Click here to access article by Robert Parry from Consortium News.
The author is no dedicated anti-capitalist, but he is a journalist with a reasonable level of commitment to truth. He looks back on his own journalistic experience and those of his colleagues in mainstream media and sees an increasing concentration of power and wealth that has grossly impacted the way news is reported. His perspective runs from a baseline of the 1970s to the present. This limited perspective misses the class based way that big media has always functioned--to serve the values and interests of the powerful, the One Percent. Thus, he refers to the 1970s as the "golden days of the 1970s".
As they say, everything is relative, and this truism certainly applies to reporting in the 1970s when all mainstream media was, until the final years of that awful war, solidly behind the Pentagon-run war and branded protesters as essentially traitors. Pressure came from corporate boardrooms on down to journalists to report the Vietnam War favorably, and in the process the gap between reality and media lies eventually created a huge crack that could no longer be credibly hidden. Much credit can be given to anti-war protestors and underground newspapers, and even more to the brave Vietnamese people who defeated the most powerful military in the world.
Hence, mainstream media sources were forced to report on some of these realities, but even much of this coverage was more in the nature of damage control and didn't reveal the whole truth. Their pro-government coverage of all the assassinations--John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcom X, and their coverup of government drug trafficking during this period are some of the most egregious illustrations of their catering to power. But, how could it be otherwise? Mainstream media is an integral part of the ruling class.
Therefore, I recommend this article as a review of the deterioration of mainstream journalism from the 1970s to the present day, but it must be kept in mind that this was a process of going from bad to worse. It has become worse simply because the concentration of power and wealth has increased, and there has been no organized opposition to this trend from any sector of our society until very recently with the Occupy movement.
