"In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell." That's a quote from the 1971 case where the Pentagon was trying to stop the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers — documents that indicated the U.S. government lied to garner support for the war in Vietnam. The Pentagon lost and the American people were made aware that the government lied, but that seems to have not made any difference, for the whole thing repeated itself for justifying the Iraq war, based on lies in 2003. (governments still lie; please see Howard Zinn) Virtually no media questioned the government propaganda that in every newspaper and on every news program day after day for months on end seemed to justify the illegal war in Iraq.
Fortunately, programs like DemocracyNow and Aljazeera English are delivering real news that is not beholden to the government or corporations. Recently Hilary Clinton commented that the U.S. media is not as informative as Aljazeera! She's right! After watching a couple of hours of Aljazeera and then tuning into Fox News, it's so obvious that Americans would be blind to virtually any objective view point at all!
