On Friday, February 3, 2012, Pete Dominick (Sirius radio, POTUS Politics, channel 124) aired an interview with investigative reporter Greg Palast. Palast worked for the BBC for years and reported on corporate corruption stories. He now writes books (Chapter 1 of Vulture's Picnic) and reports on various issues related to both business as usual and corruption in U.S. business and politics.
For example, Palast asserted that software analyzing the data received from safety equipment in the gas pipeline (pipeline integrity gauge) is programmed so that warnings about gas leaks were not always recorded. That may or may not have anything to do with accidents such as the 2010 San Bruno California gas explosion, but it is something not reported by the U.S. press. Palast asserts that oil and gas companies sometimes want "defective" software to reduce the high cost of maintaining pipeline operations ($100 - $200 million per ten miles just to analyze a pipeline, not to maintain it). Of course, oil and gas companies vehemently deny any complicity with anything unsavory like that.
In the interview, Palast commented that over the years a fair number of the major corruption stories he reported for the BBC and broadcast outside the U.S. got limited or no attention form the U.S. press inside the U.S. According to Palast, the failure of the U.S. press (or maybe more accurately, the people who control reporters and the news agenda) to reasonably inform the public on corporate corruption stories stems at least partly from press ties to or reliance on corporations and advertisers. Economic pressure sometimes limits what the U.S. press is willing and/or economically able to report.
Complaints about the general uselessness of the U.S. press have been aired from time to time over the years from all sorts of sources, including a few complaints from here. The economic pressure on the mainstream press is powerful. In a capitalist system like ours, the press has to make money or go bankrupt. That's just reality. It is also reality that corporations and individuals rarely or never want adverse publicity. If it is in their power, they will influence owners of the press to be quiet and not report news that is adverse to the bad actor.
Of course, essentially all press outlets will strongly deny that corporate or economic pressure ever affects any reporting decision. That defense of the status quo has been voiced for years. However, people like Palast and sometimes events that simply spin out of control show that that the press' denials of undue influence by money is not in synch with reality.
Money does sometimes limit things the press will report. That damages the public interest. The press defense of itself is the same as politicians telling us that campaign contributions do not affect anything. In both cases, the unspun reality just isn't the same as the spun version we get from self-interested parties. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anything that can be done to change the status quo.
About all that the average voter can do is to be constantly on guard about what one choses to believe and to try to independently figure out what is reality and what is spin. That's not easy when significant amounts of information are simply withheld and/or otherwise hidden from the public. Public discourse has been impaired but there's no obvious way to fix the damage.
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