by Mike Whitney

Confidence in the media has never been lower. A broad section of the public doesn’t believe anything they read in the papers nor do they see reporters as impartial observers of world events. This should be no great surprise. The model of a privately owned media ensures that the facts are massaged to suit ownership, a practice that inevitably undermines credibility. The marriage between the media and the state increases the danger to the public interests. This is especially true when the media becomes a marketing tool for the government, promoting its vastly unpopular wars, its attacks on the social safety net, and its vicious assault on civil liberties. The media has become an adversary to the people it is supposed to serve. It now functions exclusively as a weapon in the imperial arsenal, exalting the state and its wartime agenda, while savaging the institutions of democracy and personal liberty. Its role as state-propagandist is conspicuous in everything from its blind devotion to the president to its obfuscation of facts that discredit the administration. If we consider a few of the critical stories the mainstream media suppressed, we get a clearer idea of its overall agenda...

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov05/Whitney1115.htm