Can Truth Retain Its Independence?

By Paul Craig Roberts

Justin Raimondo has a good column this morning on Antiwar.com. It is written as a fundraiser. But what it shows is that journalists (and whistle-blowers) who tell the truth in America are more likely to be pummeled than rewarded, whereas those who lie for powerful interest groups live high on the hog.

It wasn’t just Bush, Cheney, and the neoconservatives who deceived us into an illegal war in behalf of a hidden agenda. It was the American media. Raimondo names some of the culprits who are complicit in the deaths of some one million Iraqis, an unknown number of Afghans, and thousands of American soldiers.

It was all for a lie. A lie told by the President of the United States and his handmaidens in the media.

Two of the worst handmaidens, Billy Kristol and Thomas Friedman, have been rewarded for their treachery to America by the New York Times, which pays these men, who have never been right about anything, to pontificate from columns on its pages. Others, such as Peter Beinart, are installed at the Washington Post and other publications.

The benefit of being a name columnist at a name newspaper is that it puts you on the lucrative speaking circuit. Raimondo reports, for example, that Friedman is paid $65,000 for a speech.

Such extravagant fees are not paid for words of wisdom. They are paid by interest groups for service. Even if Friedman had anything intelligent to say, it is unnecessary to pay him $65,000 to repeat what he writes in the New York Times.

The same interest groups that control the government offer the most extravagant fees on the speaking circuit. Global corporations that are driving up their stock prices and management bonuses by moving American jobs offshore reward journalists who write propaganda about the benefits of globalism. The military-security complex rewards journalists that feed hysteria about terrorism and foreign threats. (more…)