I never said that news organizations are, or should be, objective. I don’t think it’s possible. I think if they want to try for balance, that’s fine and if they want to be blatantly one-sided, that’s fine, too.

As for what say I to gov’t encroachment on press freedom, I DID say “and its agents and friends”. So my statement did not restrict the “encroachers”, as you would hypothetically characterize them, to the monolithic “government”. And, truthfully, “encroachment on press freedom” is not how I would characterize what I was referring to. I was talking about the view, which is widespread today and getting more so by the year, that we have come to a state in which the two ruling parties prop each other up whenever necessary, even to the extent of ignoring their own ideology when necessary, and therefore really merit the label of “one party”. Ya don’t see THAT much in the daily papers, do ya?

What do you think would happen if a source or, God forbid, a journalist were to try to get a statement like that printed in a mainstream publication? It would of course be set aside. The defense of mainstream journalists to such an action would be that it’s not fair. Well, that’s their opinion, and they’re entitled to it. It so happens a huge percentage of the adult population would disagree (I’d guess 40-60% depending on how you’d word the question), and my main point was that if that large a piece of the nation believes they’re being taken for a ride, they’re not gonna take kindly to the idea of paying for the privilege.

As for specific examples of covering things up, please don’t insult my intelligence. I’ve said my piece already, and I will not be drawn into a useless debate with someone who has a minority agenda to push. I will just say that I don’t buy that you’re ignorant of the thousands of cases of the press helping this or that interest hide or distort this or that over the years. Tens of millions of angry and fed-up readers are not all hallucinating or delusional. They weren’t in the Soviet Union, and they’re not in the United States. The U.S. press has been surprisingly open in admitting its sins over the years, most recently in the Edwards scandal, where an NBC reporter freely admitted on their live air that the mainstream media had deliberately refrained from reporting the affair that they knew about on the grounds that it would be inappropriate to do so before Edwards himself had admitted to it. In other words, NBC actually expected viewers to believe that this is standard policy for any scandal involving a VIP — you don’t report it without the perp’s permission. That was a novel way of defending an admitted cover-up. I wish I could report to you that the admission itself was a rarity, but it is not these days.

As I mentioned, this is just one example of thousands, and an inane one at that. The serious ones make you physically ill to read about, if you have a conscience, which most editors obviously do not. As I said before, I didn’t come on this board to explain the whole world to the catatonic journalists who are posting here. That would be a complete waste of my time. I thought I’d post some ideas for the benefit of those who already have some idea of how the world works.

I never said all US media were without truth or value; if I believed that, why would I still read their stories myself? Do not mischaracterize me. That only helps reconfirm for me and others what we already knew to be true about the media.

If newspapers, and mainstream media in general, want to have a dignified future, they must stop this tendency they have to jump to the defense of the elite at every actual or perceived slight. That is the primary cause of the problems happening now. In the past, they were generally believed, or at least it was believed that they were doing their best to be an honest broker. Beginning in the Sixties, that perception began to fall, and today they are widely disbelieved and almost universally despised. They can change that, but only if they stop belittling their critics, talking down to their readers, and parroting the talking points of their narcissistic minders who, from their posts outside the profession of journalism, pull the strings to steer the message.