Happy News Year: 'The News Dissector' Looks Beyond The Top Stories of the Year to Examine the News System

[Commentary] There are two news systems in America -- the official parody of journalism that represents most of what the mainstream or what some call the "lame stream" media offers. And a growing counter-system offering more critical narratives.

These are the "products" an "official" news business, an industry now under growing pressure from within and without to maintain a semblance of credibility with a global audience that has so many other divergent sources to rely on or suck information from. A part of a global entertainment combine, the advertising-sponsored "news biz" also spends inordinate amounts of money marketing itself and referencing its own output. It is that system that has become one of the major pillars of established power like the institutions of government and the office holders it covers to a fault. Official news tells us what politicians say, and say about each other. Some of the stars of the news world move into politics while former politicians become our pundits and meaning makers. The system is interconnected and symbiotic. It looks diverse but US news operates in an ideological framework as surely as Chinese news. No wonder that critics now speak of a military-industrial-media complex.

[Schechter edits the media watchdog site, Mediachannel dot org]

[Jan 2]