Richard Lloyd Jones: I'm Richard Lloyd Jones and welcome to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. "The revolution will not be televised," says one of the Occupy posters that caught my eye. It's sobering to see how compromised is our mainstream media these days. In this excerpt from our program, Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco and I discuss the corruption of journalism and advocate occupying the media as an essential action for the 99%.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco again with us and Cláudia wants me to focus a little bit on the media today and I think that's fantastic. And you know why.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: "Because I find them the guiltiest of all powers. Because they, as they say to the police or to the military, the police is a kind of performing their tasks. The military are
Richard: kind of performing their tasks.
But the media are totally against their principles. Read here the nine main principles."
You can read from this. Cláudia has printed out a document for me with very small print.
Cláudia: This is a book that was written by two journalists in the United States.
Richard: Yeah, let me just go for that. I think
Cláudia: it's in the United States. It's not in England.
Richard: A book called The Elements of Journalism, What News People Should Know and the Public Should Expect.
Introduction by Bill Kovach and Tom Riesentiel. Yeah, they are two journalists that wrote the book. Purpose of journalism is to provide people with the information they need to be free and self-governing. To fulfill this task, one, journalism's first obligation is to the truth, not to the people who pay them their salaries. First obligation is to the truth. Two, its first loyalty is to the citizens.
Three, its essence is a discipline of verification. 4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover 5.
It must serve as an independent monitor of power 6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise 7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant Not the insignificant as they do today, the significant Eight, it must keep the news comprehensive and proportional. Nine, its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience. Now, do
Cláudia: you think that one, just one of those nine elements are being followed by the mainstream and the bigger and the so-called traditional, and they don't need to be big, but those who are living out of this support or the money of people who announce, people who are...
Richard: Yeah, receiving? No,
Cláudia: it's the people who keep the newspaper, the advertisers, we say in Portuguese. Ah, the advertisers.
Richard: Yeah, the advertisers. So the advertisers, they pay for the ads.
So the newspaper live with this money. So they start from the beginning of being compromised. Now, not only the big ones, but also the small ones. And there's always been a battle, Cláudia, in the media, especially in the newsrooms. I know I worked in radio and television stations for many years. There was always this battle between the sales department and the news department.
You know, the sales department was saying, well, we want this sponsor to get coverage, for example. The news department would say, no, this is a news department. We have to be independent from this. There's always been this battle. But, of course, it's a delicate battle and a difficult one to reconcile. And it has not been reconciled at all, especially in the last 20 or 30 years.
I think we can say that.
Cláudia: It got much worse. No, much worse.
I think we can say that. Now
Richard: the major, major corporations own the majority of the media. Yeah, and they are reflecting the corporate view. They're not reflecting the
Cláudia: view. And if you say the truth, you are fired. And you have your kids, you have your home to support, you have your standard of life that you have to maintain, you think you have to maintain.
But if you get fired, they will tell all the other medias what happened, and everybody will know, and you will be ostracized.
We have an incredible catalog of past shows there love you to tune in and pass it on to your network Thinking with Somebody Else's Head is a production of the international society of Analytical Trilogy i'm Richard Lloyd Jones
