Follow the money: Rick Sanchez, John Huddy & Chris Hedges explain media decay

In today’s mass media, journalistic standards may be at a low, but at least profits are up. RT host Rick Sanchez together with journalists John Huddy and Chris Hedges look at how big moneyed interests took out a hit on the truth.

Whether we look at printed papers, TV news networks or talk radio, it is clear that a hand-full of “multi-billionaires” have by and large taken hold of the press, businessmen who “care little for the people they serve, let alone journalism,” according to Sanchez, host of the nightly newscast on RT America.

News industry marketing strategies have pushed the major networks into following the highly profitable and hyper-partisan model set by Fox, even if it means leaving the facts to the wayside. Today, “it's all about the right or the left, rarely is about the news,” Sanchez said, before spelling out these media moguls’ only real motivation:

If there’s one single word that ties together all that media decay, its money.

However, this wasn’t always the case, as RT America correspondent John Huddy reminds us. While news networks used to be held to certain standards of balanced reporting, today the airwaves have become polluted with unbridled competition between “massive media companies vying for control.”

The ironic part, as Huddy points out, is that while there is technically “more to choose from” in the media landscape, sources across every medium are increasingly beholden to the singular agenda of one of the few massive commercial enterprises dominating the industry.

The good old-days of the basic standard of fairness are over, long live ‘fair and balanced’ news.

The problem has gotten so out of control that some networks have seemingly gone beyond pushing one viewpoint and started devoting their attention to one attention-grabbing (and revenue generating) story. Robert Mueller’s special report on President Donald Trump’s alleged “collusion” with Russia was perhaps the most pertinent example… at least, until the whole thing fell apart.

Now that the ‘Russiagate’ “reality show” has been more or less canceled, major networks like CNN and MSNBC are taking huge hits to their ratings from which they might never fully recover, says award-winning journalist Chris Hedges, host of ‘On Contact.’

Hedges believes the corporate media’s strategy of income over honesty has served to show the “complete degradation and corrosion of journalism,” as they thrived on “fear mongering” and rumors surrounding the Mueller investigation for the past two years.

They are going to have to find a new trick, and trick is the right word, because all this stuff was posturing, a lot of it was fabricated, it's not journalism, [just] innuendo, rumor.

Did someone say ‘William Barr spin-off?’

Why has the once robust news industry been reduced to the “the chattering classes barking at each other,” in Hedges words, and is there still hope for the future of journalism?

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