In a 2017 article with Columbia Journalism Review titled “Spare the indignation: Voice of America has never been independent,” VOA veteran Dan Robinson says such outlets are entirely different from normal news companies and are expected to facilitate US information interests to receive government funding:
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/04/14/the-us-could-use-some-separation-of-media-and-state/
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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The US State Department’s spokesperson Ned Price is being replaced by a man named Matthew Miller. Like Price, Miller has had extensive prior involvement in both the US government and the mass media; Price is a former CIA officer and Obama administration National Security Council staffer who for years worked as an NBC News analyst, while Miller has previously had roles in both the Obama and Biden administrations and spent years as an analyst for MSNBC.
Like every high-level government spokesperson, Miller’s job will be to spin the nefarious things the US empire does in a positive light and deflect inconvenient questions with weasel-worded non-answers. Which also happens to be essentially the same job as the propagandists in the mainstream media.
In journalism school you are taught that there’s supposed to be a sharp line between government and the press; journalists are meant to hold the government to account, and there’s an obvious conflict of interest there if they’re also friends with government officials or are looking to the government as a potential future employer. But at the highest levels of the world’s most powerful government and the world’s most influential media platforms the line between media and state is effectively nonexistent; people flow seamlessly between roles in the media and roles in the government depending on who’s in office.
We see this indistinctness between government and media with White House press secretaries even more clearly. The current press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is a former analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and the last press secretary Jen Psaki now has her own show on MSNBC. Prior to her stint as White House press secretary Psaki worked as a CNN analyst, and before that she was a spokesperson for the State Department like Price and Miller.
At a recent event for the news startup Semafor, Psaki was asked if she considers herself a journalist and she said she does, adding that “to me, journalism is providing information to the public, helping make things clearer, explaining things.” Which is a bit funny considering that Psaki’s political faction has spent the last seven years furiously insisting that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is not a journalist. In liberal brainworms land the world’s greatest journalist is not a journalist at all, but Joe Biden’s spin doctor is because she’s got a knack for “explaining things”.
Lest you get the mistaken impression that this phenomenon is unique to Democrats and their aligned media outlets, it should here be noted that Trump’s press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders got a job as a Fox News contributor immediately after resigning from that position, and now she’s the governor of Arkansas. Another Trump administration press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, is now an on-air contributor to Fox News, and previously worked for CNN. Trump’s first press secretary Sean Spicer reportedly tried to get jobs with CBS News, CNN, Fox News, ABC News and NBC News after his stint in the White House, but was turned down by all of them because nobody likes him.
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