How Ignorance Was Promoted at the Street Level Before the Internet

Interesting article about Glynn Wilson's experiences as a reporter and news stand owner.

http://blog.locustfork.net/2012/08/newsbreak-how-ignorance-was-promoted-at-the-street-level-before-the-internet/

How Ignorance Was Promoted at the Street Level Before the Internet
August 4th, 2012
by Glynn Wilson


Editor’s Note: This is a rough draft of a book chapter I wrote in 1992 and have never tried to publish before. Many other details and stories and art will be added later for the print version. As I indicated in the introduction to a series on the importance of the press in making democracy work, there can be no doubt that experience matters. This is the ninth part, or Chapter 8, of a series designed to show how experience matters when it comes to understanding media and politics — and how to make democracy work. It is a very rough first draft of what will eventually be a literary, non-fiction memoir published with ink on paper in book form, to be sold as a print-on-demand book and promoted on the Web.

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I wouldn’t go so far as Thompson, but after 30 years of working in the news business and watching it closely, several things seem clear. The people who “make it” working for newspapers and television are some of the most mediocre, pliable, willing-to-be-bought-and-sold individuals ever to walk the earth. Those who are interested in truth and justice are either forced out of the business or sidelined into working for small publishers who have little impact on the national culture, or they publish for little or nothing in specialty magazines, which reach a limited, almost cult-like audience. As Noam Chomsky said in a letter he wrote to me in 1992, “…there are people scattered around who have kept their integrity and made it … But they live very frustrated lives, and have to carefully shape what they say, though they can sometimes sneak something through.”

One thing I learned from writing for newspapers and then reading Pravda was the extent to which you have to sneak things through the “gatekeepers,” the title given to editors by media scholar Marshall McCluin. In Pravda, on page four, there was something called the TASS Report. TASS was the equivalent of the Associated Press in this country, only in the old Soviet Union it was actually the government owned news agency. To find any real news in Pravda, however, you had to turn to the bottom of page four and read the final paragraphs of the TASS report. I once read something by a former Soviet journalist who said the only way to get any real news in was to put the editors to sleep with the first two-thirds of the story, then sneak in a few paragraphs of truth.

That happens in the United States of America even today, although the last few paragraphs are often cut from the wire stories by many newspapers. The excuse they give? They ran out of space. With space continuing to shrink as newspapers cut back on the number of days they publish and papers get smaller, and as they lay off more and more staff, the problem will only get worse. Some publications will take advantage of the Web. For many, it won’t make the stories longer and more in-depth. Today’s news stories are shorter than ever.

I have noticed this also. I have seen people's words twisted. The on an inside page, the last paragraph might give the actual quote. Most people will have stopped reading by that point, but the newspaper can claim they gave an accurate quote.