One of the more widely recognized virtues of the American way of life has been its "official" national philosophy, as set forth in the First Amendment of the Constitution, that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." Throughout America's history an independent and competitive press has been regarded as essential to the effective maintenance of her republican form of government. It was the press responsibility to provide factually the news and information necessary for the maintenance of a conscious and alert citizenry.

The American press of today is a far cry from that which existed in the days of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. The technological advances which the newspaper industry has undergone in the last century have been profound. Today the size, material quality, and format of newspapers, as well as the ability to provide a metropolitan area containing hundreds of thousands of readers with several editions a day, would certainly amaze the Founding Fathers. Yet, despite this advance in newspaper technology, they would probably be shocked by the growing monopolistic centralization of American newspapers and disgusted by the kind of managed news which is being presented to the American people.

In the years 1790 until 1798 Benjamin Franklin Bache was the editor of The Philadelphia Aurora -- an opposition newspaper that published weekly counterpoints to the pro-government-no-matter-what Porcupine's Gazette. By the Civil War, big newspapers such as the New York Times were fully cooperative with the interests of government through their editorial policies. The prevalence of pro-government newspaper publishing by the 1880s was memorialized one night when preeminent New York journalist John Swinton was the guest of honor at a banquet given him by his peers. Swinton was managing editor of the New York Times during the Civil War, later becoming a crusading journalist in the movement for social and labor reform.

A toast was offered to the independent press and Swinton later outraged his colleagues when he said the following:

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.

"There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.

"The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?

"We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

Today, influential minorities which constitute two percent or less of the total U.S. population have effectively achieved dominion over America's newspaper industry. The intense consolidation of newspapers into monopolies has resulted in the American public being offered only biased and censored news. We have an entry from Congressional Record that pinpoints the day controlled media and big government were engaged to be formally wed.

On February 9, 1917 the following statement was entered into the Congressional Record of the Sixty-Fourth Congress by a member of the [defense appropriations] committee:

Mr. Callaway: Mr. Chairman, under unanimous consent, I insert into the Record at this point a statement showing the newspaper combination, which explains their activity in the war matter, just discussed by the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Moore]:

"In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, ship building and powder interests and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press in the United States.

"These 12 men worked the problems out by selecting 179 newspapers, and then began, by an elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the country. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.

"This contract is in existence at the present time, and it accounts for the news columns of the daily press of the country being filled with all sorts of preparedness arguments and misrepresentations as to the present condition of the United States Army and Navy, and the possibility of the United States being attacked by foreign foes.

"This policy also included the suppression of everything in opposition to the wishes of the interests served. The effectiveness of this scheme has been conclusively demonstrated by the character of the stuff carried in the daily press throughout the country since March, 1915. They have resorted to anything necessary to commercialize public sentiment and sandbag the National Congress into making extravagant and wasteful appropriations for the Army and Navy under false pretense that it was necessary. Their stock argument is that it is patriotism. They are playing on every prejudice and passion of the American people." [end quote]

The disproportionately powerful political and economic control of the news media has allowed them to choose presidential candidates, swing elections, control foreign and domestic policy, and determine generally what is to be acceptable in every aspect of American culture. They do this by screening and selecting the items to be presented, by the way these items are presented, the emphasis and treatment accorded them, the headlines and pictures used, the typography and format employed in the writing and pictorial representations. News is played up and played down, dramatized, repeated, juxtaposed, spelled out, underscored, even falsehoods, to enhance its influence in the desired directions.

A nation is only as strong as its institutions, and, as an institution, journalism in America has ceased to serve the vital interests of the American People.

The media and the government like to put labels on people who talk about, or refer to, the Constitution as conspiracy nuts; anti-government, skin headed white supremacists. This shows a clear example of brainwashing to make people think black is white and up is down. They call some of us constitutionalists or patriots as if they were bad things, but . . . isn't that what we "all" should be?

credit to: https://barefootsworld.org/commonsense2.html#1a