Controlled News: Corporate Sins of Omission
William A. Cook

      Corporate news reminds me of a souvenir available in Vermont shops, a lidded jar of pristine Vermont air. We like the thought of having something desirable, but we know it doesn’t exist. News devoid of concern for those impacted psychologically, emotionally, morally is fatuous, vacuous, and irresponsible. “O’Reillyistic” news, “fair and balanced,” is clownish – it is pretense; it assumes equal justification for human actions because one can invent an argument to defend the indefensible thus allowing or justifying the need to give it equal consideration.

      Huxley’s new world citizens are blind to the tragedy of death and to its pathos precisely because they are conditioned to disengage from the impact death causes in the human soul, an impact that joins one individual to another and shares the sadness and loss of the bereaved. Nations at war cannot afford to open hearts to the enemy’s grief. How fortunate, then, in our time, our government takes on its paternalistic role to shelter its people from death: no photos of our dead soldiers, no pictures of enemy bodies strewn in the streets, no body counts to tabulate and disturb our serenity, our security, all for our security. In this fashion corporate news becomes the handmaiden of the government, a kind father that protects the weary citizen from the carnage caused by dropping or firing tons of incendiaries on hapless citizens; unreported, it is as though it never happened. America’s innocence incubates in silence about truth, the sins of omission committed by our main stream press.

      “Indifference, Shaw tells us, is the essence of inhumanity; it is worse than hatred precisely because it does not recognize the living, breathing brother and sister who suffers the agony inflicted on them by a people who proclaim to be civilized even as they inflict bestial and barbaric acts on the helpless. That makes the citizens of the world worse sinners than the IDF and the Jews in Israel who tolerate the racist hatred that drives their government. Indifference costs nothing, requires no judgment, raises no principles, imposes no action, causes no discomfort; it is the void that rests in the soul that cares only for self and nothing for its fellow man.” (“Life Inside the Entombment Wall,” William Cook, March 4, 2007)

      This paragraph follows a litany of atrocities committed by the Israeli state on the imprisoned Palestinians and reported in MWC News, a non-corporate news service that does not omit conscience. There are no two sides to this behavior by an alleged civilized state, a purported democratic state, an ally of these United States and supported in its carnage by this government, yet our corporate press does nothing to recount these barbarities finding in its silence that ignorance permits continued slaughter followed by more revenue for our munitions corporations and its investors.

      Just this past Monday, Ha’aretz carried an article by Gideon Levy describing a calculated sniper shooting of a young Palestinian girl shot in her bedroom while studying for the Magen pre-matriculation exam, her last exam, never now to be taken. “Bushra, 17, was killed by a sniper’s bullet aimed at the middle of her forehead as she paced her room, grammar book in hand, memorizing the material for the exam the next day. A direct hit. The lights were on in the room, the shooter must have seen the person at whom he was firing, whose life he was taking with such dreadful ease.” What corporate paper in this country would report this incident? But then, why disturb our citizens when our ally does such a thing; probably a bad apple in the IDF or, as is the reported case by the IDF, “After the operation the Coordination and Liaison headquarters received a report of the killing of a Palestinian girl.” Nothing more. “Blind to the tragedy of death and to its pathos.” This is the mentality of our allies. But, if not reported, it never happened.

      Nothing so graphically demonstrates the value of MWC News as its sensitivity to true news and its reporting of it so that, indeed, we can live in an open society where truth is made manifest and the humanity of our lives has more prominence than the profits of our corporations. 

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