Djelloul Marbrook: Burying The Giant Alive — The Press of Denial

The American press is like a sexagenarian doctor with a factory practice who hasn’t read a medical text since his internship. His patients don’t ask, and he doesn’t tell. They don’t know what they’re missing, and they may be dying of it.

Telegraphic incident reportage persists in the digital era. As far as the press is concerned Kitchener might as well still be besieging Khartoum in 1898. The press continues to alarm us without context, without connecting the dots. If it were left to the press there would be no Big Dipper or Orion’s Belt.

For example, we can’t possibly get our minds around the current Middle East conflagration unless the press bothers to remind us that the region’s borders were drawn up in 1917 by British and French imperialists to exploit natural resources, not to set up viable states, but the press doesn’t bother.

When newspapers had a specific news hole to fill and could not trespass on space sold to advertisers, there was an excuse, albeit a shaky one, for this reductive incident reportage, but we live in cyberspace now and there is no excuse.

Kitchener might just as well be crossing swords with the Mahdi in the Sudan. Europeans following their manifest destiny in the American West might just as well be circling the wagons. The great unfoldings of psychology and sociology might just as well not have happened as far as the press is concerned. The amplituhedron might just as well not have challenged the big-bang theory.

All these tools—psychology, sociology, quantum physics—are available to today’s press, available and largely disdained.  But the one phenomenon the press has not cold-shouldered is Madison Avenue and its hype dispenser. The press hypes news beyond recognition.

News editors used to keep tickler files to remind them to return to a story and update it. That seemingly has gone by the wayside. Today’s press is afflicted with spotty amnesia. It remembers Justin Bieber’s bad behavior but not inter-bank rate fixing. In part, this selective memory is more evil than ailment, deriving from the fact that the press is beholden to Wall Street.

With religious zeal the press fails to tell us who profits from conflict, although films like The International and Lord of War have already told us. In reviewing these remarkable films the press failed to mention their quintessential messages, namely that war is immensely profitable to bankers and arms-makers, and that government is wholly in their service.

The putative reason for the alarms and hype is competition, but the press today is largely in the hands of five or six Citizens Kane. Competition in such a corporatized arena is largely myth. In its entirely the mainstream press can be called The Wall Street Journal. If this were not so, the press would routinely tell us who is profiting. When a conflict erupts, who are the arms merchants, which banks are involved? We’re never told.

Alternet, an online news and analysis report,  on August 22^nd made unacknowledged journalistic history when Alex Kane wrote a story telling the Americans the one thing the rest of the press has moved heaven and earth to ignore about the militarization of their police: who profits? The story was more important than anything in the American press that day because it set a precedent. It addressed the missing key element in American journalism, the one thing more than anything else that Wall Street doesn’t want to talk about.

Big-city police departments were dragged grudgingly to the creation of internal affairs divisions to investigate corrupt cops and schemes. The press, the Fourth Estate, was given special privileges under the First Amendment to be the internal affairs division of the nation. It is the only private enterprise given privileges by the founding fathers. But the press is sleeping with the enemy, the corrupters of government.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin, to name but two defense contractors, are not selling airplanes when they take out full-page advertisements in newspapers: they’re buying the complicity and often the silence of the press.  The press is as censored by its advertisers as the press in Moscow and Beijing is censored by government. We do not have a free press. We have a bought-and-paid-for press pretending to report on a bought-and-paid-for government.

When the press beat the war drums for George W. Bush’s calamitous incursion into Iraq it was luring us away from the biggest story of our time, the ever-widening chasm between the filthy rich and everyone else. It was baiting us with war, demonizing Saddam Hussein so that we all would be that much further away from recognizing the injustice of American society, just as Saddam himself made war on Iran and Kuwait to distract his people from his domestic crimes.

To this day the press stands in the way of the public’s recognition that the emergence of the Islamic State, with its Islam For Dummies handbook, is a direct result of America’s incursion in Iraq. In a larger context, the press continues to stand in the way of public recognition that millions of Muslims are resorting to 7^th Century mentality to address today’s challenges while millions of Westerners are resorting to 10^th and 11^th Century behavior. Jihads and Crusades are bred in the failure of the popular press to provide perspective. A controlled press is a danger to society everywhere in the world. It assures that murderous decisions will be made in the dark by self-seeking leaders. America’s founders understood this, which is why they wrote the First Amendment. Citizen Kane, holding the press in his grubby hands, has betrayed the First Amendment. Citizen Kane is a traitor.

There is much to be learned in one obscure behavioral pattern in the press: the periodic appearance of stories suggesting that poetry is dead. Just as the press was anxious to write Occupy Wall Street’s obituary while its participants were still in the streets, so the press is anxious to bury poetry. But why? Perhaps it’s because poetry goes to the furthest pale of our sensibilities. Perhaps it’s because poetry knows only the censorship of its author’s limitations. Perhaps it’s because poetry is what we had hoped the press would be, courageous, unrelenting, clear-eyed and dangerous.

Truth is always dangerous, always subversive. That is why a brick-and-mortar church arose, to contain the hair-raising and radical Christian message, to water it down and hitch it to the patriarchy.

The press recognizes poetry as an unflattering mirror, an unremitting eye. In poetry the press sees its failure. Poetry shows us a society afraid to consult its oracles, its seers. It measures our denial. So, at the behest of Wall Street, the press wrote its occupiers’ obituary, and at the behest of Citizen Kane the press writes poetry’s obituary, not because it is a lesser force but because it is a greater force.

Who reads poetry? the press asks disingenuously. Who listens to Nashville? Who listens to Woodstock? Who reads the Bible, the Quran, the Kama Sutra? The press knows the answers and hates them. It’s not because the press discounts these examples of poetry. It’s not because its definition of poetry is preposterously narrow. It’s because the press knows it is attempting to bury a giant alive.

— by Djelloul Marbrook writing for Vox Populi

Djelloul Marbrook (Del in the newspaper business) worked for The Providence Journal as a reporter and bureau manager (five years) and as an editor for The Elmira Star-Gazette, The Baltimore Sun, The Winston-Salem Journal (under former New York Times man Wallace Carroll), The National Journal, The Washington Star, and The Washington Times, and as executive editor of a chain of dailies in northeastern Ohio and northern New Jersey.