Seymour Hersh and the dangers of corporate muckraking
In its original meaning, “muckraking journalism” was all about exposing the awful power that corporations, trusts, and monopolies exercised over people and the broader public interest. So why doesn’t Seymour Hersh, considered the premiere “muckraker” of the past few decades, turn his fearless muckraking guns on private corporate power?
Ida Tarbell dug deep into Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire and all the ways it exercised a kind of private government tyranny over huge swathes of public life; Tarbell’s work directly influenced the antitrust breakup of Standard Oil in 1911. Upton Sinclair exposed brutality in the meatpacking industry — on its workers, the slaughtered animals, and the diseased, rat-infested meats that eventually wound up in consumers’ homes — leading to the Meat Inspection Act and the Food and Drug Administration. Other muckraking exposés led to state-level child labor and workers’ comp laws, the progressive income tax amendment, and laws placing vast expanses of land and forests under federal protection from rapacious robber barons.
“The Times wasn’t nearly as happy when we went after.............................................................
business wrongdoing as when we were kicking around some slob in
government.” — Seymour Hersh
Jonathan Cook, journalist
Here's a fascinating account of Seymour Hersh's one serious attempt at taking on malfeasance by a major corporation - rather than a public or government agency - back in the 1970s. It proved to Hersh and his editors that major corporations were much more powerful and dangerous targets than the government.
It has been that very lack of scrutiny by the media (as well as the fact that the mainstream media became subdivisions of these same mega-corporations) that ensured the corporations would end up effectively owning the government. What Hersh failed to achieve 40 years ago would be even harder today. Which is why we have no hope of regaining control of our governments until we take on the corporations - and the media.
