“PROBABLY never in the history of the United States have we seen such a strangle-hold by the national press and other mass media of communication in suppressing the viewpoint of a great section of the country. The extent to which certain of the more authoritative and influential newspapers and magazines, such as the New York Times and the Time-Life group, are using their columns for sheer propaganda has become laughable. In a moral sense we are confronted with what might almost be called a trilogy of conspiracy, fraud and intimidation: conspiracy to gain control of important citadels of learning and news dissemination, fraud in the teaching of false racial doctrines, and intimidation in suppressing those who would preach the truth. To speak of academic freedom in the United States today is to make a mockery of the term.”

— Carleton Putnam, Race and Reason: A Yankee View, 1961

— Comments —

Terry Morris writes:

Extracted from THE NEW SOUTH – A Discourse delivered at the Annual Commencement of Hampden Sidney College, June 15, 1882, before the Philanthropic and Union Literary Societies, by Dr. Robert Lewis Dabney:

5. The press has been looked to as the safe guardian of popular institutions. It has been called by an English Whig “the fourth estate of the Realm.” But the influences under which the political press in America operates constitute this also one of the fatal hindrances to the subsistence of wise, free institutions.

The powerful journals must be also the creatures of money. The conditions of journalism are such that only a vast capital can float a journal into a safe and permanent haven of success. Literature is a commodity, money buys and sells it. Let the genius of an Addison, a Bolingbrooke, a Junius, a Macaulay, all be combined on the one side, with all the richest resources of historical learning to publish the political truths which happen to be unpopular without a great capital; and let commercial capital give its support to the pen of the most ignorant demagogue to propagate the crudest absurdities in which capital supposes it has a selfish and corrupt interest, you shall see the wisdom of true statesmanship, embellished by all the graces of scholarship consigned to an unread obscurity in this country, while the vulgar stupidities of error shall visit every table and claim every eye. Mammon wills it so, and Mammon rules.

The reason is because the leading presses of the commercial centers are either the tools of parties and used for exclusive partisan purposes, or else they are, like the calico mills, mere joint-stock concerns for money making. Either way, the result is the same. The contents of the journal are not dictated at all by truth or right, but solely by self-interest. What doctrine shall it assert? Only that which advances the strength of the faction, or which attracts the more numerous subscribers. Thus the press instead of being the guide, becomes the mere sycophant of misguided public opinion. Let only any political heresy begin to be current enough to become an element of danger to sound institutions, and thenceforward it is the interest and business of the great journals to give it their support. To resist and explode it “would not pay.”

Laura writes:

Well said.

Unfortunately people believe these media outlets are involved in the pursuit of objective truth.

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