Introduction - mainstream media and Big Tech censorship

The fate of Sy Hersh's Democracy Now! interview on YouTube is the latest indication of how much rougher press suppression is in this new media era....

I have watched many times as journalists, surrendering themselves for the sake of their professional careers, train themselves to hear the silent language that tells them what to say and what to leave unsaid. And then, over time, you find them giving vigorous voice to thoughts and beliefs imposed upon them, absolutely convinced these are their own thoughts and beliefs and they have come by them independently....

... we are led to ask whether the promise of independent journalism can be extinguished by way of a totalized system of censorship.... the line between the national security state and corporate media has not been merely blurred in the post–2001 era: It is now more or less eliminated, as documents such as the Twitter Files make clear....

What are we to do as an era of totalized censorship appears to be upon us? Subscribing to the independent publication of your choice would be a conscientious start.

The current “media”—loosely defined as the old major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, the network news channels, MSNBC and CNN, PBS and NPR, the online news aggregators like Google, Apple, and Yahoo, and the social media giants like the old Twitter and Facebook—are corrupt.

They have adopted in their news coverage a utilitarian view that noble progressive ends justify almost any unethical means to obtain them. The media is unapologetically fused with the Democratic Party, the bicoastal liberal elite, and the progressive agenda.

The result is that the public cannot trust that the news it hears or reads is either accurate or true. The news as presented by these outlets has been carefully filtered to suppress narratives deemed inconvenient or antithetical to the political objectives of these entities, while inflating themes deemed useful....

In sum, there is no media. It has ceased to exist, and the public plods on by assuming as true whatever the Pravda-like news outlets suppress and as false whatever they cover.

... confidence in media news reporting had long been in decline before Donald Trump appeared on the stage. Years of incessant political correctness had been enforced in the establishment media generally, not just in news reporting, and many Americans simply did not buy this ideological product.

Self-communicating and self-congratulatory, the establishment media had little idea of how perilous their public standing was. By overplaying their hand in the autumn of 2016, they brought the whole media credibility issue to its threshold.

The media establishment did have one major clue to their fundamental problem: falling ratings, falling circulation, falling advertising. Their response has been to interpret these phenomena as simply a problem of technology, including the rise of the internet and social media. The icons of the golden age of news reporting such as The New York Times; the Washington Post; and the major TV, cable, and radio networks are today often caricatures of news reporting. They survive only because their primary audiences are in large urban centers, where their bias coincides with their readers, listeners, and viewers. For this reason, they cannot go back to fair and balanced news reporting – because their own economic bases will not let them. Outside these urban pockets, their national credibility is gone...

... I applaud his seventh New York Times bestseller as of June 15, 2019, Unfreedom of the Press, where Mr. Levin provides a scholarly historical discussion of American journalism, and exposes current journalism as a source of progressive socialist partisanship that poisons American political life....

Mr. Levin educates the reader on the partisan nature of newspapermen and reporters in 18th- and 19th-century America, but his book moves forward in time to explain the problem of increasingly activist ideological journalism and media that have negatively impacted American politics and brought on an age of intellectual totalitarianism....

As Levin explains, a tunnel-vision, monolithic political group in charge of modern media results in a propaganda-type situation with biased selection and even misrepresentation of the news. The media are so committed that they believe that those who disagree are evil, a classic sign of the True Believer syndrome described by Eric Hoffer. They think there is only one way of thinking: leftist-statist-progressive. Moreover, as with all True Believers, the goal is suppression or destruction of opponents and opposing those who disagree with them, embracing the activist progressive philosophy, using the media power they have to promote their ideology opposed to American founding principles and the traditions, politics, mores, and fundamental elements of Western civilization....

Levin warns that the republic requires a functional and honest media, not a propaganda organ for progressivism. A great republic cannot survive without a media committed to constitutional limited government by the consent of the governed. The social and political fiber of America cannot survive a media establishment that is a propaganda organ of the socialist statists.