https://www.cjr.org/
http://ethics.npr.org/
http://handbook.reuters.com/index.php?title=Integrity
https://www.poynter.org/
https://www.publicintegrity.org/
https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp
http://www.timewarner.com/company/corporate-responsibility/telling-the-worlds-stories/journalistic-integrity

https://www.britannica.com/topic/agitprop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures

Fake News Psychology

Accusation in a Mirror

Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation

About State Controlled Press

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007655
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-17840134

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For referencing other web content so often and so much, BackChannels has practically stopped expressing its own logic and sensibility.  Therefore and herewith a few observations related to the now infamous and nationally degrading accusations aimed at the world’s — not only America’s — major high-integrity media (even the famed “Gray Lady” has been the target of somebody’s half-packed mud balls).

First, choose your own preferred mode in contemporary governance:

Feudal Political Absolutism

Modern Checked and Democratic Distribution of Power

That should be easy, but if you’re up to your chinny chin chin in loot, corporate or illicit (or both), and have been the object of generous favor by some singular power, then weighing the options (starting with making a little to a lot less money) may be more difficult.

Let’s move on.

Dictatorship should be oh so 20th Century by now.  If a citizen of the old EU / NATO experience, you have seen it, defeated it — Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin et al. — lived through it, or at least heard about it and thought as much gone with the Cold War and done, finished, and dead in the west.  If respectful of the American flag and those of others aligned with it in spirit, then perhaps you have been also respectful of the war dead whose sacrifice has enabled this very freedom to read and write with earnest and responsible intent.

In short, you may know and love freedom of speech — “Press Freedom” — as intended and practiced and appreciated.

And yet here I / you / we are confronted by an “information space” packed with the must vulgar of accusations: those institutions wholly devoted to reason and truth, so much has been inferred, have reverted to malicious invention.

It ain’t so, Joe.

Something has been sabotaged, gone wrong, thrown off course in relation to common confidence in America’s political discourse and news, but is that to be blamed on the many communities of best educated editors and writers and remarkably informed, sharp, and thoughtful readers?

An American homily may apply: “He who points the finger should point it back at himself.”

Additional Reference

Klein, Linda A.  “A free press is necessary for a strong democracy.”  ABA Journal, May 2017.

Pomerantsev, Peter.  Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.  New York: Public Affairs, 2014.

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Addendum – November 13, 2018

 

Posted to YouTube August 9, 2018.

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