Corporate Media

Yesterday, Wikileaks reported that the US government had demanded Wikileaks destroy all files about them:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has told a media summit that the US government has ordered him to destroy all the material WikiLeaks holds on them – published and unpublished - and to stop using government insiders to gather fresh material. 

“[When we released our documents] the Pentagon said we must destroy everything we published and were going to publish,” Assange said. ”And if we didn’t, we would be ‘compelled to do so,’” the summit’s website says. 

Assange made the allegation as he addressed the News 2011 Summit in Hong Kong via Skype. News executives and media owners from over 80 countries have gathered there to discuss editorial principles and tools as well as business models for the news media. Reports say Assange has been under police pressure to stop talking – exactly the kind of oppressive official action he has been working to highlight. 

He was met with a storm of applause from journalists as he appeared on the screen. 

Speaking about modern journalism, Assange claimed it was facing crisis of a legitimacy today and accused the mainstream press of corruption and bias.

Julian Assange is right! Many mainstream media reporters are biased, mainly because of who pays their wages. However the difficulty is that some journalists are not corrupt and therefore it needs to be said that they undertake a credible role in reporting the truth.

Unfortunately factual reporting has been declining worldwide over the last few years... and especially in New Zealand. The continued underreporting of many important issues just one indicator that New Zealand's mainstream media and their watchdogs are biased.

Here's Goerge Monbiot on the media:

So the rightwing papers run endless exposures of benefit cheats, yet say scarcely a word about the corporate tax cheats. They savage the trade unions and excoriate the BBC. They lambast the regulations that restrain corporate power. They school us in the extrinsic values – the worship of power, money, image and fame – which advertisers love but which make this a shallower, more selfish country. Most of them deceive their readers about the causes of climate change. These are not the obsessions of working people. They are the obsessions thrust upon them by the multimillionaires who own these papers. 

The corporate media is a gigantic astroturfing operation: a fake grassroots crusade serving elite interests. In this respect the media companies resemble the Tea Party movement, which claims to be a spontaneous rising of blue-collar Americans against the elite but was founded with the help of the billionaire Koch brothers and promoted by Murdoch's Fox News.

I totally agree with him. So what are we going to do about it?