Chapter 8: Freedom From the Press

 
 
 

The state of society must be very corrupt and base indeed when the people in possession of such a monitor as the press can be induced to exchange the heaven-born blessings of liberty for the galling chains of despotism. Samuel Bryan in the Anti-Federalist Papers.

 

        The statement above was true when Bryan made it. At that time it was a rather simple and inexpensive matter to establish a newspaper. There may have been a few Americans, even at that time, who could have purchased all of the newspapers in the nation in an effort to be able to dictate what those papers would print. Had anyone done so, however, it would have been easy for people with opposing views to simply start their own newspapers. When the founding fathers spoke of the value of a free press they were referring to freedom of the press from government control.
        They did not reckon with the possibility of the press being controlled by a faction within the population. As I have previously explained, Nicholas Biddle did attempt to influence the press with lavish expenditures of money when he was attempting to gain a renewal of the charter of the second Bank of America. He was not successful in gaining renewal of the bank's charter but he did gain the support of many of the nation's newspapers for his renewal efforts and he was probably somewhat successful in swaying the thinking of quite a few Americans.
        To the best of my knowledge there was no other effort, on such a scale, to control the policies of newspapers in the rest of the 19th century. As I have previously stated one item on the planners' agenda was to control the press in order to be able to use it for their own purposes. The original Round Table group in the U.S. included some journalists and publishers and there were five major U.S. newspapers that, from the beginning, could be counted on to support its objectives.
        In 1914 the magazine The New Republic was founded by Willard Straight, a Morgan partner. The purpose of The New Republic was to guide the socialist movement along the path the planners wanted it to take and to generally promote socialism in academic circles. It was not intended that the magazine would attempt to directly influence the thinking of the American people but rather that it would guide the activities of a group of pseudo-intellectuals that was already gaining some prominence in academic circles. I refer to them as pseudo-intellectuals because in promoting their ideas they appealed to the emotions, rather than the rationality, of their students and others.
        A young man named Walter Lippmann was just beginning his career about this time. Professor Quigley stated that Lippmann was a member of the Round Table group and was, from 1914 to the time when Quigley wrote Tragedy and Hope, the chief spokesman for the establishments on both sides of the Atlantic in matters of international affairs. I find this easy to believe because I remember that whenever the U.S. government took any action inimical to the best interests of the United States, as it did all too often, Lippmann would always laud it as a great act of statesmanship. I noticed this anomaly even though I still possessed at that time a firm belief in the Democratic party that I inherited from my father.
        The following is an excerpt from the Congressional Record of 1917.
 
 

Mr. Callaway. Mr. Chairman, under unanimous consent, I insert in the Record at this point a statement showing the newspaper combination, which explains their activity in this war matter, just discussed by the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Moore). In March, 1915, the J.P.Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and a sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States.These twelve men worked the problem out by selecting 179 newspapers, and then began by an elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the country. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers. This contract is in existence at the present time, and it accounts for the news columns of the daily press of the country being filled with all sorts of preparedness arguments and misrepresentations as to the present condition of the United States Army and Navy and the possibility and probability of the United States being attacked by foreign foes. This policy also included the suppression of everything in opposition to the wishes of the interests served. The effectiveness of this scheme has been conclusively demonstrated by the character of stuff carried in the daily press throughout the country since March 1915. They have resorted to anything necessary to commercialize public sentiment and sandbag the National Congress into making extravagant and wasteful appropriations for the Army and Navy under the false pretense that it was necessary. Their stock argument is that it is "patriotism." They are playing on every prejudice and passion of the American people.

        This is only the unsupported statement of a politician and the words of a politician are necessarily suspect. This is the only reference to this little scheme that I have ever encountered and I know absolutely nothing about Congressman Callaway so I can only speculate as to the truth of this allegation by evaluating it in the light of the facts in my possession. I would like to point out that in 1915 the nation's newspapers, and particularly the dailies, constituted the bulk of the news media. There were magazines that regularly ran articles on current affairs and sometimes they exerted a considerable influence on public opinion. These daily newspapers and some of the magazines, then, constituted the whole of the news media.
        There are indications that seem to support Callaway's story. In 1917 Col. Edward Mandell House sent a cable to President Woodrow Wilson in which he instructed Wilson to "suppress" any newspaper accounts depicting Russia as an enemy of the U.S. This indicates that House assumed that Wilson had the ability to do this. This certainly seems to lend credence to Congressman Callaway's allegations. In addition his allegations fit very comfortably into the overall pattern of the planners' manipulations of the press before 1915 and of all of the news media in later years. Also there was a very substantial amount of opposition to any U.S. participation in the war and the planners unquestionably wanted the U.S. to enter the war.
        If the planners did indeed adopt this policy of controlling the press in the U.S. I have no way of knowing how long they continued it. After the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 the Democrats complained loudly that most of the nation's press opposed his New Deal policies. To whatever extent this was true it could have indicated that the scheme explained by Congressman Callaway was no longer operating or it could have indicated that it was not as easy to enlist the support of those papers for the New Deal policies as it was to induce them to support England and war preparations. In any event, FDR took full advantage of the new medium of radio to speak directly to the people and thus diminish the power of the press.
         It was in the post-WWII era that the planners really began to acquire their power over the media. From the end of WWII to the present time several large newspaper chains have been created by purchasing daily newspapers that serve cities other than the nation's largest cities. These chains generally support liberal policies. Control of the Associated Press also determines, to a large extent, the way many American newspapers report national and international news since all but the largest dailies rely primarily on the AP for coverage of this news.
        It was control of the nation's three major television networks that really enabled the planners to convert the traditional news media into their personal propoganda machine. Each of these three networks' news programs reaches tens of millions of Americans on a daily basis. It appears that to many Americans the very size and power of these networks is reason enough to believe that they will report the news accurately and objectively. All three of them put essentially the same spin on the news they report and this increases their credibility. This impression is further strengthened by the fact that so many newspapers and most of the news magazines report the news in the same way.
        The true facts regarding current events are available through a few newspapers and magazines that report the news objectively or with a conservative bias. You may wonder how I can say that the truth is available from publications with a conservative bias after I have just made the point that the media, in general, cannot be relied on because it reports the news with a liberal bias. The answer lies in the fact that the traditional media distorts the news to promote its liberal ideology when the true story would not be favorable to this ideology. Because of this fact it is not necessary for conservative publications to distort the truth in support of their own beliefs because the truth itself supports their position. There is also the fact that liberals seek support for their policies mainly by appeals to emotion and their own philosophy holds that the nation will be better served if they control it, which belief, in itself, justifies deceiving the people. The conservative movement, on the other hand, appeals mainly to rationality and distortions of the truth cannot promote rational explanations.
        There is absolutely no reason why the reader should accept my contention that the traditional media reports the news with a very liberal bias but, fortunately, anyone can easily prove for himself the truth of my contention. In many cases it may be difficult to verify this liberal bias without some knowledge of the true facts. This can usually be obtained only by consulting some conservative news source. In some cases, however, this bias can be detected by careful observation and rational analysis of the stories reported by the traditional media. The following are two examples of this liberal bias. It would be easy to fill a large book with such examples but my space is extremely limited.
        Several years ago the Republican controlled House passed a school lunch bill that authorized more money for this program than President Clinton requested but also specified that this money would be made available as block grants to the states which would allow the states to determine how the money would be spent. When this story was reported by the media the story usually opened with a quote from a Democrat that the Republicans wanted to starve school children. When the story was first reported most of these reports did not even mention that the Republican bill provided more money than Clinton requested and usually did not mention that it was to be made available in block grants. If these facts were mentioned they were mentioned very briefly at the end of the article instead of being clearly explained as the opposite side of the argument. Most of the media continued to run stories on the subject for many days. Television stories sometimes opened with a picture of school children in Louisiana who had written to the president to plead with him not to allow the Republicans to starve them or a picture of Richard Gephardt telling kids in a Wisconsin classroom that the Republicans wanted to starve them.
        Now it is obvious that the reporters who reported these stories knew the facts regarding the bill. It is their job to know them. When any Democrat accused the Republicans of wanting to starve school children any self-respecting reporter would ask them to justify that contention. If they refused to do so the reporter should not have quoted them. If they did offer some justification of his statement, this should have been included in the article along with the Republican response. This is an example of the type of bias that can be determined by observation since the facts were eventually reported by the media as coverage of the story continued.
        The global warming story is an example of the type of bias that can discerned by one who has access to the truth. The press has been portraying the danger of global warming as a well established scientific fact. In actuality the concensus of opinion among scientists working in this area is that the theoretical basis of concern over global warming is extremely flawed, global temperature is not, now, increasing, and that global warming, if it does occur, might very well be more beneficial than harmful to human beings and other living things. Some of the very same people who are now proclaiming the danger of global warming were warning us, twenty or twenty-five years ago, of an impending ice age. In truth we have very little, or nothing, to fear from global warming but we have a great deal to fear from the measures being promoted to deal with this non-problem. The media continues to promote the non-existent threat of global warming to induce the people to accept draconian measures to ostensibly deal with it. The reason why the media is doing this will be examined in the chapter on environmentalism.
        Why does the traditional media report the news with an extreme liberal bias? The answer is short and simple, this is how the people who control the organizations that comprise the media want it reported. The TV networks, the daily newspapers, and the news magazines are owned by corporations. The people who control these corporations control their policies. Thus it is obvious that it is these people who are responsible for the bias of the media. The people in charge of the news departments of the TV networks are fond of saying that they do not interfere with the way in which their employees report the news and in most cases I believe this is true. In hiring their reporters and writers they look at past performance and hire only those who have already demonstrated their willingness to report the news with an extremely liberal slant. These people do what they have done in the past and the result is the observed liberal bias. If one of them should have a change of heart and decide to report the news objectively the head of the news department definitely would interfere and that individual would quickly be looking for a new job.
        One of the mainstays of liberal philosophy is that the government should appropriate money from the wealthy and give it to the poor and the people who control the media go to extreme lengths to promote liberal philosophy. These people are among the very wealthy. Does this mean that their support of liberalism results from a spirit of altruism? There is no evidence to support that belief. They actually make a great deal of money by promoting liberal policies while claiming to report the news objectively. More importantly, however, most of these liberal policies have been implemented and instead of alleviating the problems they were ostensibly intended to deal with have aggravated them. If the people who control the media had the best interests of the nation at heart they would not continue to support policies that have, in most cases, failed miserably.
        If these people are actually interested in promoting the agenda of the planners their support of liberalism is perfectly logical. Thus it is obvious to me that it is no accident that the media has become the propoganda arm of the planners and their extensive establishment. We still have a free press, in the sense that it is not subject to government coercion, but as long as it is virtually controlled by a small part of the population who use it to increase the power of the government over individuals it is no safeguard of liberty.
        There is, of course, no legislative answer to this problem. Alternative sources for news are probably the only way to combat the efforts of this propoganda machine. The chances of expanding the number of these news sources or expanding the coverage of those that already exist do not appear to be very encouraging. There is, however some reason for hope. Rush Limbaugh has garnered a very large audience for his syndicated radio show. In some ways this is similar to FDR's use of radio in the 1930s. His show has spawned many imitators who have also been quite successful. There is also the internet which has already shown some promise as a method of disseminating news and may be quite effective in the future.
        One reason that the traditional media has been able to deceive the American people so often and so successfully is the control that the planners have gained over our schools. Their efforts in these two areas have thus complemented each other. The dumbing down of Americans has made it easier for the media to deceive them while the media propaganda has made the downgrading of our schools easier.