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Thursday, May 19, 2005 Commentary | Home 
<http://www.newstarget.com/index.html>

 From News Target Network

 American news industry a far cry from genuine journalism - page 2

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/...continued... / And now, Google 
<http://www.newstarget.com/000339.html> 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 <http://www.newstarget.com/007003.html> 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 <http://www.newstarget.com/006721.html> the same 
official news stories handed to them by the Associated Press...)


  What happened to Freedom of the Press?

Some people claim that we have a free press in this nation. Free from 
what? Free from free speech <http://www.newstarget.com/000941.html>, 
apparently. It's free from new ideas and the foundation of journalism 
<http://www.newstarget.com/001470.html> on which this country was based. 
When was the last time a reporter had the guts to break a big story like 
Watergate? The last one I can recall was a story by Pulitzer 
Prize-winning Gary Webb about the CIA and its drug connection. And he 
ended up committing suicide just last year, if you can believe that. 
Click here to see story. 
<http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/13/1457240>

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 <http://www.newstarget.com/005629.html>? Where are the 
stories about how our food supply is promoting chronic disease 
<http://www.newstarget.com/001966.html>? Where are the stories about 
organized medicine being the *number one cause of death 
<http://www.newstarget.com/006985.html> 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 
<http://www.newstarget.com/004550.html> as guinea pigs for experiments 
with pesticides? Search Google for articles. 
<http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-08,GGLD:en&q=children+experiments+pesticides+EPA> 
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.

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