18911: Dailey on 18855 & 18846 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Peter Dailey <phdailey@msn.com>


Greg Chamberlain is absolutely correct to say that in discussions of Third
World etc. media "independent" is understood to mean "independent of
government control." This is not a value judgment, whatever it may once have
been, but merely a matter of usage. A newspaper may be biased, in the
business of manufacturing lies wholesale, in the service of a political
party, class, or the ambitions of its crackpot proprietor, and still be
"independent." However misleading the term may be today, during the period
several decades ago when the press of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc, as
well as much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America was largely under government
control, the distinction between government and private ownership was not an
insignificant one.

More recently, in the U.S. and elsewhere, small radio stations or newspapers
on both the left and the right have used the term independent in a different
sense to distinguish themselves from the "corporate media." However, small
market media are dependent on advertisers & supporters as well and are often
constrained by their own ideologies, preconceptions, pieties or subservient
in other ways. As A.J. Liebling famously noted: "Freedom of the press is
guaranteed only to those who own one."

Peter Dailey

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