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There have been a number of journalists complaints about the pressure on them to alter, slant, or bury stories. Books have been written about it. An older book, but a good one, is "Into the Buzzsaw," a collection of essays from journalists who had controversial stories squashed by political pressure or by corporate/financial pressure. Publishers claim they are concerned about lawsuits, or access to politicians, or their corporate sponsors, so they kill a story.
A year ago several journalists criticized FOX for considering party allegiance in their hiring practices, and there were several stories released about the pressure Roger Ailes used to force conformity. Dan Rather has spoken out about his former network and the industry as a whole, as have many, many lesser journalists.
But how do you spread a story like that when it is against the industry as a whole? The industry won't print it, and any minor outlet which does print it is ridiculed and ignored. The journalists who wrote the story won't find jobs in the industry again, and that alone is enough to keep most people quiet. And if they aren't afraid of losing their jobs and they do write stories criticizing their bosses, they are out of work, so they can't write any more stories.
And they don't have to slant all stories. Let Obama have a good week or two, let McCain get beat up. But overall, keep the stories coming, keep them slanting towards McCain, keep the tiny little digs at Obama ("terrorist fist bump") flowing. Raise a big fuss over nothing against one candidate, praise the other undeservedly.
The owners hire the publishers who decide what gets printed. The publishers hire the editors, who hire the writers. When the owners don't like a story, they tell the publisher or editors to "alter" it, or kill it. They can say "Our sponsors won't like that angle," or "we have to worry about public backlash on that story (so keep the number of children blown into bloody fragments by our bombs off the pages and screens)." They don't have to control every little story. Something like Katrina or Abu Graib can't be controlled, so you let it run, and you let the guilty take their lumps. And you hire some genuine muckraking journalists from time to time, or people like Olberman or Maddow. Can't hurt, and might even bring in some ratings. But you slant it all back the way you want it when it's time.
There were stories during the 2000 election, confirmed even by the networks, of journalists watching Gore during the debates and mocking him. Hard to imagine them being objective. Then there were the slanders against Gore, claiming he had lied about one thing or exagerated another. Many of those were direct and deliberate misrepresentations by journalists. Every journalist knew Al Gore never said he invented the Internet, yet they all joked about it. The lie that Gore had claimed he discovered Love Canal was spread far and wide and quick with the blare of a bullhorn, but when the students who witnessed Gore's speech showed what Gore really said, the corrections were printed weeks later, in tiny print on back pages. That story was a deliberate lie created by two journalists--Kathleen Seelye of the NYT, and CeCe Connally of the WP. Both continue to have jobs, as far as I know, even though they were caught red handed falsifying quotes to affect an election.
The truth is out there, the stories are written, the reporters do speak up. But the corporate media doesn't squeal on itself.
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