Yer Ol' Perfesser's reservations about the actual efficacy of Mr. Moyers as a press critic do not need to be rehashed here, but I hafta beg to differ. He's wrong, because he won't accept--or admit to--the reality of media in our time: The Big Media bear us no responsibility. "Let the Buyer beware." (Caveat emptor...it's an old scam)...
The Big Media--all corporat/state media--are businesses first and foremost, and have long since abandoned the institutional pretenses of actual journalism which protected them still from serious interference, then and still. It is somewhat ironic that the "Press" always bragged that it was the "only business with Constitutional Protections; a fact which we now see as being a distinctly double-edged blade.
Since the late 70s, and the onset of what was admiringly called "media consolidation" ("Media Monopolies" was what Ben Bagdickian called em in a 1980 book, the first of its kind), the function of the Big media has been as stenographers, repeating verbatim the discourses they're 'reporting.' This is what they are paid to do.
Their bosses, the directors sitting in those six boardrooms that oversee and control the operations of their safely purchased properties--which comprise 95%, more or less, of the sum and TOTAL of commercial media enterprises in the whole fuukin COUNTR, including Mr. Moyers and his programs-- have no desire that there should be any serious inquiry into their doings, either corporately or federally. To forestall such mischief was why they bought the "press," in the first place...
Successful coups ALWAYS start by seizing the media first.
And, as Upton Sinclair reminded us a century ago, it will ALWAYS be difficult to get someone to acknowledge what their salary depends on their ignoring.
