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Ex-Reuters Bureau Chief In Iraq on mainstream media failure


Douglas Caddy

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From the article - AM: I don’t think it’s so much an obvious conspiracy. It’s just the debate is framed in a way that it delegitimizes opposing viewpoints. I have been a member of the mainstream media for 17 years of my career, and I believed I was doing good, nobody ever told me I should follow a certain political line and certainly nobody ever told me that I should lie, and if they ever had I would refuse. I think most of my colleagues in the mainstream media are similar.

But what was interesting is that it’s more insidious than that. There is a certain discourse that becomes normalized, in which certain views are acceptable and others not. And if you make obvious statements, you know, like about the role of banks or global superpowers, and about the disaster that’s befallen the world in many areas in recent years, you are often marginalized as some sort of loony figure. And there is a “cult of moderation,” of being “neutral”’ in the media. Being neutral is normally held to be that if there is a crazy right-winger or left-winger, you are somewhere in the middle. But obviously, truth is not always in the middle. We may not always know the truth, but there is objective truth. And it does not always lie in the middle between the two extremes.

I think it is through this process that the mainstream media basically becomes a tool of misinforming people, rather than informing people. It’s not so much deliberate lies, although some clearly do engage in deliberate lies, but it’s just the sense that there are some things that are safe to say that we become conditioned that they are safe to say, and there are other things that we probably know them to be true, but if we say them we are mocked or delegitimized.

So the conversation is channeled quite subtly, in a way that deviates from the truth.

http://rt.com/op-edge/185360-reuters-chief-iraq-useless/

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