UK Weighs in on the sorry state of our propaganda/media

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1123-26.htm

Read the entire great article, indicting the whole damn cabal!

The best question asked in the aftermath of the 2004 US election came from a British newspaper, The Daily Mirror, which inquired over a picture of George W. Bush, "How can 59,054,087 be so dumb?

Now, another British newspaper has answered the question. A new marketing campaign for The Weekly Guardian, one of the most respected publications in the world, features images of a dancing Bush and notes that, "Many US citizens think the world backed the war in Iraq. Maybe it's the papers they're reading."

The weekly compendium of articles and analyses of global affairs from Britain's liberal Guardian newspaper has long been regarded as an antidote to government controlled, spun and inept local media. Nelson Mandela, when he was held in South Africa's Pollsmor Prison, referred to the Weekly Guardian as a "window on the wider world."

But is it really appropriate to compare the United States in 2004 with a warped media market like South Africa during apartheid days?

Actually, the comparison may be a bit unfair to South African media in the apartheid era--when many courageous journalists struggled to speak truth to power.

They're a group of braying jackasses that parrot what others are saying. The concept of good, independent investigative journalism is almost dead.
At least in the 19th century you knew where you stood with papers. They advertised what party they supported with names that had the word Democrat or Republican in them.

Fascism is a mass movement.

I see new insight spreading through DU!

but so is the media everywhere. I frequently read foreign media on the web, and watched C-SPAN's foreign TV feeds during the war.

It all follows Strugeon's law.

but your worst enemy. Start recognizing them as such and fighting back.

it's just that the foreign media is not as different as some claim.

is the same everywhere, euroland not excluded, by thumb-rule the bigger the corp, the badder the agit-prop. Some places they must play along with less radical corporate fascist agenda to keep their audience, but even then they sneakily keep shifting the line. In any case, the idea of profit making means to them allways playing to the lowest common nominator.

in European media. it's not as extreme as US media but the principal is the same; the media is a tool for the management of the perception of the people.

It wasn't made to sit on the books and collect dust. It was made for trust busting and monopoly smashing. I think it's time we take that law and smash up some of these corporations that own the news networks like AOL Time Warner, Viacom, General Electric, etc.

Unfortunately, we need to take back both houses of Congress and the White House in order to wage war against corporate power. That could be a long, hard struggle.

in the forseeable future at least. Why wait so long?

What you need NOW is citizen controlled alternative media to compete with the delusional version of truth told by the corporate propagandists.

But that still doesn't change the fact that they've gained near absolute control over all three branches of government. We could build a grassroots media far more easily than we could wage a campaign to retake all three branches of the federal government.

When it comes to the propaganda machine, you simply can't try and counter every move it makes. You've got to try to smash it as well so that no more lies emerge in such a large flood.

I guess what I'm saying is that we have to have a holistic approach where we try and establish an alternative voice in the news in the short-run, while we work to take back the three branches of government and smash the corporatists in the long-run.

What better way to smash corporatists than alternative grass-roots media continually exposing their lies and who makes them tell them and why, while doing it so entertainly (anarchistically! :)) that you steal their audience.

What I mean, none of that liberal pampering know-it-all attitude, let creative anarchy rule the waves!

The stupid have hijacked the country, no thanks to the Pravda press..

"Similarly," the pollsters found, "75 percent of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63 percent believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55 percent assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission."

:puke: They really have no clue, do they? *sigh*

people spread the news with typewritten newsletters and carbon copies.

difference. Here, propaganda is sly.

" Years of consolidation and bottom-line pressures have forced even once responsible media to allow entertainment and commercial values to supersede civic and democratic values when making news decisions. "

It's not the "commercial values" when it comes to news, or else they wouldn't cancel top rated shows (Spin Room, original Crossfire, donahue)
I am furious that people like the author of this otherwise good piece refuse to see the DELIBERATE effort to propagandize - OF ALL MEDIA - not just FAUX. Think of it: Murdoch sinks 40 million a year in NY Poat, Moon sinks 100 million a year in Moonie Times. I am sure all cable news (yeah, Faux too) are money losers - subsidized by BFEE's friends as ways of PAYING DUES for other things (think of GE getting a juicy war contracy right after the mock election and you'll see that all MSNBC/NBC lies were not motivated by "profit/entertainment"

in spite of the fact that it is well know that the media are owned by the same big corporations that gain the most from distortion of the truth.

the press tries to deliver as output. It really is the vapid input before the infotainers newsreaders hold our airwaves hostage. Because of the corporate mandates that they make money the issue goes to how much time is allotted for commercials, content that grabs an 'audience' to see those commercials and there for increase revenue by talking about hungry eyeballs rather than quality of content. That means that hiring practices are around visuals - not brains - case in point, for amusement watch what happens when they are unscripted at every level of a infotainment 'news' operation. The money input and pressures before they even hatch these dumb stories are where the journalistic integrity dies. We-those who bother to watch or read it... just see the end product - Newsvapor of the Living Dead.

They are drumming the beat of death, their horns are blowing the notes which will pin down our democracy until it dies. We have no
Media in this country, they long went home to sleep rather then do justice a service.