The dictatorship of the media

Leopold Tyrmand wrote this of the USA in 1975. He was a Polish satirist who emigrated to the U.S. in 1966.

"With a power to create something out of nothing, the media began, not long ago, to forge their own image—that of a weak, harassed entity whose performance of lawful service to the public is endangered by a brutal, omnipresent government. Exactly the opposite is true."

Perhaps it was ever thus. Oswald Spengler, in The Decline of the West, a book he wrote before the First World War but published towards the end of it said:

“The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.”

It must have been like that in Germany and in the other combatant countries in the First World War, but it is certainly much more like that now then any time in my lifetime.