News Control: Journalism Then and Now by Stephen Fleischman

[Radio_Lady]

October 13, 2006

News Control: Journalism Then and Now



By STEPHEN FLEISCHMAN

"Nobody rewrites what I write!" John Reed (portrayed by Warren Beatty) storms in the movie "Reds" just re-released along with its DVD for the first time since the movie opened in 1981.

This would be a good time to look back and see what's happened to journalism since those exuberant World War I days when crusading journalist, Jack Reed, who hailed from Portland, Oregon, but was called "the wonder boy of Greenwich Village", reported for independent media like Metropolitan Magazine, the New York World, and leftist periodicals, The Masses, The New Communist and Voice of Labour.

In 1919, Reed managed to get into Russia, with his wife, Louise Bryant, to report on the exploding Bolshevik Revolution and came back with a book called "Ten Days That Shook the World" that literally "shook the world" and made journalists think twice about what they were doing with their time.

The fear of "Bolshevism" was played up across American by the US government violating civil rights and the Constitution, arresting dissenting citizens and deporting aliens, in "Palmer Raids", named for Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, not unlike what the Bush Administration is doing today.

The mainstream media had not yet been conglomerated. In fact, a good chunk of it didn't yet exist. Alexander Graham Bell's telephone had just arrived on the scene. Guglielmo Marconi shared his Nobel Prize with Karl Ferdinand Braun for the invention of wireless telegraphy. Radio was growing like topsy with inventors from Hertz to Tesla to Bose and others from half a dozen countries vying to be the first to nail it down.

-----> More of this excellent article at Counterpunch.org.

Stephen Fleischman, television writer-director-producer, spent thirty years in Network News at CBS and ABC, starting in 1953. In 1959, he participated in the formation of the renowned Murrow-Friendly "CBS Reports" series. In 1983, Fleischman won the prestigious Columbia University-Dupont Television Journalism Award. In 2004, he wrote his memoir. See: www.ARedintheHouse.com