GUEST COLUMN – Mainstream media don’t always live up to the truth

By WALTER TRKLA
Guest Columnist

JOURNALISTS ARE SUPPOSED to hold government accountable by providing information on domestic, national and international events.

Media independence from government influence and control and corollary its responsibility to hold government accountable is lost when journalists are in bed with the government. Since everything is completely interconnected, journalists who promote government policy as news without examining its effect on society undermine public trust of the media.

This type of journalism erodes trust in the judicial systems and other institutions of government.  It is the journalist who decides what facts are used, where they are placed in the article and in what context the facts are significant in relation to government accountability.

There’s no such thing as unbiased news and how it is presented and interpreted. Mainstream Media (MM) journalists claim objectivity, independence and neutrality; however, when hidden media bias exists it misleads, manipulates and divides society.  One cannot champion a social or political view or change unless they and the public know the facts.

Separating fact from fiction requires huge amounts of understanding and research, which can wear down even the most experienced journalist. In many cases, speaking ‘truth to power’ leads to loss of one’s job and victimization and in some instances jail or assassination. Many journalists, once they visit Auschwitz, Hiroshima or Gaza no longer treat what they write as a commodity, which can be bought and sold but as a mirror of who he/she is. Hopefully a human first and a journalist second.

As consumers of information, provided by (MM) or social media, the consumer must study the writer and his/her associations before he/she looks at the facts and events they present. Private ownership, political views and affiliation, and media financing all lead to biased reporting.

The comments from readers of David Charboneau’s article “Decline of Mainstream Media “are all different. WHY? I can take this WHY question to the Nth degree on each comment and the people who made them might defend them to the Nth degree because they have been taken in by the bias and propaganda and a place they occupy in society.

A journalist must be well read in history, politics, economics, sociology and ethics and understand how they shape society, but when he/she writes for profit we get editorialization, phrasing, interview selection, what have you which leads to bias. When they deal with big topics, they must master a range of references, from historians, philosophers, writers and thinkers in a world where everything changes and everything is connected. Rather than do the hard research, journalists use the ‘wire services’ and print someone else’s views or what the owner wants.

Reporting on domestic politics, community events, and happenings in education is also coloured with bias because politicians are financed by donations from the community, which leads to ‘quid pro quo’ journalism or “what is in it for me.”

 Society has been transformed over time. Society has moved from hunter gatherer, slavery, feudalism and serfdom, to land owning oligarchies and serfdom, to industrial factory system and wage labour we call capitalism today. Each transformation was always exploitive of the many by the few, and today the few control the media.

Facts are changed or manipulated to benefit those few relaying on them, something we are acutely aware of today with the USA elections and globalisation. Twentieth Century with the advent of radio and film, a whole industry was developed to mislead.

Stalin’s regime, for example, destroyed documents, altered evidence and distorted it. We do that as well, just two examples of many — Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and Romeo Delair’s false fax that precipitated the chaos in Rwanda. There is nothing more heinous than governments prosecuting someone they know is innocent or targeting innocent individuals, experts and journalists who don’t agree with the prevailing narrative and the MM says nothing.

Canada is a democracy at least in how, on paper, relations occur within it. However, there are both inside and outside limitations on this democracy caused by our preliminary system of government, and our international relationships which are enforced from the outside.

Mr. Charboneau writes that MM is needed in DEMOCRACY but he does not define democracy nor does he deal with how MM manipulates it in self interest. Journalists write about lack of democracy in nations that oppose us, but they ignore our manipulation of democratic principles in our own society. Many journalists claim that they are protecting democracy when in fact they undermine it by promoting the voice of the government.

Is democracy a select society of equal individuals as we supposedly define it here in Canada where every few years, we elect political parties to manage the affairs of the nation? When a nation is organized through two or more closely integrated political machines called parties financed, and supported for profit by private media, this is not democracy.

When journalists fail to ask the tough questions, like those asked by Ellsberg, Snowden, and Assange who have suffered severe, criminal attempts to silence them, and in effect, destroy them, government abuse is rampant.

Governments use the MM for character assassination of anyone they deem a threat to their world view. Governments through MM start with character assassination, accusations of dictatorship, crimes against humanity, all followed by ICC charges. Similarly, journalists are accused first of rape, then treason which is followed by incarceration.

MM uses spin, with questionable claims and expert opinion. Favorite tactic is emotion usually where women, children, schools and hospitals are involved. This is followed by attacking a leader with questionable accusation, charges and threats and even assassinations. Omission, story choices and emphasis are used to manipulate the importance or value of the information.

They use loaded words and uncomplimentary pictures, gruesome films to instil subliminal messages of barbarians at the gate. Speculation, statistics and fear of impending doom or Armageddon is also common.

There are too many world leaders and journalists to mention here that government paid NGO’s and media outlets have attacked, assassinated and marginalized because they expose our complicity in wars, regime change and double standard.

For example, Eva Bartlet, an exceptional Canadian independent journalist has spent years in zones in the Middle East including Syria but the MM ignores her because she exposes NATO, Israeli and Turkish complicity in the Middle East wars like presently in the present Syrian conflict.  Consequently, it can be seen international affairs reporting is not transparent but more complicated by omission than reporting on local events.

Fearing persecution, many journalists have become compliant and breach their ethical duty to report the truth.  Reporting the TRUTH framed for them by financial donations and advertising, a form of bribery, forces them to select information and report it from the donor point of view only, is fallacious, not telling the whole story is fallacious, and framing the story for our benefit is fallacious.

Mainstream Media journalism is a tough business, it has gone from pony express, telegraph, newspapers and radio, to newspapers and television, to newspapers and cable television, to wire services to basic internet, and to big data. We the consumers of their information have no idea who is behind compiling the information and whether or not the information is fact or fiction.

The same thing is true with social media including Wikipedia, Siri, Facebook, X, Chatbots OpenAI, and ChatGPT all of which are known to have problems distinguishing fact from fiction but that is where the money is and that is where we are going. Many of these are used by governments to manipulate social and political outcomes. It was not social media that destroyed MM, they committed suicide by not publishing the truth.

The MM has regularly published always-too-late revelations about international events by framing their agenda as building democracy, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Ukraine and many others as good intentions that went off the rails when in fact Vietnam was decolonization. Afghanistan was to expel Russian influence and Ukraine is to stop de-dollarization.  It’s always dogs barking when the caravan has left the village.

There are some sensational revelations by what I call real journalists, about how we are manipulated by military-think-tank-industries that undermine the law, deliberately manipulate the public, and wage proxy war in a way that is both dirty and bound to backfire on our way of life. All too many of us, like Charboneau in his article, are not yet ready to face the reality that you cannot silence the truth.

Walter Trkla is a former Kamloops history teacher who frequently comments on articles in ArmchairMayor.ca.