You wouldn’t expect someone who has written for Monthly Review, the National Guardian and The Daily Worker to have reported for The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times as well. But I have. Eugene V. Debs may be my all-time favorite American and Karl Marx my all-time favorite journalist. But my employer for a decade was The Wall Street Journal, and for another decade it was the Los Angeles Times.
Altogether, I spent twenty-four years and nine months in the service of one of our country’s major socializing forces—the bourgeois press. I was a well-paid, privileged member of that fast-growing corps of information workers who mass-produce news, disseminate official proclamations, standardize information and ideas, reinforce institutional viewpoints, legitimize dominant values, and help secure the compliance of the populace.
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