The Free Press

Great essay. Should be required reading in school to help unsuspecting generations understand that the main stream media has an agenda that is not based on delivering factual unbiased journalism. The fact that this essay was published over 100 years ago adds emphasis to how long this problem has existed and will serve as an example of how the media has shaped politics vs. the people that vote for the politicians.

Rarely have there been two authors as prophetic as G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc. That their books are still so relevant to so many today is testimony to their enduring greatness. Both these men are thoroughly Catholic authors, and it is this clear headed world view that leads directly to their timelessness. The Free Press really and truly did shock me. I have known "traditional Catholics" who hate what I, as a Catholic loyal to Vatican II, stand for. Often they quote Belloc or other writers to back up their claims. They often attack ideas like freedom of expression, freedom of religion, etc. etc. More often than not, when I go to the source materials, I see that the arguments they make rarely hold water. Here too, we see the same. Hillaire Belloc is a great defender of the notion of a free and independent press. He defends advocacy journalism because journals with a clear bias don't pretend to lack bias, so the reader can think about claims critically. He defends FREEDOM to write and think. He is absolutely prophetic about the profit motive driving modern journalism and the lack of objectivity that causes. One wonders what he would have thought about the blogosphere! Given the content of this book I think he would have been supportive of much it stands for. This was an amazing read. Heartily recommended.

Hilaire Belloc wrote this wonderful and terribly important little book way back in 1918. But its message resonates loud and clear even today. Within this excellent manuscript, Belloc describes an essential fact little known, then and now: Newspapers cost more to print than their unit sales price. So, how do newspapers stay in business, and even prosper? They are subsidized by advertising. And herein lies the story. Advertising is controlled by the great capitalist fortunes. Therefore these great capitalist fortunes control the press. This is is a lesson that modern folks really need to consider well. Duped by the corporate press, now the mainstream media, they are somehow convinced that the media is populist. Nothing could be further from the truth. The media serves the needs of its controllers, the wealthy. Belloc also provided rich content relative to a truly free press. This then existed due to the efforts of such as Belloc, and his great friend, G.K. Chesterton. And, in a way, it exists even today with newsletters of specific interest and very important internet web sites, like antiwar.com and lewrockwell.com. Belloc even provides extraordinary insights relative to the insightful usage and evaluation of such aspects of the free press that again resonate even today. This is, in my opinion, one of Belloc's most important books. And that is saying quite a lot, for I have thus far been privileged to read well more than twenty of the great man's books. It is strongly recommended. Take care. And God bless.

Belloc's prognosticative prowess goes full tilt in his 1918 essay on the press. Belloc sees the development of the press as a child of capitalism: by 1918 the establishment press in England is driven by profit instead of truth, and has incredible power to shape policy and control policy makers. Why? Newspapers sell for less than it costs to produce them. The difference is made up by advertising. Thus newspaper owners are beholden to advertisers and are not inclined to run stories counter to their interest. Newspapers can make or break politicians at will. They tend to suppress discussion of real political issues in favor of manufactured ones so they can spin news according to their own interests. Sound familiar? Many people will find truth in these descriptions even today, with regard to the major news networks. Belloc sees a remedy: an independent free press. Belloc argues that by reading many different perspectives, extreme though they may be, one can distill the real truth of the matter. He observes this is exactly how we develop opinions outside of the mass media--by listening to a variety of people describe the event and assess their credibility, as in a criminal trial for instance. A free press did exist in 1918, but was in its infancy. Thanks to the Internet, we finally have the truly free press that Belloc predicted would flourish. This tract might make you rethink the idea of digesting a steady diet of network news only. What you get is not necessarily what you see.

This is a quite interesting work from the authorship of Hilaire Belloc, which correctly sustains that mainstream media are not nor objective, neither faithful to the truth, but simple tools in the hands of their owners, informing according the conveniences and interests of such owners, professional journalists being no more than mere subjects that must fulfil the orders of their employers, if they desire to keep their jobs. Without surprise the reader notices that the picture described by Belloc didn't change since 1918, the year the book was written, continuing to be actual about the current mainstream media. In fact, the present situation is even worse than in the time of Belloc, reference media being a mere repetition of each other. Despite the fact they present themselves with different editorial statutes, they always agree in the same essential matters - party system oligarchy, one-worldism, multiculturalism, free immigration and the consequent forced integration -, astonishingly remembering the media of a totalitarian society like the former Soviet Union.How can we surpass this situation? In this point, Belloc's message is also actual: having recourse to independent or free media not dominated by plutocratic interests, in order to obtain a clearer vision about the events going on the world, complementing the information received from mainstream media or, even, giving that one such mainstream media have hidden. Despite some weaknesses that independent media also suffer, to those who turn to them, a complex whole of events will become perfectly understandable or, at least, much more clear, fighting in that way the occult censorship imposed on and by mainstream media (and, today, we have the internet, a tool unimaginable in the time of Belloc, that is the paradise of free media).