Bernie Sanders, speaking on corporate control of the media

says that Corporate control of media is JUST as important as any other issue facing the country, that it's a VERY POLITICAL issue, and must be dealt with as such

this is on Bob McChesney's show now

http://www.will.uiuc.edu/main/listen.htm

try quicktime...I couldn't get realplayer or windows media to work

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/010505.html

It's the Media, Stupid!
By Robert Parry
January 5, 2005


America’s top political analysts are now mining Election 2004 for lessons learned: A front-page story in the Washington Post marveled at how effective the Swift boat smears were against John Kerry for the bargain price of $546,000. Columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. observes that “the sheer negative genius of the Bush campaign is worthy of close study.”

While both points may be true, they obscure a larger reality: The reason that negative attacks could work so well for the Bush campaign was the preexistence of a vast conservative media infrastructure that serves as both an echo chamber for Republican messages and a way to protect George W. Bush and other Republicans from attack.

Indeed, the conservative investment of tens of billions of dollars in media over the past quarter century may be the biggest – and least reported – money-in-politics story of modern American history. The conservatives’ ability to saturate the airwaves with their version of reality has changed how millions of Americans understand the world.

So, even when the Democrats can roughly match the Republicans in election fundraising – as occurred in 2004 with each side spending about $1 billion – the Republicans have a huge, built-in advantage because the conservative media reinforces their messages. This infrastructure also works between elections – day-in-day-out, year-in-year-out – to keep the Republican base engaged and the Democrats on the defensive.

Maybe it would work then to get them up in arms about that, so to speak. Be more critical.

The older generation has a lot of faith in what is in print and on TV but younger ones might be more open to the idea of question what you hear.

percentage of americans who believed that saddam had something to do with 911.

way more than fifty percent, even after the invasion

a substantial number (33% or more?) think that WMDs were found in Iraq

where do people get such notions, I wonder?

That is the USA media in a nutshell! I need to get that book.

library ordered it 'just' for me, ha

also, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, by McChesney, is semial, in its own way.

one of his precepts is that without economic democracy, there can be no political democracy, and, with the advent of a global economy, that concentrated media makes economic democracy impossible

so much to read so little time! Thank you! :hi:

I too love and respect Bernie Saunders. Peace!

link to McChesney's radio show

check the very impressive list of guests, all available on archive

http://www.will.uiuc.edu/am/mediamatters/

thanks for this link

In his speech to last spring's National Media Reform Conference in St. Louis, Bill Moyers accused the Bush Administration not merely of attacking his highly regarded PBS program NOW but of declaring war on journalism itself. "We're seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age-old ambition of power and ideology to squelch and punish journalists who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable," explained Moyers. With the November resignation of Moyers's nemesis, Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) board chair Ken Tomlinson, amid charges of personal and political wrongdoing and a host of other recent developments, it becomes increasingly clear that this White House is doing battle with the journalistic underpinnings of democracy.

To be sure, every administration has tried to manipulate the nation's media system. Bill Clinton's wrongheaded support for the Telecommunications Act of 1996 cleared the way for George W. Bush's attempts to give media companies the power to create ever larger and more irresponsible monopolies. But with its unprecedented campaign to undermine and, where possible, eliminate independent journalism, the Bush Administration has demonstrated astonishing contempt for the Constitution and considerable fear of an informed public. Consider the bill of particulars:

Corrupting PBS.
Faking TV News.
Paying Off Pundits.
Turning Press Conferences Into Charades.
Gutting the Freedom of Information Act.
Obscuring the Iraq War.
Pushing Media Monopoly.

In his famous opinion in the 1945 Associated Press v. US case, Justice Hugo Black said that "the First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society." In other words, a free press is the sine qua non of the entire American Constitution and republican experiment.

The Bush Administration attack on the foundations of self-government demands a response of similar caliber. Under pressure from media-reform activists Congress has begun to push back, with a strong bipartisan vote in the Senate Commerce Committee to limit the ability of federal agencies to produce covert video news segments and to investigate Defense Department spending on propaganda initiatives. But until the Administration is held accountable by Congress for all its assaults on journalism, and until standards are developed to assure that such abuses will not be repeated by future administrations, freedom of the press will exist in name only, with all that suggests for our polity.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1118-21.htm

see the link for expansion of bill of particulars

and has an even higher profile.

Republican. If you can get a few dollars his way, it would be a big help.

http://bernie.org/

The Nation article

http://bernie.org/?p=97

Please read.