"On reality and bitter truths" by Paul Jay of Real News Network

[JohnyCanuck]

That's the problem with most news these days. Journalists know that people with power publicly say things that are in their interests, and often not what they really think or want. Journalists understand there is an economic and political elite and when they say "for the good of the nation", they mean themselves. That we live in a class society is a fact everyone knows but few journalists acknowledge in their work.

There are great economic and social pressures brought to bear on journalists to go along with the official narrative. We saw this in the extreme in American newsrooms after 9/11 and in coverage of the Iraq war. Dan Rather and Tom Fenton of CBS have both talked about the fear in US newsrooms of being called unpatriotic if they criticized the Bush administration.

Canadian news coverage of our role in the Afghan war has only been a little better. With a few notable exceptions, most reporting and commentary has avoided the fundamental question of what the mission is and why are we there. A policy of aligning with war criminals and narco-war lords as the basis of building a "democracy" was surely doomed, yet under US pressure that's what Canada bought into.

I interviewed General Lewis MacKenzie in 2004 and he answered the question "why are we there?" in a very straightforward way. He said because we didn't go to Iraq and we had to pay to keep the US border open to our goods. He could have added, we had to pay in blood. Of course, here we get back to the issue that not much of that blood is blue.

http://communities.canada.com/shareit/blogs/reality/archive/2010/05/19/the-reality-of-bitter-truths.aspx

On Edit: Oops sorry, forgot to add the link.

[Scuba]

1. We'll compromise all our principles to sell one more snowmobile.