“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.” - Mark Twain
"The letter exposes divisions and frustrations within U.S. newsrooms about how they are covering the Gaza conflict." By Laura Wagner and Will Sommer Updated November 9, 2023 at 3:35 p.m. EST|Published November 9, 2023 at 2:43 p.m. EST. “More than 750 journalists from dozens of news organizations have signed an open letter published Thursday condemning Israel’s killing of reporters in Gaza and criticizing Western media’s coverage of the war.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2023/11/09/open-letter-journalists-israel-gaza/?itid=sr
750+ Journalists to Colleagues: 'Tell the Full Truth' About Israeli Atrocities in Gaza "This is our job: to hold power to account. Otherwise, we risk becoming accessories to genocide." https://www.commondreams.org/news/journalist-gaza
"The American press is extraordinarily free and vigorous, as it should be. It should be, not because it is free of inaccuracy, oversimplification and bias, but because the alternative to that freedom is worse than those failings." Judge Robert Bork (1927- ) Circuit Judge for US Court of Appeals 1985
Journalists Need to Sound the Alarm. [Steven jay] https://america.substack.com/p/journalists-need-to-sound-the-alarm?r=1jtd0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Good!!! But they can’t. This plea left out three fundamental factors.
1) Media is a business. If it doesn't offer what people want...they won't buy it. = Underpaid staff and Bankruptcy.
2) Journalists can't denounce national sovereignty, the flaws of the Constitution and reactionary political policies-- and keep their jobs...even in a 'democracy'.
3) Journalists continue to use political, economic, and religious terms that within our creative, ‘believe anything’, and ‘scientific illiterate’ culture can mean ANYTHING! If they wrote using only well defined words...the public wouldn't read it...because it would expose our profound ignorance of how things really work. Like airplanes, cell phones, our bodies, and nature. cw
“Everything is connected, everything is interdependent, so everything is vulnerable.... And that’s why this has to be a more than whole of government, a more than whole of nation [effort]. It really has to be a global effort....” Jen Easterly. Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency’s director in a speech Oct. 29, 2021. [CISA is our nation’s newest federal agency established by the Trump Administration in 2018]
"There is no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard." Arundhati Roy
Journalism is the first rough draft of history. Then we learn more. Sometimes we believe it. Rarely however do we change our minds. The whole truth may never be known but we need to understand and rely on fundamental truths before moving forward with any preconceived notions of our disconnects will play out in reality. cw
"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another." -- Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist. Source: "On the Cryptic and the Elliptic", 1908
"The newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly. Its primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation, must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free but facts are sacred."
-- C. P. Scott (1846-1932) Source: Manchester Guardian, 6 May 1926
"An opinion, right or wrong, can never constitute a moral offense, nor be in itself a moral obligation. It may be mistaken; it may involve an absurdity, or a contradiction. It is a truth, or it is an error; it can never be a crime or a virtue." -- Frances Wright (1795-1852) Scottish-born lecturer, writer, freethinker, feminist, abolitionist, and social reformer Source: A Few Days in Athens
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have...
a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the characters and conduct of their rulers." -- John Adams
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President
“You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.” - Robert A. Heinlein, Revolt in 2100/Methuselah's Children
"A newspaper is a public trust, and we will suffer as a society without them. It is not the Internet that has killed them. It is their own greed, it is their own stupidity, and it is capitalism that has taken our daily newspapers from us." - Michael Moore
"What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
"The liberty of the press would be an empty sound, and no man would venture to write on any subject, however, pure his purpose, without an attorney at one elbow and a counsel at the other. From minds thus subdued by the fear of punishment, there could issue no works of genius to expand the empire of human reason." -- Thomas Erskine (1750-1823) Lord Chancellor of England
Source: Trial of John Stockdale, 9 December 1789
"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie -- a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days -- but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please." -- Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German-American political theorist, escaped Nazi Germany Source: 'Hannah Arendt: From an Interview' Comments made in 1974 during an interview with the French writer Roger Errera and published in October 26, 1978 issue of The NewYork Review of Books Interview
"If newsmen do not tell the truth as they see it because it might make waves, or if their bosses decide something should or should not be broadcast because of Washington or Main Street consequences, we have dishonored ourselves and we have lost the First Amendment by default."
-- Richard Salant former President of CBS News.
C:\Users\chuck\Documents\0 Trilemma 2\Quotes\Media\If newsmen do not tell the truth as they see it.doc
“If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own” The regular sign off message of a San Fransciso Radio DJ in the late 60s or early 70s.
The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses. - Malcolm X
Found in The Works, vol. 5 (Correspondence 1786-1789) Jefferson writes from Paris to Edward Carrington, whom Jefferson sent as a delegate to the Continental Congress from 1786 to 1788, on the importance of a free press to keep government in check. He concludes that if he had to choose between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter”:
The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.
Jefferson constantly surprises the reader with his radical insights into the nature of government and his remedies to correct its abuses. In this letter written from Paris while he was Minister to France to Edward Carrington, whom he had appointed to represent the state of Virginia at the Continental Congress he makes two such insights: the first is the topic of the quotation, namely that he thinks the role of a free press in keeping government power in check is so important that he would prefer “newspapers without government” to “government without newspapers; the second is his statement about the nature of European governments (remember he is writing on the eve of the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789), that they have divided the nation into two contending classes where the government were like wolves who devoured the wealth of the people, who were like sheep. Jefferson warns Carrington that all governments, even the new American government of which they themselves were members, unless checked by a knowledgeable citizenry, would inevitably become wolves.
John Zeglin 2-21-20 https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart
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