After watching Idiocracy last night, I found myself craving a book. If you don't know the movie, it essentially argues that at our current rate of mindless television consumption, we will become raving idiots incapable of the most average and common sense decisions in about 500 years. Being a fan of TV, I found this supposition uncomfortable...but not wholly impossible. I also read. But how many people do you know who watch some TV and read a great deal? My guess would be...not many. Most people get all of their information, news, opinions, and data from the tube. People swallow what they're told without ever questioning the source...or asking, what's missing?
Which leads me to the freedom of the press. One of our valuable and guaranteed freedoms a la the First Amendment. But is the press still the fourth estate? Does the press still have the power to expose cheats, frauds, and bad guys? More importantly...if they do have the power...do they ever use it?
Watching the development of broadcast, internet, and print press for the past 20 years, and having first hand experience in print, leads me to some uncomfortable conclusions.
The press is no longer the powerful fourth estate of checks and balances on the "people in power." Why? Because they are controlled by huge multinational, multibillion-dollar corporations that, directly or indirectly, make it known what is safe to report on and what is not. Think about it. Who owns CNN? Who owns Fox News? Who owns the New York Times? The Washington Post? ABC and the other networks?
This is not the era of the mom-and-pop owned network. Furthermore, think about how these operations make money. Advertising. And WHO is advertising? Giant, multinational, multibillion-dollar corporations. Proctor and Gamble. Ford. Disney. Now put the two together. Essentially, corporation A who owns the network is making millions of dollars off of corporation B, who advertises their products on corporation A's network. What do you think would happen if an enterprising reporter had the gall to discover and then report on some nefariousness going on at corporation B? (Think, Enron.) Enron was not a pariah, an enigma of the corporate structure of our capitalist society. People who run these corporations are ALWAYS looking to cut corners and to make an extra buck. If you've never worked at a corporation, you're probably thinking, yeah right. Either trust me, go investigate it yourself, or work for a big corporation for awhile..say in the accounting department...and then tell me I don't know what I'm talking about.
Back to the question. Enterprising reporter uncovers massive nefariousness...reports on it without getting the approval of the editors and higher-ups (ie, the people with the advertising purse strings). What do you suppose would happen?
Allow me to interject a story here that may answer this question. When I was 25, I wrote a column of my own design called Renter Know-How for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Into the second year, it was becoming quite popular in a dead section of the paper, my editors were happy, readers felt like someone was on their side (in rental situations - I almost always took the renter's side in any landlord-renter dispute), and I was enjoying the regular gig of being an opinion columnist. One day, I got a letter from an angry and frightened woman - her mother was being evicted without the legal time limit notice or a legitimate reason. I called her up and got her story. One of the great benefits of my column was this ability to share amazing stories with the public...I was not wearing my "journalist" hat - this was my opinion column, so the same rules did not apply - related to "balance" (which is a farce half the time anyway). I sent the column in, exposing this poor woman's story and opining on the power of landlords.
My editor liked the column and ran it without changing anything. The very week it appeared, I got an email from that same editor saying I had to run an apology. Because the advertiser (the evicting property management) was threatening to pull their ads from the real estate section...because I didn't get their side of the story. Had I been wearing my "journalist" hat, full rules of balance apply and I absolutely should have gotten their side of the story. But I wasn't wearing that hat...and the editor knew it.
I refused, in my youthful optimism, I believed truth was more important than money.
That was my wake-up call. In the press, money trumps the truth. The editor ran a small apology tagging my next column (putting words in my mouth) and my column was summarily canceled. The advertiser won because money trumps the truth.
If that sort of thing happens in a half-million circulation daily paper in a mid-sized city, I guarantee it happens on a much larger scale at larger news outlets all over the world. Which means...if money trumps the truth, we the people are NOT getting the stories we should be getting. Because the purse-string folks are controlling WHAT we hear and read. Therefore, I don't trust anything I see on TV or in print - I'm always asking, what are they leaving out? What stories are getting buried because it might hurt some advertiser and hence, hurt the press outlet's bottom financial line?
Is this freedom of the press? In a word, no. How far off are we, then, from the disgusting, garbage-filled, world of stupidity presented in Idiocracy?
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