Response to Media Lens Alert Intellectual Cleansing Part 1

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/081002_intellectual_cleansing_part1.php

By: Jonathan Cook

Sent to Media Lens October 5, 2008

Lesson 1: It’s all about money

In many ways, my introduction to journalism was far from typical. In the mid-1980s, after university, I was casting around for a career and decided to “try” journalism. I called the local free newspaper in the city in which I had graduated, Southampton, and offered my services.

Free newspapers were a new and rapidly growing form of print media. Cheap production had been made possible by the new technologies about to revolutionise the working practices of all papers, including those in Fleet Street. I was using a small Macintosh computer, writing stories and designing the pages, at a time when the nationals were still laboriously typesetting. At the Southampton Advertiser, we produced a weekly newspaper with just four editorial staff: an editor, two reporters and a photographer. The advertising staff was more than twice that size.