December 24, 2003

Growing up in New York City, it can be assumed that I would have experienced the sight and sound of a newsboy shouting, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Superman loses his cape!” or something like that. But I never experienced that. I’m not saying such newspaper hawking by young entrepreneurs didn’t occur, just that I’ve never experienced it.

Chances are that younger folks don’t have the foggiest notion of what I’m talking about. For even movies that would depict such scenes where newsboys would shout the headlines to attract buyers for their newspaper for two cents or a nickel a copy are themselves dated and a rarity. So the competition of shouting newsboys hawking their employers’ wares has become yet another fading memory of Americana.

Also fading into memory are the many former great New York City newspapers. There was the Daily Mirror, Herald Tribune, World Telegram and Sun, Journal American, in addition to the three mainstream survivors, the New York Times, Daily News and New York Post. Obviously, the competition amongst these newspapers for readers and advertisers literally spilled out onto the streets and was exhibited by both journalists and newsboys as well.

The movies, then radio, and finally television changed all that. Star radio journalists graduated from typewriters to microphones, such as Walter Winchell of the Daily Mirror. Columnist Ed Sullivan advanced to the nation’s leading variety show emcee, benefiting from his fame for his well-read column, “Little Old New York” in the Daily News. And newspapers and entertainment, when they combined, trumpeted the excellence of persistent, independent and courageous news reporting and journalism as personified by such radio shows as “The Big Story,” which later appeared on television along with Brian Keith’s “Crusader.” The titles alone paint the picture of the real meaning and importance of a free and independent press.

What has happened? Television has morphed into a societal role much larger than was ever imagined considering the impact of its communicative predecessors, radio and the movies. Movies ran “newsreels” via Movietone News. The Kennedy/Nixon debates in 1960 launched television as a primary factor in national presidential elections, and hundreds of millions of taxpayer and political party dollars provided astonishing financial wealth to the TV networks. The public service role of a free and independent press was passed from newspapers, to radio and movies, and finally to television. The televised Army/McCarthy hearings, the Kefauver Congressional Organized Crime Hearings, the Moon Shot and numerous Space Launches, the Ruby shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald and such, all served to solidify TV as the communications leader of the nation.

But along with wealth and an extensive public following, comes the additional dimensions of both power and responsibility. And sadly, the former usually overshadows and eventually eliminates the latter. TV newscasters, anchors and talk show hosts, have acquired astonishing wealth and power, and that power greatly diminishes their commitment to inform and educate an information-dependent national audience of free men and women. TV “journalists” and anchors are as much the celebrities as are their fictional counterparts in Hollywood. And just as is the case in Hollywood, public commitment has been overtaken by a sense of power that fits the agenda of arrogance that is exemplified by looking upon the public as “raw material” to be shaped and molded in order to achieve a utopian, egalitarian, perfect and beneficent socialist society.

Mainstream establishment media potency in terms of network TV, Hollywood and the big newspapers such as the New York and LA Times and Washington Post, feeds on both its celebrity status and wealth. It takes on an “opinion-shaping” dimension, and that dimension attempts to motivate public opinion into fully accepting all aspects of socialism. And the enforcement medium of socialism is, of course, big government.

This agenda, one geared to socialism, is the total opposite of the intent and design of American government to ensure individual freedom. It explains how party politics has eclipsed the individual rights and freedoms of every man, woman and child in America. It explains liberal journalistic bias. It explains the journalistic embarrassment of a Jayson Blair. And it explains why a small family-owned newspaper in Toledo Ohio, The Blade, exposed the Tiger Force Massacres. And why a small newspaper in Oklahoma, the McCurtain Daily Gazette, documented the federal abuses of torture and murder and the subsequent cover-up by the FBI.

And even after these real journalists in real newspapers uncovered these astonishing events, where are the mainstream establishment media on these critical news revelations?

Theodore E. Lang

© 2003 THEODORE E. LANG All rights reserved

Ted Lang is a political analyst and a freelance writer.

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