Pilger, Fisk, Glass, and S. Hersh on the failure of the world’s press

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13492.htm

Normalizing the Unthinkable

John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Charlie Glass, and Seymour Hersh on the failure of the world’s press

By Sophie McNeill

06/03/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- The late journalist Edward R. Murrow might well have been rolling in his grave on April 21. That’s because Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a lecture that day in Washington, DC to journalists at the Department of State’s official Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists.

For the Bush administration to use the memory of a person who stood up to government propaganda is ironic to say the least. Secretary Rice told the assembled journalists that “without a free press to report on the activities of government, to ask questions of officials, to be a place where citizens can express themselves, democracy simply couldn’t work.”

One week earlier in New York City, Columbia University hosted a panel on the state of the world’s media that would have been more in Murrow’s style than the State Department-run symposium. Reporter and filmmaker John Pilger, British Middle East correspondent for the Independent Robert Fisk, freelance reporter Charlie Glass, and investigative journalist for the New Yorker Seymour Hersh appeared together at this April 14 event.

Before the afternoon panel began, I met up with John Pilger at his hotel. He’d just flown in from London and was only in New York for the panel before flying to Caracas, Venezuela the next day. A journalist for over 30 years, Pilger has reported from Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Palestine, and Iraq—to name a few of the countries to which his investigative reporting and filmmaking had taken him.

Where would I be without the links I get from DU.

This is a powerful indictment on the failures of the news media. They do a great job at explaining how these failures have been a disservice to our democracy. It is encouraging to know that there are indeed journalists out there trying to get the facts, the true stories of what's going on. It's a horrible shame that the corporate media doesn't allow the great reporting to get any air time or ink.


Seymour Hersh said,
“But above and beyond all that, folks, by my count there are something like 1,011 days left in the reign of King George the Lesser and that is the bad news. But there is good news. And the good news is that tomorrow when we wake up there will be one less day.”

I tell myself something like that everyday.


Thanks again for the link. I've book-marked it so I can share it with others.

is highlighted by Robert Fisk in this passage:

"Fisk challenged the standard reporting conventions hammered into journalism student’s heads around the world. “There’s one that comes up from the journalism school system which is you’ve got to give equal time to both sides,” explained Fisk. “To which I say well, if you were reporting the slave trade in the 18th century, would you give equal time to the slave ship captain? No. If you’re covering the liberation of a Nazi camp, do you give equal time to the SS spokesman? No. When I covered a Palestinian suicide bombing of a restaurant in Israeli west Jerusalem in August 2001, did I give equal time to the Islamic jihad spokesman? No. When 1,700 Palestinians were slaughtered in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982, did I give equal time to the Israeli spokesman, who of course was representing an army who watched the massacre as its Lebanese Phalangist allies carried it out? No. Journalists should be on the side of the victims,” Fisk said."

The cost has been enormous.