You remember Aaron Brown, don’t you? The congenial, and fact oriented journalist who hosted CNN’s NewsNight until he was unceremoniously fired last November. I always liked Brown, because, despite the occasional smug utterance, I at least felt he took the news seriously and tried to give a fair and accurate picture of events, rather than just buying into the Republican spin cycle.
Well, today he gave a speech, and what he had to say is a searing indictment of the status quo as it operates in the “Infotainment Business”:
“Truth no longer matters in the context of politics and, sadly, in the context of cable news,” said Aaron Brown, whose four-year period as anchor of CNN’s NewsNight ended in November, when network executives gave his job to Anderson Cooper in a bid to push the show’s ratings closer to front-runner Fox News.
Brown said he tried to give viewers a balanced diet of light and serious news with NewsNight. “But I always knew when I got to the Brussels sprouts, I was on thin ice,” he said.
Too bad the “brussel sprouts” are what America needs most from its broadcasters these days.
With the departure from the screen of the “titans” — Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather — who “resisted the temptations of their bosses to go for the ratings grab, it will be years before an anchorman or anchorwoman will have the clout to fight these battles,” he said. […]
Important issues, such as the prosecution of the war in Iraq at home and abroad, are being clouded over by “mud-wrestling” that skirts substance, he said. Consider what he called “the swift-boating of John Murtha,” the Democratic congressman whose war record was smeared when he called for an exit strategy in Iraq. “Cable didn’t search for the truth, but engaged in mock debates pitting those making the charges against Murtha’s defenders,” he said.
In many ways, this has been the worst consequence of the conservative momement’s successful assault on our country’s politics and culture — the destruction of unbiased and accurate reporting. This is why we need an independent media, something to stand in opposition to the easily manipulated and lazy corporate controlled media that currently casts an ever darker shadow on our democracy. With the way things are today, with constant cutbacks in the news departments of the various networks and in the halls of our Nation’s newspapers, we losing not only the ability to investigate the lies being fed to us, but also the ability to disseminate the truth even when we can discover it buried amidst the manure heap of spin, lies and prevailing stereotypes that all too often passes for wisdom among our punditocracy.
Until we do, our “free press” will only continue down the path of selling lies, confirming prejudices and validating ignorance.
