The New York Times and the Washington Post — Missed the Point about the Senate’s Decision to Fast Track the Trans Pacific Partnership — Why Care about Workers, when Camouflage and Political Legacies Are More Fun to Force Feed?

© 2015 Peter Free

 

25 June 2015

 

 

America’s media have turned their Fourth Estate function on its head

 

Consider, for example, about the New York Times and Washington Post’s headline treatment of the Senate’s vote to fast-track the Trans Pacific Partnership.

 

The Times summarized the President’s plutocratic endeavor as, “Obama Bolsters His Leverage With Trade Victory, but at a Cost.”

 

[At the time that I saw the Times’ digital version, the headline was posted at the top left of the front page. Presumably the political contest message was the one the paper’s editors thought the most important to convey.]

 

The Post took a similar view, “Obama scores a major trade win, burnishing his foreign policy legacy.”

 

[As with the Times, the Post’s headline sat prominently at the Post’s digital top left corner.]

 

 

To these highfalutin rags . . .

 

. . . the TPP is apparently mostly about the political game and evidently not very much about the agreement’s worker-destroying substance.

 

Down-playing essential truths and up-hyping theatricalized conflict is typical these days. Media people are evidently so empty-headed that actually seeking and reasonably prioritizing Truth’s kernels is too much for them.

 

These easily manipulated louts settle for the access-to-power meal ticket that parroting the Oligarchy’s party line offers them.

 

 

The moral? — With an alert and conscientious media now evaporated, the United States’ chances for recovering its lost republican democracy are nil

 

When nobody knows anything reasonably accurate about current affairs, it is impossible to make practicable decisions affecting the Whole.

 

Perhaps the most critical shortcoming of American democracy was its implicit assumption that the visible Press would miraculously supply voters with:

 

 

(a) arguably intelligently prioritized

 

(b) facts.

 

Today’s mainstream does neither.