Dirty Laundry and the Mainstream Media

From Murrow to Murdoch, a 50 year run on the national media ski slope; it only goes downhill.

1957 cover featuring Edward R. Murrow and Rupert Murdoch fifty years later, in 2007. These two easily represent the full spectrum in news integrity; Murrow is a hero to journalists.

(CLERMONT, Fla.) - As Emma Goldman noted, "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution" so on 26 October 2010, I will be in Section C-B, Row 7, Seat 11 at the Amway Arena for an Eagle’s happening.

The Eagle’s dedicated one of my most favorite of their tunes to Rupert Murdoch:

Dirty Laundry, Eagles Farewell Tour

Keith Rupert Murdoch, is an Australian-born American media magnate and the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of News Corporation.

In the late 1950s he began dabbling in television, and his first foray into TV in the USA, was when he created Fox Broadcasting Company in 1986.

In 1958, journalist Edward R. Murrow gave a speech at the Radio-Television News Directors Association which nailed the network television establishment and its emphasis on popular entertainment over programs that would enlighten and educate the public.

That speech was the climax of the 2005 motion picture Good Night, and Good Luck:

Good Night, And Good Luck

Murrow’s ideas remain bulletproof, and in this reporters opinion Murdoch has a long and dirty laundry list of his finger’s in everybody’s pies!

Murdoch plays host at private meetings with influential politicians, and both Democrats and Republicans play along by dismissing the gatherings as politically insignificant, merely social events with dinners and drinks.

Isidor Feinstein, better known as I. F. Stone or Izzy Stone was an independent radical investigative journalist who noted:

"All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed."

"If God, as some now say, is dead, He no doubt died of trying to find an equitable solution to the Arab-Jewish problem."

"I made no claims to inside stuff. I tried to give information, which could be documented, so the reader could check it for himself...Reporters tend to be absorbed by the bureaucracies they cover; they take on the habits, attitudes, and even accents of the military or the diplomatic corps. Should a reporter resist the pressure; there are many ways to get rid of him... But a reporter covering the whole capital on his own — particularly if he is his own employer — is immune from these pressures.

"The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing - for the sheer fun and joy of it - to go right ahead and fight, knowing you're going to lose. You mustn't feel like a martyr. You've got to enjoy it."

Stone spent his career challenging government deception and press complicity and he confronted the lies of the American government in a time when nobody else had the kerbangers/thatcher’s to do it.

Stone understood that dissent is the only thing that keep’s democracies healthy but his peers and colleagues viewed him as a pariah.

As Edward R. Murrow noted, "We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it."

Izzy Stone was one lone voice out of the wilderness of all the BS that emanated out of D.C., but he lived long enough to see himself vindicated on "searing issues such as the Holocaust and fascism, the McCarthy purges, the nuclear arms race, the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and the endless struggle between Israelis and Palestinians." [1]

In this humble reporter’s opinion History indeed will be what we make it.

Good day, good night and good luck to US All!

1. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joe_conason/2006/10/06/i_f_stone_book