Leading Western media cannot be trusted to cover wars because their shareholders and board members are often representatives of big businesses, including the arms industry, says Belgian investigative journalist Michel Colon. In his opinion, large media in Europe and the United States cannot be considered independent, since most of them are owned by billionaires.

MICHELLE COLON, journalist, founder of the independent media Investig’ Action: The problem is that the press, information is an enterprise, and we see that in France it is an enterprise, this is obvious. We have ten billionaires who own most of the daily newspapers, TV channels and so on.

Let’s leave public media aside for now. The situation is the same in the USA. You need a huge fortune to create a TV channel or serious print media. 

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And what’s interesting is that their boards of directors and shareholders come from the business world, from the banking, oil and even weapons sectors. 

That is, representatives of the arms industry are shareholders or even managers of the New York Times and leading television channels. So, there is no talk of any independence.

And there is a huge problem with their reliability. How can you explain to the public that the wars in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine, Gaza now, Venezuela and so on are wonderful democratic wars, if you are paid, among other things, by multinational arms corporations, obviously interested in selling weapons? Thus, information trading is a huge problem today.

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