Roaming Charges

The Media and all its Craziness

By Jim Vail 

The media is in a pickle these days. We have a president who was elected by attacking the media and calling it fake news.

I have worked in the newspaper business for many years and know that the end is just around the corner. The Internet and all the social media have replaced good reporting and investigative reporting. 

But I can't say that the newspaper is perfect. I have struggled myself reporting for a community newspaper called Inside Publications that is run by a very right-wing publisher. He promotes pro-police war on crime reports, supports pro-empire statues like Columbus, is very disdainful of the poor and is against taxing the rich (libertarian), etc. 

His newspaper is in danger of dying the death of the hundreds that have perished due to the lack of advertising that was usurped by the googles and facebooks and craigslists. I can't say I feel sorry for him.

The media is owned by big money interests and supports big business. The New York Times is biased in support of the U.S. State Department and promoted the war in Iraq. The Washington Post was bought by Jeff Bezos and thus promotes his warped pro billionaire anti-worker reality. The Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times are similarly owned by big business interests that are anti-union/anti-workers. They are capitalists.

These mainstream papers are not even covering the trial of the century - the U.S. government's persecution of Julian Assange and Wikileaks and the attack on our freedom of the press. They do not write about this trial and its attack on our Constitutional right because they are owned by big business, not the people.

One fantastic website I read is Counterpunch edited by Jeffrey St. Claire, who started it with the late/great Alexander Cockburn, a former reporter and columnist for The Village Voice. Together they wrote an amazing book about the CIA and its crimes against people around the world called Whiteout.

As my friend John stated so clearly and matter of factly - the horrible situation we find ourselves in today as a country is because this government is run by the capitalists for the ruling class, not a government run by socialists for the people.

And voting for either ruling class candidate A or ruling class candidate B will not change that.

Roaming Charges, Counterpunch.org, Jeffrey St. Clair ...

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