Crisis Magazine:
According to Reporters Without Borders, the U.S. has dropped to 46th place in press freedom. The lowered ranking was based on the conviction of the WikiLeaks informant, the effort to punish NSA leaker Edward Snowden, and the Justice Department’s monitoring of reporters.
Unmentioned by the report, however, is an equally serious cause for concern. Most press censorship in the U.S. is self-imposed. The masters of the media are quite willing to suppress certain news stories without any government encouragement. This can be accomplished in several ways: by not reporting a story, by providing only minimal coverage, or by shaping the story to fit a pre-existing narrative. There may be “eight million stories in the naked city,” as the old television series informed us, but the news producers are the ones who decide which stories you will hear and what slant they will be given. Full article is here.
