{"id":19703,"date":"2016-04-08T12:11:37","date_gmt":"2016-04-08T17:11:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19703"},"modified":"2016-04-08T12:12:00","modified_gmt":"2016-04-08T17:12:00","slug":"a-media-unmoored-from-facts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19703","title":{"rendered":"A Media Unmoored from Facts"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A Media Unmoored from Facts<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Exclusive:<\/strong>\u00a0Mainstream U.S. journalism has completely lost its way, especially in dealing with foreign policy issues where bias now overwhelms any commitment to facts, a dangerous development, writes Robert Parry.<\/p>\n

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Several weeks ago, I received a phone call from legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh who had seen\u00a0one of my recent stories<\/u><\/a>\u00a0about Syria and wanted to commiserate over the state of modern journalism. Hersh\u2019s primary question regarding reporters and editors at major news outlets these days was: \u201cDo they care what the facts are?\u201d<\/p>\n

Hersh noted that in the past \u2013 in the 1970s when he worked at The New York Times \u2013 even executive editor Abe Rosenthal, who was a hard-line cold warrior with strong ideological biases, still wanted to know what was really going on.<\/p>\n

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\"Washington<\/a><\/p>\n

Washington Post\u2019s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

My experience was similar at The Associated Press. Among the older editors, there was still a pride in getting the facts right \u2013 and not getting misled by some politician or spun by some government flack.<\/p>\n

That journalistic code, however, no longer exists \u2013 at least not on foreign policy and national security issues. The major newspapers and TV networks are staffed largely by careerists who uncritically accept what they are fed by U.S. government officials or what they get from think-tank experts who are essentially in the pay of special interests.<\/p>\n

For a variety of reasons \u2013 from the draconian staff cuts among foreign correspondents to the career fear of challenging some widely held \u201cgroup think\u201d \u2013 many journalists have simply become stenographers, taking down what the Important People say is true, not necessarily what is true.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s especially easy to go with the flow when writing about some demonized foreign leader. Then, no editor apparently expects anything approaching balance or objectivity, supposedly key principles of journalism.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Media Unmoored from Facts Exclusive:\u00a0Mainstream U.S. journalism has completely lost its way, especially in dealing with foreign policy issues where bias now overwhelms any commitment to facts, a dangerous development, writes Robert Parry. Several weeks ago, I received a phone call from legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh who had seen\u00a0one of my recent stories\u00a0about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[13373,6963,1648,462,512,1921,7203,5340,776],"class_list":["post-19703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-associated-press","tag-consortium-news","tag-facts","tag-journalism","tag-media","tag-new-york-times","tag-robert-parry","tag-seymour-hersh","tag-syria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19703"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19705,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19703\/revisions\/19705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}