From: Fort Russ News

The Fall of Journalism Ethics and Standards in the Corporate Press

April 18th, 2017 – Fort Russ News –
– Analysis by Samer Hussein for FRN –

While browsing through daily news reports and looking for independent and unbiased sources, it becomes clear the situation is getting worse day by day. While journalism never really was that far away from politics and propaganda, the present-day state may have reached the bottom as regards professionalism and ethics.

Merely looking at the coverage of the Syrian conflict, it becomes obvious that there are hardly any ethics or standards left, at least as regards the corporate and mainstream media outlets, some of which are even taxpayer-funded.

In the past seven years of covering the Syrian conflict, we have seen some of the biggest distortions, fabrications, lies, manipulations and falsifications of events. These include: Dead children that suddenly become alive; refugees from at least three different conflicts on at least three different continents; cardboard-made buildings that are collapsing; Al Qaeda associates who suddenly become human rights activists; American males in their 40’s posing as young and oppressed Syrian lesbians; convicted adult individuals who suddenly become little children and 7-year old girls who speak English with a proficiency of an educated adult native speaker, despite otherwise barely understanding a word of English – these are only some of the many examples from the ocean of Syria-related media hoaxes that have, for the past several years, been flooding people’s minds.

On these examples alone, a question immediately arises of how accurate and honest the reporting on other issues really is. Given how far modern journalism has gone on the Syrian issue, it is legitimate to assume that coverage of other events is not much different.

It may be true that journalism never was alien to the establishment as it was always needed for propaganda purposes, especially in the absolutist and authoritarian systems, however, one is simply amazed upon realizing that ties between journalism and the governing political powers are even closer in the so-called “free and democratic world”, where a diversity and plurality on reporting would be expected. Instead, the reports on crucial issues, namely the conflicts in Yemen, Syria and Donbass, and the foreign policies of US and NATO, are pretty much the same. Even opinionated articles, features and columns have become pretty much alike across all media.
In today’s mainstream press, the situation is even worse than it was decades ago. At least at the time of the Vietnam war, there were few honest journalists who risked their lives by traveling to the midst of the warzones and presented the world with truth, previously hidden under the blanket of lies by the ruling elites and their media parrots.

Nowadays we see less and less of these things. …

An important issue to bring up here is also the fact that such fabricated and manipulated works of journalism no longer seem to pose a problem for various regulating bodies, whose primary task is to monitor the authenticity and legitimacy of the press. Hardly any of the fabricated reports from recent years were investigated for possible law or ethics-related violations.

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