Prof. John Kozy: The Media in America -Selling Views, Calling it News

Sometime in the 1960's, Professor Kozy took part in a university symposium along with three other faculty members: A political scientist, a historian, and a journalism professor. The topic was "Freedom of the Press", good or bad. During the sixties the Cold War was still being fought. The Soviet Union's news agencies, TASS and Pravda, were continually attacked by the American "free press" as untrustworthy. A common claim was that a controlled press could never be trusted while a free press could, and my three colleagues on the panel supported that view. A controlled press, I argued, most certainly could NOT be trusted when reporting on governmental actions or policies, but, I pointed out that much news is not affected by government, and I saw no reason to distrust the so-called "free press", no matter what is reported. My argument rested on the observation that a controlled free press, being funded by its controlled government, had no need to attract readers, while the so-called "free press" had to rely on readers to remain economically viable. The free press had to market its wares in the same way that any retail company must, and one way to do that was to slant the news in ways that made it attractive to the news organization's target groups which, in a sense, biased all the stories the free press reported.