Jonathan Cook Explains How & Why Western Media Force Journalists to Deceive

Eric Zuesse

Jonathan Cook, himself a world-renowned investigative journalist, posted to his blog, on January 30th, the most thorough explanation I’ve ever seen of this, under the headline “Why the western media is afraid of Julian Assange”.

He said (and these are only excerpts):

One of the mistakes we typically make about the so-called “mainstream media” is imagining that its outlets evolved in some kind of gradual bottom-up process. We are encouraged to assume that there is at least an element of voluntary association in how media publications form.

At its simplest, we imagine that journalists with a liberal or leftwing outlook gravitate towards other journalists with a similar outlook and together they produce a liberal-left newspaper [or other media-type]. We sometimes imagine that something similar takes place among rightwing journalists and rightwing newspapers.

All of this requires ignoring the elephant in the room: billionaire owners. Even if we think about those owners — and in general we are discouraged from doing so — we tend to suppose that their role is chiefly to provide the funding for these free exercises in journalistic collaboration.

For that reason, we infer that the media represents society: it offers a market place of thought and expression in which ideas and opinions align with how the vast majority of people feel. In short, the media reflects a spectrum of acceptable ideas rather than defining and imposing that spectrum.

Of course, if we pause to think about it, those assumptions are ludicrous. The media consists of outlets owned by, and serving the interests of, billionaires and large corporations — or in the case of the BBC, a broadcasting corporation entirely reliant on state largesse.

Furthermore, almost all corporate media needs advertising revenue from other large corporations to avoid haemorrhaging money. There is nothing bottom-up about this arrangement. It is entirely top-down.

Journalists operate within ideological parameters strictly laid down by their outlet’s owner. The media doesn’t reflect society. It reflects the interests of a small elite and the national security state that promotes and protects that elite’s interests.

Those parameters are wide enough to allow some disagreement — just enough to make western media look democratic. …

They are there to do essentially the same thing, but they can monetise their similarity only by presenting — marketing — it as difference. They brand differently not because they are different, but because to be effective (if not always profitable) they must reach and capture different demographics. …

At its best, journalism is simply gathering and publishing information that serves the “public interest”. Public: that is, it serves you and me. It does not require a diploma. It does not require a big building, or a wealthy owner. Whisper it: any of us can do journalism. And when we do [this], journalistic protections should apply.

Assange excelled at journalism like no one before him because he devised a new model for forcing governments to become more transparent, and public servants more honest. Which is precisely why the elite who wield secret power want him and that model destroyed.

If the liberal media were really organised from the bottom-up rather than the top-down, journalists would be incensed — and terrified — by states torturing one of their own. They would be genuinely afraid that they might be targeted next.

Because it is the practice of pure journalism that is under attack, not a single journalist. …

The corporate media, especially its liberal outlets and their journalist-servants, understand that Assange’s media revolution — embodied by Wikileaks — is far more of a threat to them than the national security state.

Difficult home truths

Wikileaks offers a new kind of platform for democratic journalism in which secret power, along with its inherent corruptions and crimes, becomes much harder to wield.  …

Readers no longer have to be passive consumers of news. They can inform themselves. Not only can they cut out the middle man — the corporate media — but they can finally assess whether that middle man has been entirely straight with them.

That is very bad news for individual corporate journalists. At best, it strips them of any aura of authority and prestige. At worst, it ensures that a profession already held in low esteem is seen as even less trustworthy.

But it is also very bad news for media owners. They no longer control the news agenda. They can no longer serve as institutional gatekeepers. They can no longer define the limits of acceptable ideas and opinion.

Access journalism

Second, the Wikileaks revolution sheds an unflattering light on the traditional model of journalism. It shows it to be inherently dependent on — and therefore complicit with — secret power.

The lifeblood of the Wikileaks model is the whistleblower, who risks eveything to get out public-interest information [that] the powerful want concealed because it reveals corruption, abuse or lawbreaking. Think Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

The lifeblood of corporate journalism, by contrast, is access. …

That’s 29% of his entire article on the subject. You can see the entire article at https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2023-01-30/media-afraid-julian-assange/.

Cook’s article was read by him at a 28 January 2023 international symposium in London, “#Freethetruth: Secret Power, Media Freedom and Democracy”, at which the authoritative book titled The Trial of Julian Assange: A Story of Persecution was being sold.

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I’ve done many articles related to this topic, of censorship and who does it and why and how it is done. One, here, is about a journalist who tries to be honest but lacks the courage to go all the way and consequently perhaps to become even more suppressed by the billionaires’ algorithms than is already the case. Another, here, is a detailed first-person account of how the result of those algorithms becomes applied so as to cause even small independent news-media to ditch journalists whose work is too good for the billionaires (i.e., for those billionaires’ medias’ hired editors and the billionaires’ other agents) to allow to be published. Another, here, is about what happens when a crucially important news-report manages to slip by a major news-medium’s censors (editors) and thus to become published so that only other media’s censors — or else Google’s algorithms —  have prevented that important news from becoming known to the general public. Another, here, argues that at least regarding international issues, Russia’s news-media aren’t nearly as pathologically untrustworthy as are U.S.-and-allied ones. Another, here, argues that censorship is toxic to and inconsistent with ANY democracy and is an essential tool of any dictatorship — that censorship (regardless whether directly by the Government or instead by the aristocracy or theocracy who control it) is a mark of ANY dictatorship, not merely of SOME dictatorships.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.