Blind Willie McTell News - 3

Pressing Matters on the Old Press

In the first post of this series we looked at the "DNA" of the history of the main stream media, and found that they still, to this day, have the genetic markers of MOMCOM, and are still performing their song and dance routine (Blind Willie McTell News).

Add to that their inherent aversion to the history of the America of way back then, the America of now, as well as the ominous, approaching America of tomorrow  (Blind Willie McTell News - 2).

Some will say that they had to do it in a shark infested capitalist eat capitalist media society.

A society increasingly driven by predatory evolutionary dynamics, demands of advertisers, demands of stockholders for profit, and technological changes that put pressure on the old styles and models of for-profit international news corporations (Survival Of The Fittest Willie McTell).

In yesterday's post we took a look at some behind-the-scenes and unexpected sources which also bring distorting pressure and burden to the main stream media:

The graphic to the upper-left points out today's topic, which is that the U.S. is in one decline after another, including a decline concerning a fundamental principle in traditional American values: a free press.

Concerning that fundamental value, we have declined to almost last place in the top 50 ...
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Countries that pride themselves on being democracies and respecting the rule of law have not set an example, far from it. Freedom of information is too often sacrificed to an overly broad and abusive interpretation of national security needs, marking a disturbing retreat from democratic practices. Investigative journalism often suffers as a result.

This has been the case in the United States (46th), which fell 13 places, one of the most significant declines, amid increased efforts to track down whistleblowers and the sources of leaks.
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The political power of the military has developed and matured since Huntington published The Soldier and the State in 1957. ... The military has become a political constituency that must be addressed in the Washington power equation ...“The professional military, with its allies and communities, has developed into a potent political force in American government. Knowledgeable people, particularly those who, in each administration, are charged with the direction of national security affairs, recognize this, even if they cannot, for political reasons, admit it openly .”

(A Tale of Coup Cities - 9, emphasis in original). That Dredd Blog post cites to sources which point out that the military has an impact on the media because it is the most powerful single political entity in the nation.

That post also cites to authorities who point out that military political power grows with the growth of public trust in the military (ibid).

Dredd Blog has, with concern, pointed out that trust in the military is at remarkable highs in the U.S. (Stockholm Syndrome on Steroids? - 2).

So, how does the military bring political power to bear on the mainstream media so as to promote the military establishment's warmongering ideology, together with their lust for more and more taxpayer dollars?

The answer, in general, is "through the propaganda engines of McTell News" (The Ways of Bernays).

But today, let's focus on the military NSA as one of the military weapons used against journalists:

The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based body that promotes press freedom around the world, has devoted the first two chapters of its annual report on global threats to an assessment of the impact of the NSA’s data sweep. Its internet advocacy co-ordinator, Geoffrey King, warns that the NSA’s dragnet threatens to put journalists under a cloud of suspicion and to expose them to routine spying by government agencies.

By storing mass data for long periods, the NSA could develop the capability to recreate a reporter’s research, retrace a source’s movements and listen in on past communications, King warns. “It could soon be possible to uncover sources with such ease as to render meaningless any promise of confidentiality a journalist may attempt to provide – and if an interaction escapes scrutiny in the first instance, it could be reconstructed later.”

CPJ’s annual report, “Attacks on the Press”, which was released at the United Nations building in New York on Wednesday, chronicles a troubled year for journalism with 211 journalists imprisoned and 70 killed – a near-record number. On top of an all-too familiar account of censorship, kidnappings, detention and killings, the committee’s warnings on the dangers of mass surveillance sound a new alarm for the digital age.

(Guardian, "NSA actions pose 'direct threat to journalism'"). The military is infected with the "destroy it in order to save it" and "dominate it in order to make it free" toxic memes.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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