Can We Trust the Media?

Glenn Greenwald says today’s news media do not understand what holding authority accountable means; power wins out, he says: government over the press and business over the government. “It’s not that these media figures fail to perform their assigned function or consciously decide that they won’t. They don’t even conceive of their purpose in this way, because holding government officials accountable is not actually their purpose. With some accidental exceptions, the corporations which own these media outlets don’t choose people for these positions who want to or who will perform these accountability functions. They choose the ones who have no interest in doing so, no ability to do so, and who simply won’t — and thus don’t.”