{"id":14470,"date":"2023-06-26T03:15:24","date_gmt":"2023-06-26T08:15:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=14470"},"modified":"2023-06-26T03:15:28","modified_gmt":"2023-06-26T08:15:28","slug":"elite-apostate-explains-governments-deal-in-power-not-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=14470","title":{"rendered":"‘Elite apostate’ explains governments deal in ‘power,’ not ‘truth’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Last month, the economist Jeffrey Sachs appeared on the Substack podcast Nonzero, hosted by the writer Robert Wright, to discuss American foreign policy failures in the post-Cold War world. Wright asked Sachs if he felt American journalism is in decline. Sachs\u2014who, as the head of multiple UN nonprofits and director of Columbia\u2019s Center for Sustainable Development, is one of the most institutionally recognized figures in public intellectual life\u2014said that it absolutely had, and then shared an anecdote. \u201cI had a chat with a longtime friend of mine\u2026a senior reporter at one of the most important newspapers,\u201d he said, \u201cand I said to him, \u2018When I was young, I turned to your paper because of Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and I loved it.\u2019\u201d According to Sachs, this nameless friend, who in a later appearance Sachs would identify as a senior New York Times reporter, replied, \u201cThat paper is so dead and gone, Jeff. You have to understand that.
Sachs spoke with the reporter last September. The issue that provoked the reporter\u2019s comments was the recent bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines and its subsequent coverage in the media. In the days and weeks after the attack, a flurry of conjecture about who was responsible dominated mainstream outlets, with\u00a0CNN\u00a0and the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0echoing U.S. and European government allegations that Russia had sabotaged its own piece of critical infrastructure in a dramatic bid to turn European favor against Ukraine. Sachs, who worked closely with Mikhail Gorbachev and knows his way around U.S.-Russia relations, read these reports and called his friend: \u201cThe U.S did it!\u201d he said. \u201cWhy is your paper saying today that Russia did it?\u201d The reporter responded, \u201cOf course the U.S did it. Who else? But come on, Jeff. The editor isn\u2019t interested in that.\u201d
In relating these stories, Sachs expressed a view shared by a coalescing group of anti-establishment thinkers, journalists, pundits, and academics: that the mainstream media in the United States has been corrupted beyond repair and is so deeply beholden to U.S. intelligence and security interests as to be of little journalistic value. Sachs has been increasingly vocal about this over the last year, as the war in Ukraine\u2014the fault for which\u00a0he places\u00a0squarely at the feet of the United States and its decades of NATO bellicosity, even blaming specific State Department operatives for the 2014 ouster of Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych\u2014escalates shockingly, with little mainstream media attention given to potential American culpability in provoking and prolonging the bloodshed.
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Last month, the economist Jeffrey Sachs appeared on the Substack podcast Nonzero, hosted by the writer Robert Wright, to discuss American foreign policy failures in the post-Cold War world. Wright asked Sachs if he felt American journalism is in decline. Sachs\u2014who, as the head of multiple UN nonprofits and director of Columbia\u2019s Center for Sustainable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":14471,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3491,4202,1269,1332,9087],"class_list":["post-14470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-american-foreign-policy","tag-decline","tag-failure","tag-journalism","tag-the-mainstream-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14470"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14472,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14470\/revisions\/14472"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}