I came across this article
I came across this article which again confirms much of the WSM view. “a democracy cannot function without a public that is properly informed. Informing the public used to be the role of serious newspapers and television networks. Of course, not everything in the mainstream media is always true: Mistakes are made. News organisations have political biases, sometimes reflecting the views and interests of their owners.But high-quality journalism has always relied on its reputation for probity. Editors, as well as reporters, at least tried to get the facts right. That is why people read Le Monde, The New York Times, or, indeed, The Washington Post. Filtering nonsense was one of their duties – and their main selling point.That has changed. Populist demagogues in politics and the mass media are doing everything they can to discredit the quality press as propaganda organs for left-wing elites who sneer at the views of ordinary Americans. Santorum pretends to speak for these people – that is, for a minority of Americans who are mostly white, provincial, highly religious, deeply conservative on cultural and social issues, and convinced that Obama and all Europeans are dangerous godless socialists.The point is not whether Santorum is right or wrong factually. What he says “feels” right to his followers, because it conforms to their prejudices. And the internet, having swamped the quality press, feeds and reinforces those prejudices, making it more difficult to distinguish the truth from lies.The public is increasingly segmented into groups of likeminded people who see their views echoed back to them in blogs, comments and tweets. There is no need to be exposed to different opinions, which are, in any case, considered to be propaganda…The first people to argue that all truth is relative and that all information is a form of propaganda that reflects society’s power relations, were far removed from the world inhabited by Santorum and his supporters. Several decades ago, a number of European and American intellectuals, often with a background in Marxism, developed a “post-modern” critique of the written word. We might think, they argued, that what we read in The New York Times or Le Monde is objectively true, but everything that appears there is, in fact, a disguised form of propaganda for bourgeois class interests.There is no such thing, the post-modern critic believes, as independence of thought. Objective truth is an illusion. Everyone is promoting class interests of one kind or another. The real lie, in this view, is the claim of objectivity. What is necessary to change the world is not the truth, but another form of propaganda, promoting different interests. Everything is political; that is the only truth that counts…” The Socialist Standard wrote “Postmodernist junk The “right environment” in question is the one presented by postmodernism, that loose body of thought which contends that interpretation is everything and the truth an ephemera, and that science and reason are merely particular interpretations of events, being “narratives” with no more claim to validity than any other. It is postmodernism and the parallel distrust of science and progress that has arisen in recent years that has opened the way for conspiracy theories to multiply – whether they have a basis in reality or not. At the same time – and without coincidence – various New Age and occultist ideas and practices have gained ground. Postmodernism, irrationality and conspiracy theories now unite to form a bizarre trinity that informs much popular interpretation of historical events and processes.” Our problem is how do we combat this self-censorship of opposing views. In fact the Socialist Standard also reflected the view of the articles author on the ‘respectable’ press “If you want to know the truth, you cannot rely on newspapers. We have that on good authority – in fact, on the authority of the more honest newspapers. (The more honest papers are those that are read mainly by capitalists who need reliable information about the world in order to make investment decisions, as opposed to those that are read mainly by workers.)””