The absence of Dylan Ratigan, Keith Olbermann, Phil Donahue, Ted Koppel, Sam Donaldson, Dan Rather, Katharine Graham, and a few others was brought to my attention via a Facebook post this morning. It got me to thinking about just how sorely these people and a few others are missed, especially in an election year. It is no mere coincidence that these giants of journalism are no longer around, with the exception of Mrs. Graham who has passed on, in an environment that so often rejects the truth if only by omission of fact.
If something is going to be a problem for your employer, like the rise of the corporatacracy playing a major role in the demise of Democracy, then you simply don’t talk about it. The death of American Democracy. Just pretend it doesn’t exist. Dylan Ratigan, couldn’t bring himself to do that which led to his classic on-air rant while others sat there listening aghast, in disbelief that someone had the courage to speak truthfully about a topic sure to upset Mr. Ratigan’s employer at that time, MSNBC.
A clear presentation of the truth, or trying to get to it to the best of our abilities, is contrary to achieving the greatest profit possible. Until we somehow come to grips with this and restore some balance between advertising and editorial, replacing greed for the sake of greed with journalism for the sake of journalism, the American people will continue to be misinformed, disinformed and sometimes just plain lied to, making it impossible to have any kind of an informed electoral process.
Simply put, the oligarchs win and Democracy loses.
Ignorance is a terrible thing. Particularly so, when it is cultivated by an electronic media interested more in the power of profit than in educating and enlightening their viewers.
Why hire journalists, when you can get former poltical “insiders” hot off the campaign trail or former politicians themselves to tell you what they think? You can forget about objectivity. No, there’ll be none of that, as their words will be seasoned to fit the needs of their friends and parties. But who cares, if the end result is an increase in profitability for the network?
How did we get into this disinformational mess? Deregulation led the way followed by the explosion of media with the advent of cable-tv, satellite broadcasting and the Internet, pushing us through the looking glass and into the magic land of electioneering, where fact becomes fiction, fiction becomes fact and an army of bean counters cuts down anyone who dares speak out against this relatively new and all-powerful corporate culture driven almost solely by sales.