Why A Free Press (And Media)?

Notwithstanding the allusions that some make to a halcyon, mythical and perfect past when press freedoms were supposedly completely unchecked, never in human history has there been a perfectly free press.

But neither has any marriage been completely perfect and if the press be married in purpose to the people, the marriage has at various times been blissful, blessed, even beautiful to behold, but not perfect. There is undoubtedly a fundamental and enormous gulf of difference however, between a wonderful marriage of purposeful and productive bliss - and one that is on the rocks, separated, divorced. A separated or divorced free press then, does not serve the people, but becomes an instrument of the peoples’ oppression and persecution. We are now living through such a time and the press has united itself in an adulterous partnership with the ruling authorities - the two have indeed become one flesh.

A free press flows directly from free speech and is the grandchild of freedom itself. Its light derives from the bright light of freedom and is opposed by the night of censorship. The darkness always prods and probes the light and would if it were possible, extinguish the free press forever.

If freedom and free speech are essential to the human condition, then a free press is like the flag flown from the ramparts of the fort that houses freedom - it signals to the world that all is indeed well with freedom. When the flag is absent or even flown at half-mast, freedom, free speech, freedom of conscience are all under grave and present danger. We the people must then rise to their defence.

The hand of censorship is not always visible - as when newspapers are banned by governments, or individuals banned on social media. Hidden algorithms (programmed by human beings who decide what to censor) no doubt operate in hidden ways to automatically censor and ban free speech on the internet - this is quite well known.

It is also completely true but less obvious however, that the concentration of media ownership in a few hands, is a powerful, hidden hand of censorship. For example, just six companies own 90% of the sum total of American media. A similar pattern repeats itself across the globe. Those who control these companies will therefore have the ability to censor the free press at will and push forward any agenda they choose at any particular time in history. 

The concentration of press and media ownership extends to the big tech companies. A rather amusing if sinister illusion of separate ownership is actively pursued by these companies, although more and more people are now aware that Google owns YouTube, Facebook owns WhatsApp, Microsoft owns LinkedIn - and so on. 

Capitalism and the stock market supposedly ensure wide public ownership of company assets, including press and media companies. Very large investing companies (“Institutional Investors”) however, undermine and negate this ability of the public (the small investor) of having an essential say in the running of the press and media. Institutional investors typically control trillions and billions of dollars and hold an increasing proportion of shares in the shrinking roll of media companies, thus once again, concentrating their control in a few hands. For example, Vanguard and Blackrock, together with less than a dozen other large, institutional investors control the great majority of shares in press and media companies. 

This control also extends to the concentrated ownership by the very same oligarchs and institutional investors of other very big companies, including multinational pharmaceutical companies, banks and weapons manufacturers. In effect therefore, these very few CEOs and oligarchs in our Western, capitalistic nations can control both the drugs/injections that are manufactured and their propaganda arm of ownership, the press and media; both the banks (including the Federal Reserve) and the press and media that carries their stories of inflation, deflation, or “necessary” monetary policy; and both the declaration of war with the weapons made by the manufacturers that they control and the press and media that feverishly make the case for war and ignore and demonize the call for peace. 

The compliant press and media will also ignore all kinds of essential, negative stories of products made by the companies that are jointly owned by the oligarchs and institutional investors - including harms caused by vaccines and drugs and the savage, pointless suffering caused by most wars.

Even the journalist turned revolutionary leader of the 1917 communist-Bolshevik revolution in Russia recognized the concentration of ownership in the corrupt, “bourgeois” capitalist press of the time. Astutely, he also pointed out that large companies in capitalist countries pour advertising money into newspapers, further corrupting an already corrupt press.

“Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” - the more things change, the more they remain the same!

This particular brand of tyranny therefore, that exerts a vice-like grip on the press and media and strangles the life out of free speech, is in essence, a capitalistic tyranny.

There is also a fearsome communist or fascist tyranny, of course - and within living memory, many of these regimes have exerted their murderous control over millions of people, including in the former Soviet Union, in China and in Nazi Germany.

All tyrannies, both capitalist and communist, make the case, often with emotional or fear driven propaganda for a “temporary” restriction of press freedoms to deal with a supposed emergency.

Soon after the communist Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Vladimir Lenin’s Nov 1917 “Council of the People’s Commissars Decree on the Press” promulgated widespread censorship laws which could be applied to virtually every publication critical of the bloody Bolshevik revolution and its sadistic rulers. 

Item “3” in Lenin’s Decree on the Press reads, “The present ordinance is of a temporary nature and will be repealed by a special decree as soon as normal conditions of social life set in.” As it happened, the Soviet tyranny lasted more than 70 years.

In my essay on freedom, I wrote about how no matter how dystopian the tyranny or how cruel the tyrant, the essential, defiant, glorious partnership of truth with freedom is always destined to triumph and put to flight the forces of oppression. 

In the genocidal, tragic, years of the Soviet communist tyranny in Russia and Eastern Europe, a particular brand of defiance was to emerge and make an essential, indispensable contribution to the defeat of totalitarianism. The “Samizdat” (Russian for “self-published, underground”) press was the clandestine press that distributed banned publications in secret, to the people living in the Soviet Union. Always under the constant threat of surveillance and arrest, at great personal danger to themselves, in dinghy apartments and with nothing more than a pen or paper or manual typewriter, the soldiers of the Samizdat free press would write out or type, then distribute banned publications to a population hungry for the truth - the Bible, the great works of Russian literature (including Michael Bulgakov’s caustic, subversive, brilliant “Master and Margarita”) and numerous other books, tracts and newsletters describing and proclaiming freedom.

In the capitalistic censorship and tyranny that has exerted its control of our press and media today, a modern-day Samizdat press has emerged, demonstrating once again, that the urge for freedom is God-given, primal, irrepressible. Where YouTube censors, Rumble and a host of other media platforms have risen to defy Google’s monopoly over internet video content; where the increasingly irrelevant and defunct legacy media repeats only the narratives of the tyranny, multiple credible sources of “old fashioned” journalism and alternate narratives have proliferated on the internet. 

A high level of surveillance already exists over everything the citizen in Western countries reads or consumes on the internet. What if this Orwellian surveillance morphs into an open ban on internet content, as in China today? Will that spell the end to the defiance that now exists to capitalistic control of the press and media? 

No tyranny has ever triumphed over or completely silenced the voice of freedom. Freedom and the free press will always find a way around the tyranny. Even in China, brave Chinese citizens are finding ways to get around the open censorship of the internet. As I wrote in my essay on freedom, no tyranny lasts forever - and every tyranny has a defined lifespan.

When the Soviet empire collapsed in ruins in 1991, from amidst the ashes of that collapse, the great works of Russian literature, the Bible and the Samizdat press emerged intact, triumphant.

“There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, and nothing hidden that will not be made known. What you have spoken in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the housetops.” - Jesus, in the Gospel according to St. Luke.