reporter on the outlet in 2017, for e.g.: "please read here:"-Branko Marcetic (BMarchetich) April 11, 2023

As Branko Marcetic pointed out on Twitter, these claims about VOAs "editorial independence" have been squarely refuted by someone who worked there for 35 years. In a 2017 article with Columbia Journalism Review titled "Spare the indignation: Voice of America has never been independent," VOA veteran Dan Robinson says such outlets are entirely different from normal news companies and are expected to facilitate United States information interests to receive government funding:

I spent about 35 years with Voice of America, serving in positions ranging from chief White House correspondent to overseas bureau chief and head of a key language division, and I can tell you that for a long time, two things have been true. First, United States government-funded media have been seriously mismanaged, a reality that made them ripe for bipartisan reform efforts in Congress, climaxing late in 2016 when President Obama signed the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. Second, there is widespread agreement in Congress and elsewhere that, in exchange for continued funding, these government broadcasters must do more, as part of the national security apparatus, to assist efforts to combat Russian, ISIS, and al-Qaeda disinformation.

Everywhere you look you can find extensive entanglements between the United States government and the news media outlets that westerners look to for information about the world, and that is before you even get into the way the plutocratic class which owns and influences the United States media is also not meaningfully separate from the United States government. When corporations are part of the government, corporate media is state media!!

It seems a safe bet that the United States would be a completely different country if separation of media and state and separation of corporation and state were enshrined like the separation of church and state is.

The only reason United States of Americans consent to the freakish status quo of their government which impoverishes and oppresses people at home while bombing and starving people abroad is because their consent has been manufactured by a media class that is not meaningfully separate from the government!!

Place the press in their proper place as oppositional scrutinizers of government behavior, and the dynamics underlying the nations problems would no longer be hidden from the public!!

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Ah, the Buddha Ms Caitlin speaks the truth!!! - Cousin Lucky