Reacting to Raw Story exclusive, Young Turks host calls for boycott of mainstream media

The increasingly cozy relationship between US mainstream media and corporations they cover is a problem.

Raw Story’s Brad Jacobson published an interview Monday where former insurance executive Wendell Potter confessed that he had “wined and dined” media outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal for favorable coverage.

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Potter refused to name individual reporters who embraced such relationships with him because he did not want to single them out for embarrassment.

Russia’s largest news network, RT, took up the topic during a Tuesday broadcast. Speaking to The Young Turks‘ Ana Kasparian, host Alyona Minkovski wondered what such squishy ethics says about US media.

“It tells me that the media isn’t doing its job, especially the mainstream media,” Kasparian replied. “This is just one of the examples of why the public no longer believes in the media, they no longer trust the media.”

“It all really comes down to the question of access. A lot of times, reporters will write favorable pieces and they will be afraid to ask the hard questions because they want to continue to have access to these sources regardless of how corrupt the source may be,” she said.

“I just don’t understand why people decide to be journalist if they’re not willing to investigate hard-hitting news stories,” Kasparian added.

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“Interviews like this are so important,” The Young Turks co-host said. “If [the mainstream media] is not going to change, if we’re going to hear about things like this constantly, about how they’re not being credible, about how they’re easily being influence by people who are taking them out to dinner, then you know what? We need to boycott the mainstream media and we need to go online and we need to find credible news sources.”

This video is from RT’s The Alyona Show, uploaded to YouTube Dec. 14, 2010.

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— with earlier reporting by Brad Jacobson