Noam Chomsky + 86 right wingers = balance

I had an ulterior motive in wanting to come to DC today.

I'm in search of the political genius who thought it would pass the smell test with swing voters if Kerry suspended his campaigning 12 days before the election and went duck-hunting in Ohio. Swing voters are often highly misinformed, but they're not stupid.

As labor communicators, you have an understanding of working people and swing voters that the high-priced Democratic Party strategists seem to lack. They pander to stereotypes of what a swing voter is. Democratic Party strategists need your help. And labor communicators can help in developing language that emphasizes economic and social justice as issues of morality and values.

You all know about journalists embedded with the troops in Iraq. I started out as a media critic at FAIR and, as if in a slow-motion nightmare, I ended up embedded inside the mainstream media. I've worked as a panelist/commentator over the years at all three cable news channels.

What I've found inside TV news is a drunken exuberance for stories involving celebrity, lurid crime and sex scandal -- matched by a grim timidity and fear of offending the powers that be, especially if they're conservatives. The biggest fear is of doing anything that could get you or your network accused of being liberal.

In 2002, I was an on-air commentator at MSNBC, and also senior producer on the "Donahue" show, the most-watched program on the channel. In the last months of the program, before it was terminated on the eve of the Iraq war, we were ordered by management that every time we booked an antiwar guest, we had to book 2 pro-war guests. If we booked two guests on the left, we had to book 3 on the right. At one meeting, a producer suggested booking Michael Moore and was told that she would need to book 3 right-wingers for balance. I considered suggesting Noam Chomsky as a guest, but our studio couldn't accommodate the 86 right-wingers we would have needed for balance.

http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1041&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

when weighing respective brain mass?

People talk of an alternative media, but the question is whetherwe any longer(or ever truly did) have the "public" service news sector this nation required. I don't think it ever did, but as long as everyone was cozy and the corporations had to grumble and go along with unsexy obligations and uncomfortable truthouts no one saw it at all. The "free" press relies on wire services to topdown the truth and newspapers were never perfect and hgetting less so.

Comes the test and the upstairs move against the public sector and presto, instant combo of National Enquirer and Pravda with the same lazy schmucks who never did their research or jobs very well to begin with. Those latter I might add suffer under incredible delusions about their accomplishments in "the good old days".

Therefore give me toyer confused, frustrated, muddled masses yearning to be informed- and free. The nutshell is that Michael Moore mischievously and with careful skill plucked the abandoned job right out of the waste baskets of undone news. It's all there. The gatekeeper is the electric box. The Internet is an awesome mess, the TV and radio are narrow and perverted strangleholds that don't do the job in any way. It's all Entertainment and a skeleton of re-fabricated pablum and repulsive RW cant(and deliberately repulsive liberal wheedling).

Announce a better news source(s) and they will come, just as CNN started wiping out the nonsense of network news. Then failed. But it will take determination and a large worldwide coalition of sources too big to simply buy out or compete against with partisan crap.