The Truest Patriot
by Brighid Mooney

The media's role in American culture goes as far back as colonial times, when one-sided broadsheets were used to make announcements and encourage trading.  Once America officially broke away from England, a vital function of the first independent newspapers was to keep an eye on the newly created American government, to help ensure that it never became too powerful or grew outside of the intended control of its citizens.  Since then, American media has changed immensely in both form and function. Unfortunately for the American public, the modern media seems to be less and less like a government watchdog and more and more like the government's bitch.

But media bias is nothing new and the history of yellow journalism goes back nearly as far as journalism itself. The few people in the past who have dared to break away from shameless, obsequious government proselytizing have consistently been labeled as traitors, America-haters, or even communists. And today it seems that yellow journalism is more than just the unabashed presentation of biased information as objective truth; it is also the collective fear of those we rely on for information to question anything the United States government says or does.

In the 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism, the Hollywood blacklist was one of America's most insidious secrets, keeping talented directors, writers and actors out of work for their political affiliations. Just last year the New York Post published a list of celebrities whose movies, shows and CDs should be boycotted because they publicly opposed the war, and ABC broadcast a similar list onscreen around the same time. Tell me anything has changed in the last 50 years, and then tell me why the Dixie Chicks lost radio airplay, or why the Baseball Hall of Fame cancelled an event for the 15th anniversary of the movie Bull Durham. It can't be because Americans truly know what it means to be free.

But the New York Post isn't the only one complying with the government's every whim. Unfailing support for the war and an unwillingness to question government policy, at home or abroad, seems to be a rule of thumb in journalism today, and phrases like "fair and balanced" aren't much more than a glib assurance of something we can no longer really expect. Despite the intent of the Fairness Doctrine, media conglomerates vehemently oppose actual two-sided debate. Critically dependent upon corporations for advertising, and monopolized by an increasingly smaller number of parent organizations, US media has a disturbing tendency to overlook corporate crime (or at least until Martha Stewart), and to ignore pro-labor and pro-consumer issues. Talk radio is overwhelmingly dominated by right-wing pundits, with liberals languishing at stations like Air America or Pacifica.

The newspapers and broadcast news channels today offer us little more than proof through repetition and seem unwilling to dig deeper than pseudo-comforting sound bytes from self-aggrandizing politicians. Instead, we're shown staged images of rallying Iraqis and denied access to the pictures deemed too gruesome or upsetting. Pictures of children blown into pieces by American bombs and pictures of the soldiers themselves, row after row of their coffins draped in American flags. It's little surprise that what results is something these same media outlets term propaganda: Michael Moore.

Moore, in all of his one-sided glory, picks up the slack of the mainstream media, questioning law and policy makers, and filling in the gaps where the traditional media slants, omits or completely ignores. His books and films are undeniably biased, but with most news outlets leaning in the other direction, the American public can almost find even ground. Yet even with both sides opining in our ears, how sure can we really be that we're getting any semblance of the complete picture, much less objective fact? For reliable answers, you have to do the research yourself, and the average American citizen has neither the time nor the inclination to search for the truth. Apparently, neither does mainstream media.

After all is said and done, who can really be called the truest patriot? And if this is what patriotism means in America today, is it really even something to aspire to at all?

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