Jesse Sopher

This is important. Listen to what RT’s Abby Martin has to say about the state of corporate-funded journalism in the United States. Piers Morgan tries to sway the discussion toward a condemnation of government-funded journalism, but Martin correctly points out that both corporate and government-funded journalistic operations have their faults. 

No journalist is unbiased. If you’re on a network that’s owned by a government — Al Jazeera, Russia Today, etc. — you have a bias toward that government. If you’re on a network that’s owned by a big corporation, you have a bias. 

Both Morgan and Martin point out that they’ve never been approached by the management of their respective news networks and asked to censor their opinions on issues important to their corporate or governmental overlords. But near the end of the video, Martin notes that employees often feel a need to self-censor themselves in the light of their networks’ biases. They may not even realize they’re doing it. 

The only way around this is independent journalism. The problem with that, of course, is that good journalism is expensive. Funding has to come from somewhere. 

As viewers and readers, I think it’s important that we not discount the work these networks are doing based solely on the source of their funding. When Al Jazeera America first launched, there was a pretty hefty backlash because people recognized that a network funded by the Qatari royal family couldn’t be fully objective on issues in which Qatar has any sort of vested interest — oil and energy, for example. RT is routinely dismissed as having a pro-Russian bias. MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN are all corporately funded. Those networks have a vested interest in supporting their owners’ causes. 

That being said, all of those networks (aside from Fox News, but for entirely different reasons) still have value. As consumers of news and analysis, it’s not so much that we have to reject the work of journalists in these companies as much as it is that we have to be aware of those biases and understand how they affect the way information is presented to us. We can’t just sit back and blindly accept what a cable news anchor or newspaper columnist tell us. This is where those critical thinking skills your undergrad professors kept talking about come into play.