I can’t imagine the difficulty of trying to go fantasy free cold turkey. I was born this way. Nature provides all animals with the ability to access the meaning of almost every situation or threat. Animals can immediately grasp and understand the exact circumstance they are in and understand what is going on around them. Indulging in fantasy greatly inhibits these abilities. When fantasy free we see the truth. When fantasies are indulged in we see a preferred alternative to the truth.
Honesty in the news media is a contradiction. The media is not honest, never has been and never will be. Before I get specific, there is an important principle of natural law that is relevant. An action that has an immoral beginning, will have a negative outcome. Almost all of the income news organizations receive comes from advertising. What is advertising other than telling lies and embellishing? There is no way a process which begins with an immoral activity will ever generate an honest outcome through what it produces. Advertising itself is not immoral. It is the lying that is immoral. Truthful ads are a waste of money so there are at most very few.
For politicians, to get the media on their side, all they need do is to pay them by making the outcome of elections supportive of their bottom lines. The media supports whatever is most profitable for them to support. The media is a prime beneficiary of the corporate welfare system that has replaced our free market ideology. There is no way a news organization would support a candidate who would interrupt the flow of government benefits global corporations receive. A return to a free market system would be a great benefit to the U.S. economy but it would hurt news organizations and the huge corporations that buy advertising.
There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an “Independent Press”! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
John Swinton, 1880