Would W.E.B. DuBois Have Supported Bail-Out Of Big Media Monopoly's Newspapers?

The newspaper subsidiaries of the Big Media Monopoly’s media conglomerates are no longer as super-profitable as they were before they had to compete for younger readers with non-profit bloggers and alternative journalists on the Internet; and before the current U.S. economic depression led to a decline in their super-profits from the sale of corporate advertising space.

So, predictably, some of the lobbyists for the White Corporate Male Power Structure’s media conglomerates have apparently been starting to lobby recently for some more tax breaks and public bail-out funds from local, state and federal government institutions for the Big Media Monopoly’s newspapers.

But it’s not likely that the now-deceased prominent 20th-century African-American intellectual, W.E.B. DuBois, would have wanted the tax money collected from U.S. working-class people to be used to bail-out the Big Media Monopoly’s newspaper industry. As early as 1955, for example, DuBois characterized the White Corporate Male Power Structure’s daily newspapers in the following way:

“Truth makes us free and lack of it enslaves us. Yet we have become accustomed to expect to have truth furnished us daily…at the hands of makers of clothes, cigarettes and toothpaste, who pay its main costs.

“When we slowly awake to the fact that much of the real news never reaches us, much is deliberately misinterpreted, we contemplate gathering our own news…”

DuBois had also asserted on July 29, 1953 that “the average New York Sunday paper is a vast bundle of pounds of advertisements enmeshed in a mass of propaganda and wrapped in a rag bag of entertainment, distraction and escapism…all calculated to make upon the reader the impression which the owners of this vast economic organization want made on the people of the U.S. and the world…”

(Downtown 11/9/94)