The Myth of a Forgotten American Free Press
Debunking the Myth of a Forgotten American Free Press
One of the most harmful bits of mythology frequently promoted by the comparatively few slumming liberal and “library leftist” voices in our mainstream discourse is the fable of a lost golden era, when the social contract held sway, democracy functioned, and “liberal” elements of the establishment actually gave a damn about the labor class. The awful reality is that if you take the time to study American history with any sort of critical eye, it quickly becomes apparent that with a few notably brief and flawed exceptions, none of it is true.
Take for example the mainstream media in the Pig Empire; I literally cannot count the number of times I’ve been told that this new dystopian deregulation fight or that nightmare capitalist thinning of the journalist herd will be the “death of the American free press” – frankly the whole thing is a sick fucking joke. For all of the undoubtedly heinous damage caused by things like the 1996 Telecom Act, corporate conglomeration and the rise of reactionary cable news, the historical record makes it quite clear that large U.S. media companies have literally always been like this. The American press has always been owned and strictly controlled by elite private sector interests – at times, famously so as in the case of the invariably pro-war Washington Post, or the late Henry Luce’s pro-Cold War magazine empire over at Time-Life. As such, the mainstream US media has always supported the ruling class, imperial power and established authority at the expense of the labor class and the interests of the larger population. From Joe Hill, to Assata Shakur and on through to Julian Assange today, the corporate American press as a whole has always actively supported injustice and the persecution of supposed “enemies of the state.”
While it’s true that the mainstream press has at times reported certain truths that are uncomfortable to some aspects of power, it’s important to look at the greater (and typically unmentioned) context of that reporting. Elite capital is obviously not a monolith and on occasion, the interests and objectives of various factions in our ruling class will collide, resulting in the weaponization of truth for political purposes – such as when establishment liberal media gains interest in a Republican political scandal, or vice versa.
Indeed with an understanding of this factionalism in mind, some of the crowning victories achieved by the “free press” in America ring quite hollow when placed under the microscope of historical context. Contrary to modern popular mythmaking, the mainstream media wholeheartedly supported the Vietnam War, the draft and even elements of the Nixon administration until much of the ruling class itself found those positions untenable. Only then did our free and adversarial press find the courage to openly turn against one small aspect of the establishment power structure. Even when the mainstream media does criticize establishment power, it typically only does so in a limited context. For example, while it is now fashionable to critique the second US invasion of Iraq in mainstream “liberal” media as a tragic blunder born of neoconservative ineptitude and arrogance, there remains virtually no discussion about the imperial criminality and hubris of a nation that launched a war of aggression for oil under blatantly false pretenses and almost no examination of the media’s own role in selling that unquestionably illegal invasion. In other words, while it’s now fine to score political points in the mainstream media by criticizing how the Iraq war was conducted, it remains overwhelmingly unacceptable to discuss the real reasons why the war was conducted in those same forums. Recently this open and yet unspoken contradiction has even resulted in the bizarre spectacle of a mainstream media outlet attempting to chastise Bernie Sanders for opposing multiple Pig Empire wars the American public itself now largely regards as catastrophic mistakes.
Despite this, media apologists will argue that alternative and even anti-establishment viewpoints have proliferated in the smaller independent media in America, but that position too is undermined by the evidence at hand. For starters, mainstream private sector media isn’t independent media and indeed the mainstream press is at best dismissive of, and at worst openly hostile to the independent press as a matter of course. More importantly however, the observable impact of independent media on the public discourse has largely revolved around increased audience access facilitated by the introduction of new technologies – examples might include affordable printing presses, cheap radio broadcasting equipment and self publishing/blogging platforms on the internet. Unfortunately, here too the historical pattern is quite clear; after a brief explosion of influence granted by each and every one of these new communication mediums, private interests have compelled the state to restrict that access to the public conversation through anti-democratic legislation. From outlawing the anarchist, anti-war and labor press under the guise of anti-communism, to the privatization and licensing of public airwaves for radio and television, on through the deregulation of telecom internet giants and demanding that social media corporations actively censor dissenting opinions online, the state (itself beholden to the same private sector as the media) has invariably complied, and severely restricted access to the public discourse by dissenting voices.
Finally one might point to the constantly shrinking number of anti-establishment voices occasionally featured in the mainstream press as evidence that the US media doesn’t always work to stifle dissent and protect power, but even those self-same dissenting voices acknowledge that the limited scope of these opportunities to influence the public discourse makes that theory utter hogwash. To quote no less of an authority on the subject than Noam Chomsky:
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
Between the severely restricted scope of public debate in the mainstream media and the limited (and constantly dwindling) number of opportunities for dissenting voices to even present arguments in the corporate press, the effect is that of a few discordant notes that briefly and almost unnoticeably interrupt an endless triumphalist symphony – a symphony that actively marginalizes dissent, exalts the exercise of establishment power and reinforces opinions suitable to elite capital as “the reasoned consensus” or “mainstream thought.”
I mean, let’s cut the crap here; we’re talking about an overarching institution that has literally started on the wrong side of every major progressive issue in American history. Initially the mainstream media opposed the abolition of slavery, opposed women’s suffrage, opposed organized labor, opposed the civil rights movement, opposed the US peace movement, opposed the anti-poverty movement, opposed anti-mass incarceration advocates, opposed the protests to keep the United States out of Iraq (twice), opposed Occupy Wall Street, opposed Black Lives Matter, and continues to oppose the quasi-left wing, western democratic socialist movement embodied by modern “New Dealer” politicians like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. Donald Trump may be a bloviating fascist pile of steaming dogshit, but he’s not strictly wrong when he says the mainstream media is the enemy of at least the common American people; even if just making that statement is hypocritical, disingenuous and self-serving in the extreme on his part. Far from maintaining an adversarial relationship with power, the mainstream media in America has literally always bolstered power, justified injustice and manufactured consent for the rule of elite capital – which is precisely how one would logically expect a media owned by the rich, staffed by elites and beholden to free market fundamentalist investors, to behave.
Absorbing these harsh historical truths in turn draws forth numerous sobering questions for the reasonable observer. Questions like: how can you hope for a return to a golden era of the free press when said era simply never existed? How can insulting the New York Times and revoking Jim Acosta’s White House media credentials be attacks on the “free press” in America if there is literally no such thing as an American free press? How do you defend something that doesn’t exist and if it’s clear that this conflict is simply a war between separate heads of the establishment hydra, should you even bother? In the final analysis doesn’t opposing fascism mean opposing both Downmarket Mussolini and the pro-Pig Empire “liberal” mainstream media? If watching the corporate media lay the foundations for the extradition of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, even while simultaneously acknowledging that doing so represented a very real threat to their own freedoms didn’t convince you that the press is beholden to establishment power at all costs – what will?
Naturally like any reasonable leftist I fundamentally believe that we should fight to protect a lawfully guaranteed free press in the Pig Empire; unfortunately however as a history student I’m painfully aware that we, the common people of the labor class, will have to create one first.
– Nina Illingworth
