Two items which give a very negative view of the 'press'. What do you think about these:
FLASH CARD
"I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel
myself infinitely the happier for it." (Thomas Jefferson)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: WHAT HAPPENED AT THE TIMES?
In a book highly critical of the way the New York Times has evolved in
recent years, attorney Bob Kohn examines the issue of opinion and bias in
news reporting:
"Today, it seems, newspapers are in the business of identifying
solutions to society's problems and influencing public opinion to agree with
those solutions. News gathering and reporting are no longer the ends of the
newspaper; they have become merely a means to an end.
"Over the course of the past fifty years, the line between the
editorial opinion and the news article has become increasingly blurred.
Today, the two are nearly indistinguishable. Though maintaining some
stylistic differences, the editorial opinion and the news article have the
same purpose and often work in tandem to maximize the newspaper publisher's
influence over public opinion.
"The profession has become very open about these changes. In 1975, when
the American Society of Newspaper Editors assembled to rewrite the code of
ethics that served them for nearly fifty years, they took their original
canon -- 'News reports should be free from opinion or bias of any kind' --
and turned it on its ear with the following: 'Distinguish between advocacy
and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not
misrepresent fact or context.'
"No longer did the society stress that news be free from opinion or
bias of any kind. The focus shifted away from how news reports should be
written to how 'analysis and commentary' should be labeled. The
straightforward canon established in the 1920s was replaced with the rather
vague, 'Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting.'
"Those in the profession -- whose day-to-day tools of trade are words
and their meaning -- fully understood the future they were forging. The
message they sent to their fellow editors and reporters was now clear:
straight news articles need no longer be 'free from opinion or bias of any
kind.' And while the new ethics code elsewhere demands that the deliberate
distortion of facts is 'never permissible,' it merely recommends that
analysis and commentary 'should be labeled.'"
***
[To purchase a copy of Bob Kohn's "Journalistic Fraud: How The New YorkTimes
Distorts the News and Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted," go to <
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0785261044/newsscancom/ref=nos
im>

Well it's not just the Japanese government that keeps secrets that it shouldn't:. LET THE SUN SHINE IN
http://prweek.com/news/news_story.cfm?ID=231598&site=3
The American Society of Newspaper Editors and other media
organizations are organizing "Sunshine Week" in mid-March, to
encourage print, broadcast and online media outlets "to address the
issue of a more open government through news coverage, editorials,
commentaries, and editorial cartoons." The organizations are
"alarmed by a trend toward secrecy at all levels of government." A
similar effort, OpenTheGovernment.org, has been launched by dozens
of organizations "to advance the public's right to know and to
reduce secrecy in the government." The managing director of the PR
Consulting Group, which is promoting OpenTheGovernment.org, said,
"As Americans concerned about the erosion of our constitutionally
protected freedoms, this is a very important client for us."
SOURCE: PR Week (reg. req'd.), January 3, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3165