Worth Your Thought

Posted on May 17, 2006 in Journalists & Pundits Reading

Try as they might, reporters and editors don’t often go beyond the professional groove of the media workplace. Journalists routinely function as cogs in media machinery that processes tragedy as just another news commodity….

On this planet in 2006, no greater contrast exists than the gap between human hunger and military spending. While international relief agencies slash already-meager food budgets because of funding shortfalls, the largesse for weaponry and war continues to be grotesquely generous. The globe’s biggest offender is the United States government, which at the current skyrocketing rate of expenditures is — if you add up all the standard budgets and “supplemental” appropriations for war — closing in on a time when U.S. military spending will reach $2 billion per day.

This is what Martin Luther King Jr. was talking about in 1967 when he warned: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Such an occurrence isn’t sudden; it overtakes us gradually, becoming part of the normalized scenery….

We’re encouraged to see high-quality journalism as dispassionate, so that professionals do their jobs without advocating. But passive acceptance of murderous priorities in our midst is a form of de facto advocacy. It’s advocacy of the most convincing sort — by example.

Norman Solomons said it.