Letter Criticizing Newspapers

February, 1993

So readers want to be able to make up their own minds (Letter "Protect our right to free expression", Plain Dealer, 2-1-93). This is a quaint idea considering the qualities of news organizations upon which the readers depend.

Feigning a commitment to Truth, news services create caricatures of truth rather than the real thing.

Professing Openness to All Ideas and a search for the "pearl in the garbage", news services preselect what to cover with special handling, which is nothing less than dishonest scheming. Not one word gets published without consideration of press peer approval.

With Fairness proclaimed, only the editors' opinions qualify, the rest given token coverage slanted negatively as compatible with press peer approval.

Pridefully Liberal, news services brook no views unpopular to their own unless undermined by stern, slick, subtle, "put-down" reporting.

Arrogantly claiming Courage on behalf of the general welfare, the news services are total cowards and wimps when it comes to self-analysis and self-criticism.

Considering "Being Up To Date" a virtue, news services are not.

Asserting Freedom, they are merely fashionable, and they would not know a free citizen if he wrote to them every week. In the minds of newsmen, only the press is free, not people, and the most basic working principle for the press is "never let a citizen have an uncensored presentation."

One can go on. Sufficient is that today's news services are the most despotic tyrants ever on earth because we the people do not recognize the ink-celluloid-electronic slavery manipulating us like strung puppets.

Readers want to make up their own minds, all right, but this is an illusion when in fact the news services only pretend to provide free expression, and they do that so calculatingly that it is not free at all.