Then You Must Be a Prostitute, John

Brummett colleague Fred Garvin
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"Either Julie Wilson is an idiot or I'm a prostitute." writes John Brummett in his August 10th column. Wilson is the vice president for corporate development at a Fort Worth-based division of Chesapeake Energy. It is hard to believe she is really an idiot. As far as Brummett being a prostitute, or at least a presstitute, I simply assumed he always knew it.

What Wilson has said that raised his ire was that paying retired journalists to do infomercials for her energy company was about the same as advertising on news programs. Brummett took this to mean, perhaps rightly so, that she was implying that buying a bunch of ads affects how the media covers stories. I find that to be true and getting truer.

For example, the owner of Brummett's newspaper chain is a financier. His company sells government bonds to make money. Also, big food processors in this state buy a lot of ads. Keeping that in mind, try getting fair media coverage for a political candidate (if you can find one these days) that wants to 1) quit using government bond issues to finance everything when we have the cash on hand to pay for it without paying commissions to bond traders, or 2) is serious about restricting illegal immigration so that the big food processing and construction interests have to pay legal free-market wages for their labor. Any candidate who wants to get in those big players puddin' is going to be subject to reams of personal abuse by Brummett and much of the rest of the brothel too.

On the national level it is even worse. Global corporations control all major media outlets, so when an anti-globalization, non-interventionist Presidential candidate like Ron Paul comes along, NBC (owned by big global corporation and defense contractor GE) does not cover him fairly. Heck, he was blacked-out by most of the media until it was too late for him to win. When they were forced to talk to him in the debates, they were mostly insulting: Carl Cameron "Credibility sir, do you have any?" : or Hannity sniggering into an open mike while Paul is in the middle of answering a question- but perhaps Hannity saying "oh no, not again" when learning that Paul had won yet another text-message debate poll is a better example.

That is not to impugn every reporter that works at the Democrat Gazette or Morning News. I personally know a number of them that are as fair as any human can be considering we all have our biases. John Brummett is not one of them. Neither is Seth Blomley nor a few more I could name.

But maybe both Brummett and I are wrong about his little moment of self-realization. Here is a good test: We vote on a flawed lottery amendment in a couple of months. Will these papers fairly cover the flaws in the proposal, or will they let that pass because a lottery will mean a big state agency with lots of advertising dollars to throw their way?