An Appeals Court has just struck down the FCC's attempt to impose net neutrality. That ruling, and the rise of the app, may very well spell the end of the independent voices, such as your humble blogger, that have, to a some extent, managed to fight back against the now very much right wing mainstream media. (I do not wish to imply that I am a significant actor in that fight, but Kos, Josh Marshall and their ilk have certainly been a counterweight to a media that tows the corporate line, and the cumulative effect of us little guys cannot be denied.)
We get a bit of a preview of the brave new world that awaits us from an old media example, the Washington Post, which still rests on its Watergate laurels while serving the interests of the 1%:
American journalism has entered highly dangerous terrain. A tip-off is that the Washington Post refuses to face up to a conflict of interest involving Jeff Bezos – who’s now the sole owner of the powerful newspaper at the same time he remains Amazon’s CEO and main stakeholder. The Post is supposed to expose CIA secrets. But Amazon is under contract to keep them. Amazon has a new $600 million “cloud” computing deal with the CIA.
The situation is unprecedented. But in an email exchange early this month, Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron told me that the newspaper doesn’t need to routinely inform readers of the CIA-Amazon-Bezos ties when reporting on the CIA. He wrote that such in-story acknowledgment would be “far outside the norm of disclosures about potential conflicts of interest at media organizations.”
But there isn’t anything normal about the new situation. As I wrote to Baron, “few journalists could have anticipated ownership of the paper by a multibillionaire whose outside company would be so closely tied to the CIA.”
The Washington Post’s refusal to provide readers with minimal disclosure in coverage of the CIA is important on its own. But it’s also a marker for an ominous pattern – combining denial with accommodation to raw financial and governmental power – a synergy of media leverage, corporate digital muscle and secretive agencies implementing policies of mass surveillance, covert action and ongoing warfare.
via Norman Solomon at Consortium News
Jeff Bezos may not seem like an evil man, but he does evil things behind his corporate mask. The demise of net neutrality will play perfectly into the hands of men like him, who think first, last and always of the dollar. We can expect that someday soon the only information we can get on the net will be the type of n ot-quite-propaganda we get from Bezo's Post: slanted to suit the needs of the 1% first, and the surveillance state thereafter.
Of course, it would be an easy matter for Congress to reverse the court's ruling.
Yes, I know. I'm laughing too.
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