The MOST IMPORTANT thing we must do is take back the media

Dan Rather Gone, But White House Isn't Sated Ye

http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage3.asp



This story talks about how the White House strong-armed CBS into firing Dan Rather.

It's Karl's way or the high way. You report what he wants, in a way he likes it, and he'll give you the heavyweights for interviews. Otherwise, he will freeze you out. And in neither case we will you get any info he does not want you to have. And you better slant your story the White House's way or else. You had better show the proper deference.

THIS IS WHAT I THINK:

1. The last person I want to see interviewed is an administration heavyweight. They are just going to lie through their teeth. I would much rather see Al Franken tearing them apart. I would much rather see ANYONE, any no name person, who knows their stuff, who is interesting and informativie, and who is not so extremist as to be laughable (on either side).

2. Why don't we let the media know this? Karl freeze them out? THEY FREEZE KARL OUT. Without the media, it gets to be a little harder to get that fascist propagada out. Sure there will always be FOX, but no reasonable person believes anything on FOX.
FORM A COALITION to freeze out Karl and the White House. Heck, you can learn more now by reading the internet than you could possibly hope to get from the White House in 100 years.

Phil said Larry King was going to have Michael Moore on until they got a call from the WH saying no more interviews with Rice, Powell, etc.

They did the same thing to Chris Matthews right after the Zell miller duel fiasco.

I agree - without an honest free news media, we're f%^^&d!

NPR reported last night that CNN is probably the biggest source of these "Video News Releases" and "Corporate News Releases" that end up on Local channels. They said CBS does it too, but CNN has a dedicated subscription service for them. I was shocked. I'm about to post about this, but for some reason, most of my post are going by with out being noticed.

Here a Link to the Audio:

Video News Releases Find News Airtime

All Things Considered, March 25, 2005 · As resources have shrunk and profit pressures increased for TV newsrooms, some have chosen to take questionable shortcuts. Among them, the unattributed use of VNRs -- video news releases. VNRs provided by federal agencies have drawn recent attention, but they're also being produced by large corporations trying to shape the news.

to change course. i rarely see the news. It is insulting and confusing. We have so much information right here, that it is a total waste of time for me to even turn the tube on. Not until it is accepted as fact that information from the tube is useless will another medium appear...those that control the media have too much power right now, and the money is the issue.

I was just over at Media Matters and I read that DU is composed of people that want Terri Schiavo to die (thanks Ms. Noonan for your objective reporting), did we ever say that, no, what most people here are saying is that this is a family decision, it is not my business to make this decision and it is not the government's right to interfere. Does this make me or anyone else here a dirty liberal who should be stoned in the streets. No. Joe Scarborough says one minute that we are just quietly sitting by while this woman dies and then says that we're are support Michael Schiavo to pay back GWB. I am not going to end someone's life to pay back George Bush nor is anyone else here. Whatever happened to the days when the newspapers reported facts not opinions.

news and editorials.
Peggy Noonan is not a reporter and, therefore, doesn't HAVE to be objective.
However, too much of this has seeped over into the news coverage and that SHOULD be objective.
Joe Scarborough, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Peggy Noonan, Rush Limbaugh - hell even Al Franken, Randi Rhodes, etc. - NONE of them are reporters. They're all pundits.
We need to get away from punditry and focus more on news reporting.

Maybe they are not journalists per se, but many turn to them for their news which is one of the major reason that things have slid downhill since 2000. Whatever happened to fair and balanced, and these people do dominate the airwaves, if it's not them, it's other talking heads.

this permanant back door they gave themselves. they took all of the major news stations and devided it into segments. Like a constant stream of editorials, but they are PRESENTING it as if it were news. And thats the big problem. It's not about the content. Its about disclosure.

They need to disclose if a show is an editorial, or if they are reporting the news. They have blurred the lines so that its impossible to distinguish one from the other.

Click the link in my signature line for Freepress .net

I signed up for emails from them.

An acquaintance of mine who worked with Rather doesn't think the public cares about issues like this. Sad to day, he is right about the majority. But we need to work to get the word out. I was so pleased to hear this week's "On the Media" on NPR discuss some alternative media - AAR, Salon.com, Schultz's show. Who knows how many people were made aware of those resource due to that broadcast?

is that if we EVER get control of congress back, have every single head of every network/news outlet called before congress under threat of being charged with treason.

the WILL appear, or be jailed, and they will explain their actions. once they actually admit what their goals were, charge them appropriately.

we have GOT to make SURE that the public airwaves, and i mean ALL outlets given as a means to broadcast over air or cable, to the american people, are NEVER used again to lie to the american people, or manipulate the will of the american people.

truth is truth. spin is not.

this will NOT BE TOLERATED.

... would agree with you. Many of them would have been quietly enraged at the notion that the White House was determined to lead them around by the nose. But, even then, the corporate bosses would have tried to smooth things over to keep the stories coming.

These days, however, the news corporations don't just want access to the White House--they want access to Congress, to the FCC, to every governmental body that can improve their bottom line. That means that everything they do in the way of news is going to be compromised in some way.

A hundred years from now, if we survive this neo-conservative siege and if some rather permanent and effective controls are placed on the media, people will look back on this time as an aberration, and see it for what it was--a very unhealthy symbiosis of press and government.

a time when even the most basic right of every human, the right to die became the object of government intervention.

press as being the "check and balance" of We the People.

It seemed like it was different back then, the politicians, the reporters, the people themselves had seen the devastation of WWII and the end result of Hitler's fanaticism (no one called it "spin" back then.) It seemed that everybody took their job seriously, even when McCarthyism threatened our society, the reporters stood up to him. Now we have corporations, politicians, and even individuals who believe their only sin would be to get caught doing something wrong. Everything is a check and balance, the voter, the newspapers, the Congress, the courts. Now all the lines are blurring even honesty, religion, judicial, congress, whitehouse, state jurisdiction, etc. and I do not think this is a good thing.

Things were different then.

I remember reading that when anyone came in and asked him to abuse his power to pay somebody back. He just wrote the person's name on a piece of paper, and threw the paper into his bottom drawer never to be looked at. He said that he had the power to blow up the world and he could not be involved in such petty stuff.

are the government. But we have long lost our voice by this fascist regime that controls us the way the Mafia controls their peons. The media is controlled as is the police in this nation are in lockstep with junior.

The protest rallies March 19th were rather weak. Most every is scare!

I think that television made people think less critically, it provided instant gratification and most of the shows boil things down to wrong vs right, the bad guy loses, etc. Also there was a great deal of emphasis on looks. Superman looked just the way he was supposed to, the president of the U.S. became a friend, a buddy, someone you could imagine having a beer with. I think people are breaking away from this type of thinking. They are blogging, blogging is a lot like radio was in the 40s. Radio was just plain every day communication, in addition to fantasy, there were a lot of just plain talk shows which dealt with everything, the way the blogs do now. As a result people are starting to do their own research, link and read articles on their own, which sharpens their thinking, seeing an action hero blow away 5 scummy guys might make you feel good but it provides you with nothing other than an emotional high,
it does not help you with any tools to assess what is going on.

There are times when what we journalists see and intend to write about dispassionately sends a shiver down the spine, shaking us from our neutrality. This has been happening to me frequently of late as one story after another drives home the fact that the delusional is no longer marginal but has come in from the fringe to influence the seats of power. We are witnessing today a coupling of ideology and theology that threatens our ability to meet the growing ecological crisis. Theology asserts propositions that need not be proven true, while ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The combination can make it impossible for a democracy to fashion real-world solutions to otherwise intractable challenges. In the just-concluded election cycle, as Mark Silk writes in Religion in the News, the assiduous cultivation of religious constituencies by the Bush apparat, and the undisguised intrusion of evangelical leaders and some conservative Catholic hierarchs into the presidential campaign, demonstrated that the old rule of maintaining a decent respect for the nonpartisanship of religion can now be broken with impunity.

The result is what the Italian scholar Emilio Gentile, quoted in Silk's newsletter, calls "political religion"â??religion as an instrument of political combat. On gay marriage and abortionâ?? the most conspicuous of the "non-negotiable" items in a widely distributed Catholic voter's guideâ??no one should be surprised what this political religion portends. The agenda has been foreshadowed for years, ever since Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other right-wing Protestants set out to turn white evangelicals into a solid Republican voting bloc and reached out to make allies of their former antagonists, conservative Catholics.

What has been less apparent is the impact of the new political religion on environmental policy. Evangelical Christians have been divided. Some were indifferent. The majority of conservative evangelicals, on the other hand, have long hooked their view to the account in the first book of the Bible: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

There are widely varying interpretations of this text, but it is safe to say that all presume human beings have inherited the earth to be used as they see fit. For many, God's gift to Adam and Eve of "dominion" over the earth and all its creatures has been taken as the right to unlimited exploitation. But as Blaine Harden reported recently in The Washington Post, some evangelicals are beginning to "go for the green." Last October the National Association of Evangelicals adopted an "Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility," affirming that "God-given dominion is a sacred responsibility to steward the earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part." The declaration acknowledged that for the sake of clean air, clean water, and adequate resources, the government "has an obligation to protect its citizens from the effects of environmental degradation." But even for green activists in evangelical circles, Harden wrote, "there are landmines."

Welcome to the Rapture!


Bill Moyers

The thing that has scared me most is the theory of having a style of governance that is not "reality based." Something that is above the confines of observation and existing fact. I think that people will buy into this "I am the guru" only as long as the soothsayer is above reproach. But since Jan '04, reality has landed with a bang.
According to the Wead tapes, Bush lied about his drug use and formulated a response to avoid the issue. What I am hearing all over the blog, is JEB lied about bringing in the troops to save Terri. As boss Tweed said, the public is a sheep to be sheared but if you insult it, it's a wolf (rough quote).

we need to get their control back away from the corporations and back into the hands of the common man.
In other words, don't support the corporate media - support your local independents and the Internet.

... by "controls." I'm not speaking of controls on news, but, rather, controls on the corporations owning the news media--breaking up monopolies, legally discouraging the monopolistic practices by which the FCC has indulged the corporate media of late--taking away the financial incentives which have turned news into entertainment.

As for the common man controlling the news, I doubt that it's ever been that way since the beginning of the industrial age and the advent of automated printing presses. Once the business of printing the news became capital-intensive, owners in large part determined what news went into their papers. But, it was less biased and wishy-washy in days past, when the news corporation didn't own hundreds of other papers, TV stations, radio, multimedia, etc.

As for local independents, fewer and fewer communities have them any longer, and many of those are in the less-populated (and therefore less profitable) areas of the West, and reflect the conservatism of that area of the country.

I think one has to accept that large institutions will still continue to disseminate the news--the networks, the major papers in the country, the wire services. The largest portion of people get their news from those sources, and will continue to do so in the future. So, one has to work toward changing the legal and cultural framework that has encouraged them to ignore their civic obligations in favor of conglomeration and profitability over all else.

Cheers.

like they used to be when Ted Turner owned and ran it, all they would have to do is report the news objectively, as is, no spin, no bias, just report the news. All "We The People" want is a level playing field. They would become #1, I have no doubts. I don't waste my time watching the prefabricated Republican propaganda. CNN should ask themselves: How can we stand out to the people? Of course, that goes for "any" news channel, but they appear to be all the same, so why watch any of them? I want to see and hear the "real" news for a change. Thank goodness for DU!!!

in the WH would bring lots of media attention.

Like reporting the crimes being comitted, some investigative reporting. Expose the truth, and people would be tuning in in droves. I know I would.

for example:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3353926

The Paper Chase Project

This is a way to get the truth out to people who are currently relying on the corrupted media for their news. It's a great idea, and something we all can implement in our own communities. It's grassroots, and it can make a difference.

Please go to the linked thread and read more. In that thread there is also a link to a web site devoted to the Paper Chase Project, which is beginning now and, with our will and effort and the cooperation of the progressive news media, WILL get the truth out in spite of the Administration-controlled Poodle Press.

I plan to start leaving articles on the commuter train

but all us cable subscribers do..this site has a good point, and its 1 I think we can win from, consumer pressure on cable channels to remove fox from basic package....

http://www.starvethefox.com/index.html

I intend to call them (my local cable co.) monday and say my kid switched on fox and was scaried by the Schiavo tapes, because they are murdering her.. I had to sit my child down and try to explain braindead to an 8 yr old, and how sometimes its better to let someone go to. Then he asks why people say such things if they are not true! This channel is not news.. its not fair and balanced and I am outraged to have such hate and filth regularly braodcast! I cant wait to see what they say!

I urge everyone to do this,and.. get friends and family to call in too!

lucky you are." LOL

TV stations do not sell news, they sell advertising space.
The higher the ratings, the more they sell.

The last thing they need to make that happen is the cooperation of the White House.