Say It Ain't So Already

The U.S. Media as Government Henchmen

October 25, 2010 at 4:10 PM Leave a comment

As I noted yesterday, during the Watergate era, Nixon’s henchmen were assigned the task of trying to discredit Daniel Ellsberg.  Fast forward to today, and the U.S. media — working as an arm of the government — has assumed that role when it comes to Wikileaks and Julian Assange.

Here is another case in point:

On the October 22 broadcast of ABC World News With Diane Sawyer, the anchor weighed in on the WikiLeaks Iraq War documents by noting, “Arab television is already trumpeting the revelations.” Not exactly a promising start, but the correspondent Martha Raddatz did a pretty good job of conveying the findings:  hundreds of Iraqi civilians killed at checkpoints, thousands of unreported civilian deaths and torture of detainees.

Then the report went back to Sawyer for a follow-up question:

“I know there’s a lot of outrage about this again tonight, Martha. But tell me, anything more about prosecuting the WikiLeaks group?”

Gee.  Whatever happened to an independent media?  Wikileaks is doing the U.S. media’s job for it and they can’t stand it.

Now that corporations are buying our government, the term “corporate media” is taking on a whole new meaning.  The media is government is the corporation.  They’ll soon be one and the same.

Entry filed under: ABC / Disney Media Networks, Corporatocracy, Media - General. Tags: .