Email this article to a friend

Printable Version

Articles Related to This Article: • Mainstream media criticizes Wikipedia because it represents a decentralization of their information monopoly • Newspapers continue shift towards Internet as print business fades • Pharmaceutical advertising turns national newspapers into drug industry puppets Support NaturalNews advertisers - Advertise with NaturalNews Help support NaturalNews with health books and educational programs from Truth Publishing: • Swine Flu Advanced Preparedness • 8 Weeks to Vibrant Health • Raw In Ten Minutes (recipes) • How to Halt Diabetes in 25 Days ... and much more.

Want to know how you make money in publishing? It's easy: just say whatever advertisers want you to say. If there's a new prescription drug on the market, run all sorts of articles about the miracles of that particular drug. If a big food manufacturing company has a brand new product with a nice, colorful box and lots of artificial ingredients, run that as front page news (or, better yet, give them an award!).

Here's what else you do: in between stories about new drugs, foods and cosmetic products, keep people's attention by running stories about celebrity trials, murder, mayhem, disasters or anything involving explosions and death. And of course, censor out any and all content that's critical of popular food products, and never allow articles that are critical of drug companies to see the light of day.

Censor everything your advertisers don't want and keep the ad money pumping through your publishing company. This pleases advertisers and gets them to spend even more money with your organization, after which you can run even more positive articles about whatever products or agendas those companies support.

Welcome to Publishing 101 in the United States of America. This is the way publishing works in America and throughout the world. Far too many mainstream newspapers, cable news networks, TV news stations and newsstand magazines are basically just infomercials. They follow an agenda, and that agenda is handed to them by big business.

Sadly, the majority of magazines that commercially succeed are those that print stories that benefit Big Business. That's how they get advertising, make money and stay in business. It's not exactly a conspiracy, but more of a system of patting each others' backs. Here, you run my story on this new drug, and we'll sign that $10 million ad contract for the next calendar year... that sort of thing.

Where has the honest press gone in this country? I don't see it out there except in a few small independent publications and some gutsy newspapers that manage to uncover real news from time to time. Most newspapers are just running corporate press releases and making just enough modifications to call it news.

All the pre-canned news that's fit to print

And now, Google News seems to be adopting a technology to stop running smaller, independent news stories. Instead, it looks like Google News is going to focus on news from the "top" organizations -- the big newspapers, TV networks, news magazines and online news heavyweights. Which means, of course, readers are going to get the same exact story from every one of these "top" organizations, because they're all feeding you the same canned news stories. It's homogenized news for the dumbed-down masses. (Funny, isn't it, how these larger news organizations are considered more reputable when, in fact, they're largely just recycling the same official news stories handed to them by the Associated Press...)

What happened to Freedom of the Press?

Where is the honest reporting in this country? How on earth can a journalist at a major newspaper write about the 60,000 people killed by one of the most popular anti-inflammatory prescription drugs ever sold and then merely characterize those deaths as an "unintended side effect"? (It's true. I've seen this description in popular newspapers when talking about the number of people killed by COX-2 inhibitor drugs.) Can you imagine the front-page headlines if somebody found out that an herb killed 60,000 people? But when it's a drug, the newspapers just called it an "unintended side effect."

Where are the stories about the abuse of Ritalin by our nation's schoolchildren? Where are the stories about how our food supply is promoting chronic disease? Where are the stories about organized medicine being the number one cause of death in this country, now responsible for more than 750,000 American deaths each year?

Where are the headlines about the EPA using low-income children as guinea pigs for experiments with pesticides? Search Google for articles. Where is the reporting on how anti-depressant drugs are causing our nation's schoolchildren to pick up firearms and blow each other away in classrooms across the country? Sure, the murder gets covered, because that gets ratings, but the true cause of the murders (the SSRI drugs) are almost never explored.

Where are all these stories? You don't see them in the big media outlets. And here's why you don't see them: because they weren't issued in press releases submitted to the wire services by Big Business. Most mainstream news organizations don't even have journalists any more. Sure, they call them journalists, but they're basically just paper pushers. They sort through different stories that have been submitted to them by the Associated Press, or that have landed on their desk from a faxed press release from an advertiser. Some stories get chosen (the ones that support advertisers' agendas or boost ratings), while others get trashed (the ones that don't benefit Big Business or that are too boring to boost ratings).

And forget about investigative journalism. Who's doing investigations any more? Sure, there's some small local TV station doing an undercover story about a used car dealer that rolled back the odometers on 10 cars. But I'm talking about real, big investigative journalism stories that affect us all.

There are still some great journalists out there

And if you've been in journalism for very long, let's say 20 or 30 years, you've seen the deterioration of journalistic standards in this country. You've seen practices that used to pass as shoddy journalism now being considered everyday news writing. And I'm not just talking about fact checking, I'm talking about idea creation. Anybody can check facts. What about a time when journalists used to actually have original thoughts? They used to challenge the White House or the interests of Big Business. I don't see that happening much these days. Michael Moore is doing his part, but who else is willing to grab a mic, hike up to a mega corporation, and ask some really tough questions? John Stossel (ABC News) is one journalist who's willing to ask those tough questions, but there aren't many others.

So getting back to the point of this rant, here's how you make your fortune in publishing:

1. Run the press releases your advertisers want you to run.
2. Toss in as many ads as you can. (Take a look at the home page of PCMagazine.com. I counted over 42 separate advertisements on their home page alone!)
3. Censor any stories that might conflict with advertisers.
4. If you're a video news organization, fire all the anchors who can actually think for themselves, and hire brainless models who will read the teleprompter, without a conscious, and never ask questions about the information they're pushing.
5. Repeat the above steps as often as possible while cashing advertisers' checks.

Free registration is required to read the rest of this article...
Enter your email address to continue:  
Your email privacy is 100% protected by NaturalNews. We do not sell, rent or share emails.


Get articles like this delivered to you FREE in our popular email newsletter

Related CounterThink Cartoons:

Related Articles: • Mainstream media criticizes Wikipedia because it represents a decentralization of their information monopoly • Newspapers continue shift towards Internet as print business fades • Pharmaceutical advertising turns national newspapers into drug industry puppets	Take Action: Support NaturalNews.com Email this article to a friend Share this article on: NewsVine | digg | del.icio.us Permalink to this article: http://www.NaturalNews.com/007279_newspapers_journalism_paper.html Reprinting this article: Non-commercial use OK, cite NaturalNews.com with clickable link. Embed article link: (copy HTML code below): <a href = "http://www.NaturalNews.com/007279_newspapers_journalism_paper.html">American news industry a far cry from genuine journalism</a>