Read full text: https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead-in-san-bernardino/
........At one point she noted the striking collapse of public confidence in the honesty and reliability of American journalism, which had plummeted from around 72% soon after Watergate to just 36% these days. But she never asked herself whether the public might have a sound basis for such rapidly growing distrust of our media..............
.........During the previous few years I’d grown increasingly suspicious of many of the watershed events of our country’s modern history, but I hadn’t yet launched my American Pravda series nor even published a single article outlining any of my conspiratorial views. However, certain elements of this mass shooting raised red flags in my mind, and I soon republished a short column by longtime libertarian writer Gary North highlighting some of those issues....
..........Similarly, my enormous suspicions that our media was hiding the truth about both the Charlie Hebdo and San Bernardino terrorist attacks gradually convinced me that many other important stories were also being concealed or distorted by our mainstream media and I began thinking of expanding my original 2013 American Pravda article into an entire series. The July 2016 death of Sydney Schanberg prompted me to launch that series, which opened with the following paragraphs, perhaps helping to explain much of the bland and blinkered material in Sullivan’s book:
The death on Saturday of Sydney Schanberg at age 82 should sadden us not only for the loss of one of our most renowned journalists but also for what his story reveals about the nature of our national media.
Syd had made his career at the New York Times for 26 years, winning a Pulitzer Prize, two George Polk Memorial awards, and numerous other honors. His passing received the notice it deserved, with the world’s most prestigious broadsheet devoting nearly a full page of its Sunday edition to his obituary, a singular honor that in this degraded era is more typically reserved for leading pop stars or sports figures. Several photos were included of his Cambodia reporting, which had become the basis for the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, one of Hollywood’s most memorable accounts of our disastrous Indo-Chinese War.
But for all the 1,300 words and numerous images charting his long and illustrious journalistic history, not even a single mention was made of the biggest story of his career, which has seemingly vanished down the memory hole without trace. And therein lies a tale.
Could a news story ever be “too big” for the media to cover? Every journalist is always seeking a major expose, a piece that not merely reaches the transitory front pages but also might win a journalistic prize or even change the history books. Stories such as these appear rarely but can make a reporter’s career, and it is difficult to imagine a writer turning one down, or an editor rejecting it.
But what if the story is so big that it actually reveals dangerous truths about the real nature of the American media, portrays too many powerful people in a very negative light, and perhaps leads to a widespread loss of faith in our major news media? If readers were to see a story like that, they might naturally begin to wonder “why hadn’t we ever been told?” or even “what else might be out there?”
- American Pravda: The Legacy of Sydney Schanberg
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 13, 2016 • 3,500 Words
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