Glenn Greenwald attacks the “establishment” media outlet MSNBC for creating a corporate culture that forces its reporters to engage in “self-censorship” aimed at at avoiding any reporting that runs counter to the interest of the corporation. (What is “self-censorship?” The act of forcing oneself to say something that is consistent with one’s own self-interest? It certainly would be interesting to find someone who did not engage in this as a matter of standard procedure.)
Greenwald approvingly quotes from an exchange between Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow in which they fawningly describe the independence of the Guardian newspaper in London:
The journalists who have been dogging this story for the last six years worked for “The Guardian,” which is one of the great newspapers in the western world. “The Guardian” is run by a trust —
MADDOW: Public trust.
MOYERS: — a public trust, set up by the founding family to make sure that “The Guardian” would always be commercially and editorially independent.
Wouldn’t you have liked to have been in the editorial room at “The Guardian,” when they decide — they knew what they had — they had the evidence, they would not have gone this way if they had not had the evidence. And they knew they were taking on the most powerful media baron in the world, the Berlusconi of England and the United States, but they did it because they were independent.
We have been reminded that in the end, democracy depends upon maybe even just a few independent voices, free of any party or commercial allegiance.
The Guardian is run by a “public trust”! Moyers and Maddow’s excitement over this fact makes you wonder whether they think that this means that the Guardian is not run by people: greedy, biased, misinformed, and sloppy people, just like the rest of us. Only the belief that the Guardian is not run by members of that species—combined with ignorance of the Guardian‘s reliance “on cross-subsidisation from profitable companies within the [media] group, including Auto Trader”—could justify Moyers’ idiotically repeated claim that the Guardian is “independent.”
I confess to having no idea what the term “public trust” means, although I am somewhat surprised to find that it can be used to describe an organization whose objective is:
- To secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity: as a quality national newspaper without party affiliation; remaining faithful to liberal tradition; as a profit-seeking enterprise managed in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
Apparently, if you want to call your organization a “public trust,” you don’t even have to pretend not to be profit-seeking. Nor do you have to hide the fact that you are “faithful to liberal tradition.” Liberals will argue that this use of the term “liberal” is not used in a partisan sense, but rather that it is meant to convey an affinity for freethinking. Even so, fundamentalist Jews, Christians, and Muslims would argue that liberalism, even in this sense, constitutes a type of “allegiance,” one that they do not adhere to. And they would be correct, no matter what you think about their religious beliefs.
Given the Guardian‘s profit-seeking nature (and its reliance on transfer payments from Auto Trader), one really has to wonder what the Guardian is so laudably independent of.
But more importantly, what, in Glenn Greenwald and Bill Moyers’ world, should a media outfit be independent of in order to be considered reliable? Advertising? Paid consumers of any kind? Must a media outlet be funded purely by the owner’s own trust fund, with no revenue at all, to be credible?
In my opinion, the most important thing to do in order to determine whether an account is biased is to try to determine whether the person relaying the account is biased (or rather, how biased; probably everyone is biased somewhat). To make that determination would require learning quite a bit about the person, much more than could be determined by reading his employer’s Compliance procedures, or even its mission statement. Knowledge that the person works for an organization that calls itself a “public trust” gets you nowhere.
- To secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity: as a quality national newspaper without party affiliation; remaining faithful to liberal tradition; as a profit-seeking enterprise managed in an efficient and cost-effective manner.