From a recent speech, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., pretty well sums up the situation and what we -- those who give a damn about our country and its future -- need to do about it:
Those of Us Who Know That America’s Worth Fighting for Have to Take It Back Now from Those Who Don’t by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Speech delivered at the Sierra Summit 2005
San Francisco, California
September 10, 2005
Published on Friday, September 16, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
EXCERPT...
The problem is most Americans don’t know about it, they don’t see the connection and the reason for that is because we have a negligent and indolent media and press in this country which has absolutely let down American democracy
. All this right wing propaganda which is planned and organized and has dominated this country, the political debate for so many years talking about a liberal media. Well, you know and I know there is no such thing as a liberal media in the United States of America.
There is a right wing media and if you look where most Americans are now getting their news, that’s where they’re getting it. According to Pew 30 percent of Americans now say that their primary news source is talk radio which is 90 percent dominated by the right.
SNIP...
This all started in 1988 when Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine said that the airwaves belong to the public. They were public trust assets just like our air and water and that the broadcasters could be licensed to use them but only with the proviso that they use them to promote the public interest and to advance American democracy. They had to inform the public of issues of public import. They had to have the news hours. None of those networks wanted to show the news because it’s expensive, they lose money on it. They had to avoid corporate consolidation. They had to have local control and diversity of control. That was the requirement of the law since 1928.
Today as a result of the abolishment of that doctrine, six giant multi-national corporations now control all 14,000 radio stations in our country, almost all 6,000 TV stations and 80 percent of our newspapers, all of our billboards and now most of the Internet information services, so you have six guys who are dictating what Americans have as information and what we see as news.
The news departments have become corporate profit centers, they no longer have any obligation to benefit the public interests, their only obligation is to their shareholders and they fulfill that obligation by increasing viewer ship. How do you do that? Not by reporting the news that we need to hear in to make rational decisions in our democracy but rather by entertaining us, by appealing to the prurient interests that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brain for sex and celebrity gossip -- . So they give us Laci Peterson and Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant and we’re today the best entertained and the least informed people on the face of the earth and this is a real threat to American democracy.
If you look at the PIPA Report and I’ve known this for many, many years because I do 40 speeches a year in red states Republican audiences and there is no difference. When people hear this message and what this White House is doing and the Gingrich Congress, there is no difference between the way Republicans react and the Democrats react except the Republicans come up afterwards and say, “Why haven’t we ever heard of this before? I say to them, “It’s because you’re watching Fox News and listening to Rush.”
And 80 percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don’t know what’s going on .
CONTINUED...
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0916-27.htm
The entire speech is a great read. Remember what it says and use them for your talking points with your repuke "friends." Once they learn the Truth about the monkey and his minions, they'll become real friends once again.
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