Ted Rall: No Way Would Today's Newspapers Publish the Pentagon Papers

Ted Rall writes that No Way Would Today's Newspapers Publish the Pentagon Papers.

The key point of this story, which isn’t made in the movie and few younger moviegoers are likely to be aware, is that it was her decision to make. The Graham family held controlling interest in the Washington Post Company. Great newspaper families like the Grahams, the Chandlers and the Sulzbergers were quirky and often had bad politics. But they also had something today’s corporate, publicly-traded media outlets do not: editorial freedom.

They didn’t always do the right thing. But they could. So sometimes they did.

Sadly, those days are gone.

Emphasis Mine

Competition within the Capitalist class could sometimes serve the public interest. With the concentration of media ownership, the odiousness of monopoly power emerges. And the public interest is quashed in favour of the private Capitalist interest.