Although Marijuananews.com has a special page specifically devoted to "Media Criticism," that is actually all this site is – and is about.

For many years, I have repeated that the best two-word explanation for marijuana prohibition is simply "bad journalism." I will quickly add "bad science," "bad medicine," and "bad law," etc. However, the fact remains that the malpractice in all these other areas would have long-since been exposed -- if journalism really functioned as it pretends to – as our watchdog – zealously seeking out the truth. Instead, the media, mass and specialized, have become a part of the problem, not a part of the solution. In fact, at this point the media have three almost insurmountable problems.

The first is their complicity in the fraud. Newspapers are notorious for burying their corrections deep in the inside pages, usually at the bottom of the page, next to the fold. Even this is generally much better than the electronic media. It is rather difficult to imagine a headline or broadcast beginning with "How We’ve Lied to You All These Years."

The second problem is simply one of scale. Reporters and editors like to talk about the "Big Story," but a story can also be too big, especially today in the age of "short-attention-span-theater." This site is not only the evidence for what I am saying, its size is proof of the magnitude of the problem. Size does count.

I remember standing on a street in Amsterdam being interviewed by Morley Safer of Sixty Minutes. My part never ran, perhaps because I told him that they couldn’t do the real story in sixty minutes, much less one of their little segments. (The fact that they wanted an Amsterdam street scene even though I lived around the corner form CBS’s Washington studios, tells us something about television’s priorities.)

Finally, there is the absence of the vocabulary and context. From time to time, I use the ponderous term the "prohibitionist paradigm" – meaning simply the prohibitionist world-view that makes it impossible for most people to see that prohibition is the problem, not the solution. Can journalism execute a "paradigm shift?"

There are often very good stories that are critical of this or that failure of prohibition. I call them pearls without a string. They can never be "part of the mounting evidence that marijuana prohibition is a failure, etc.," because that topic is just not on the public agenda. In fact, it is a "non-topic" – just as there used to be "non-persons" in the Soviet Union.

This eliminates the need for censorship. Say or write what you want, because even if someone can hear you, they  can’t understand you. And if they can understand you, the next day your words are gone to the newspaper morgue, or the even more inaccessible files of the broadcast media. Forgotten like a dream. Obviously, given the context in which you are reading this, the Internet is now an exception to this – sort of… almost. Indeed, that is the point of this essay.

None of them even mention marijuana. The fact that they do not is very revealing in itself, but each of them have a relevance to the marijuana controversies, which either the authors never understood, or their editors would not allow in print.

One of the strategic premises of maintaining marijuana prohibition is what I call the "myth of consensus." This is the foundation of any paradigm. "Everyone" sees it this way. "Everyone is against drugs" -- so don’t even think about it. Indeed, it is not easy to do so. There is almost no vocabulary left with which to think. In 1984 it was explained that after the destruction of the meaning of words, censorship would be unnecessary because thought would be impossible.

A part of the maintenance of this "myth of consensus" is that any criticism of prohibition encourages children to abuse drugs. Former Surgeon General Elders was blamed for the increase in teen drug use after she suggested thinking about possibly considering ending prohibition.

This and other anti-prohibitionist sites shatter the myth of consensus, but they can only do so by reporting what is going on – and perhaps even more important – reporting what is being reported, and what is not being reported, and how the reporting is done. The importance of this may be in just a few words or nuances that are meaningless without context.

Sometimes, I will begin commenting by saying that "the story is the story." It really is very important when The New York Times reports on hemp, and how they do it is a key part of the story. This is why I use red to highlight certain words. It may make it easier to scan the story, but it also makes it harder to miss nuances, which may be even more important if the reporter did not even realize what he was doing.

For example, when a reporter for the Washington Post writes that marijuana is "ten times stronger than it was back in the ‘60s" does he have to check to see if this is the party line? Does the Post have anti-fact checkers?

Where I am going with all of this -- as the title of piece indicates – is to explain why I use so many copyrighted stories in their entirety. There is simply no other way to present a complete picture of what is going on, or more precisely, what is being done to us. Pete Hamill has a new book called Journalism Is A Verb. Well, we are being journalismed.

I could lift a sentence or two out of a story and say that the Post lied to us again today, or that the AP actually reported the truth, as the case may be. However, that really will not do the job.

Now let’s get to the bottom line. My point is that the media cannot be allowed to hide their massive malpractice behind the copyright laws.

Every time they invade someone’s privacy they tell us that the "public has a right to know." Well, the public also has a right to know what the media are doing to us. The media enjoy all manner of special protections under the law, because they are supposed to inform us about what is "really going on." This is truly the "life-blood" of democracy. They are even called the Fifth Estate, an unofficial part of our system. And they are.

To be very blunt about all this, marijuana prohibition, created and maintained by the media, is a massive violation of the Ninth Commandment: "Thou shall not give false witness against thy neighbor."

For most of this century the leading media outlets have given false evidence to the people of the world about a plant. I know all too well that this sounds absolutely crazy, and it is precisely because the allegation seems so absurd that it requires such massive proof.

Only the Internet, with its endless capacity and hyperlinking capability could possibly be adequate to demonstrate this point. This site and others are doing just that.

But, as I am busy denouncing the hypocrisy of others, am I being a hypocrite myself by stealing intellectual property? After all, the Eighth Commandment is "Thou shall not steal." As it happens, copyright laws have a "loophole" called "Fair Use," and the Eighth Commandment is aimed a preventing loss.

One of the key requirements for a copyright infringement is that there be a significant economic loss. Substantively and morally, no one is suffering any loss by my reprinting articles here. What I do does not "materially impair the marketability of the work which is copied." (Harper and Row v. Nation Enterprises.)

If I post a good story and praise it, as I am happy to do, this encourages readers to seek out the publication or writer. In order to be fair in my criticism, I generally reproduce complete articles, whenever practical, but I do not even begin to reproduce all of the articles about marijuana from any source. I am not reproducing a substantial portion of anyone's work.

There is one exception to what I said about no one suffering any loss – the exception is the loss suffered by those being criticized. But – for obvious reasons -- one of the exceptions to copyrights is provided for criticism, comment and news reporting. As I have said, what is being criticized and reported here is not just a given article, although there is certainly plenty of that.

What I am criticizing --and documenting -- is not just certain lies, but the abject failure of the media as a whole to report the truth.

When the Associated Press or Reuters carries a story, and it is not reported in any major American paper – as was the case with the WHO’s suppression of a report saying that marijuana was less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco -- this omission is news. It would also be meaningless without the content.

One of the saddest commentaries on the degraded state of journalism is that a good story or factual and honest editorial is actually news. It would also be unfair to print only the bad. If I did that, and omitted the good, defenders of current journalism could rightly say that I was doing what I accuse them of doing.

By the way, contrary to what many may think, "fair use" does not apply only to non-profits. In Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, the Supreme Court even quoted Dr. Samuel Johnson as saying "no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." Well, I have been a blockhead more than once, but this site is a .com and is not intentionally non-profit.

Ironically, one of the key exceptions to copyrights, in addition to those cited above, is that the use of the copyrighted material is such a way that is "transformative" and changes the original meaning. Yes, I add links, highlights and often comments, which could not be done without reproducing the article, but its very presence in this context often changes or even reverses its meaning entirely.

Readers of this site, especially students, tell me that they had never realized the extent of the deceit until they see it laid out in front of them. I sometimes compare marijuana prohibition to the Grand Canyon. A picture just does not do it justice. Even when you have been there several times, it is still incomprehensible in its size.

I believe in intellectual property rights, and I would not deprive anyone of the value of their work, but I also believe in freedom. Millions of Americans and other people around the world have had their dignity and freedom and even their health and lives stolen, because the media have failed their obligations.