A Review of 'End Times'

A Review of Alexander Cockburn's and Jeffrey St. Clair's End Times
- by Stephen Lendman
5/16/07

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End Times - A Collection of Essays from Cockburn and St. Clair On the Dismal State of the Dominant Print Media

"End Times - The Death of the Fourth Estate" is a collection of 50 wide-ranging essays written in recent years under six topic headings, mostly by Cockburn and St. Clair with a few by other contributors, on the dismal state of the corporate print media today. They were dominant at their zenith in the mid-1970s Pentagon Papers - Watergate era but now, the authors say, are in an inevitable state of decline agreeing with media mogul (Cockburn-labeled "WORLD-SCALE MONSTER") Rupert Murdock's characterization of a long twilight at best.

Even more, their current state is symptomatic of our overall societal decay with unprecedented wealth disparities, the nation in endless wars of illegal aggression, predatory corporate giants ruling the world, and our democracy on life support heading for the crematorium to be heralded on arrival in front page coverage of the nation's leading purveyors of "news unfit to print." This review covers the authors account of their decline at a time noted historian Gabriel Kolko calls "the most dangerous period in mankind's entire history" when the kind of news and information we most need isn't served up by the dominant fourth estate suppressing it in service to power. The essence and flavor of the book is covered with selected examples from it in an age of media concentration, deregulation and "in-bed-with" journalists posing as the real thing.

The book came out at a time public distrust for traditional print and electronic news is increasing as growing numbers of people, hungry for real information, are turning to alternate sources including a new, vibrant world of them online like CounterPunch the authors say gets around three million daily hits, 300,000 page views, and 100,000 unique visitors including 15,000 regular US military readers stationed around the world, a sign many thousands more of them visit other sites like CounterPunch and pass on what they learn to others. A hopeful, but not certain, indication of a growing trend too powerful to stop. More on that at the end...

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