Journalism will never disappear. Someone will always need to give out the news because as much as people tell me that current events bore them, they still want to know basic things like, "Why is the red line on the D.C. metro always under maintenance?" and "Why was I-81 backed up for hours?"
And that stuff is important, too. But sometimes I think people try to avoid the news because they don't like politics and discussing politics can only bring you trouble (unless you're like me and enjoy that part).
But when I turn on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or any national broadcast, I wonder how much people question what they hear. The news is supposed to be impartial, yet each of these stations has its own agenda. From Bill O'Reilly to Keith Olbermann (despite his move to Current TV), opinions are treated as news, and news is treated subjectively.
There's also each time politicians try to quell WikiLeaks, such as when Senator Lieberman got Amazon to drop the muckraking site.
In the well-known Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism by Laurence W. Britt, one point centers on the media.
6. A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’ excesses.
And while learning about the dissident press, I was surprised to learn how many American communists were involved in the news, crying foul at the world. In a way, I shouldn't be surprised because I've always been enamored to a degree with communism.
However, many people aren't aware of how strictly the press was controlled within the Soviet Union. Not only did use Stalin use the propagandist Pravda to his advantage, he would purge anyone in the Communist Party who did not follow a line of Stalinist thinking. In one part of Slavenka Drakulic's book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed--the majority of which takes place in Eastern Europe before the Soviet Union's collapse--Drakulic tells the reader about a journalist she knew who wrote a piece that did not go well with the Communist Party even though she was a member of the same party (all journalists had to be members of the Communist Party). She wasn't blacklisted, but everyone in her newsroom ignored her from then on.
Drakulic also describes a time when she had a chat with her censor. He wasn't there to tell her that she was writing anything that the Party didn't like; he just wanted to show her that they were always watching. After that, Drakulic didn't need a censor. She had enough self-concern that she was her own personal censor.
A controlled mass media doesn't point to strictly fascism nor strictly communism. It's not about whether the media are too far right or too far left. What people need to know is that a free press and a totalitarian government cannot coexist.
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