What the Financial Press Tells Elites That Mainstream Media Won’t

The US should show it can win a nuclear war, The Answer to Terrorism? More Colonialism and The Middle East is Up for Grabs. These are all real headlines from The Wall Street Journal and illustrate how the financial press is often more direct about America’s imperial ambitions than the rest of the mainstream corporate media.

This is because the market for outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, or the Financial Times is elite traders rather than the general public. As such, these publications trust their audience in a way that other big platforms simply do not. This means that they are typically a goldmine of information that cannot be found elsewhere, and they will regularly report on issues that the rest of the corporate media dare not.

As media critic Professor Noam Chomsky stated, business leaders need to be more informed than the public about what’s really going on in the world. The drivel about the United States being the leader of the free world and spreading democracy is not for them. Instead, they need to know about capitalism’s brutal, harsh realities to continue to reap gigantic profits from it. That is why stories such as “More money for welfare means less for the Pentagon” are published in the business press but not elsewhere.

Stay tuned to MintPress News and Behind the Headlines for more quick bites of media analysis and education.

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.