Mark Crispin Miller: The End of Peter B. Collins and the Need for Media Reform

via CommonDreams:



Published on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 by Huffington Post
The End of Peter B. Collins and the Need for Media Reform

by Mark Crispin Miller


We may have to get progressive talk shows put on the Endangered Species List, now that the president has reinstated it. Otherwise there won't be any voices on the air except the voices of the right, whether "centrist" (corporate) or explicitly far-right (corporate). As Brad Friedman notes in his report on Peter B. Collins's forced departure, the economic crash is threatening to finish off those last few figures who have managed somehow to resist the oligopolistic tide that has by now all but submerged the US media.

That purge, now near-complete, has actually been in the works for years. It was the purpose of the vast "de-regulation" of the media begun by Reagan back in '87 (soon after the corporate press obligingly refused to look too deeply into Iran/contra) and continued by Bill Clinton nine years later (and a fat lot of good it did him.)

Those grand strokes were the eventual result of a big semi-covert effort that had started up much earlier, when, in the early Seventies, the US Chamber of Commerce and the top tier of its membership (some dare call it "the ruling class") resolved to take the country back from all those citizens who had been acting up against the war, for civil rights for all, for the environment, etc. Such was the groundwork for the Reagan/Clinton hand-off of our airwaves (and the cable system) to the likes of GE, News Corporation, Disney and Time Warner, and the aptly named Clear Channel. With that network in charge, and quite absolved of any public obligation, those trying to tell some truth out loud soon found that they were struggling to be heard.

So now Rush Limbaugh's voice -- along with those of Hannity, O'Reilly, Ingraham and the aptly self-named "Michael Savage," among others -- bellows inescapably from coast to coast, while those who are at least as talented, but honest, rational and well-informed, have got to work like hell to find, and build, their audience (which is, increasingly, on-line). ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/17-6

I hope they find a way to bring it back.

And Miller makes a critically important point in his final paragraph:

"So what this country needs, ASAP, is media reform; because the media culture now in place is not a genuine expression of our real opinions or desires, but a gigantic corporate imposition on us all. For far too long we have assumed that what we see and hear (and read) comes mostly from the right because Americans are mostly on the right: not just throughout the "heartland," but, ludicrously even in New York, L.A,, Chicago, San Francisco. Thus we must reform the US media -- break the oligopoly, restore the broadcast code, and build a genuinely non- commercial public system) so that we'll know not just what's really going on, but also, even more important, who we really are."

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/17-6

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I perceived this strange and massive disconnect between the American people and the warmongering, fascist corporate media monopolies back in the 2003-2005 period, when I began following issue polls, in a quest to determine whether my fellow and sister Americans had gone nuts, goose-stepping to Bush, or something else was going on. I came across poll after poll after poll showing huge disagreement between the American people and virtually all Bushwhack policies, foreign and domestic, including nearly SIXTY PERCENT opposed to the Iraq War in the leadup to the invasion.

This led me to look at the election system, where I now believe that a fascist coup occurred during the 2002 to 2004 period, when the country was flooded, end to end, with new electronic voting systems run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushwhack corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls.

The disconnect between the American people and the media continues, and the fraudulent (on its face), privatized, non-transparent, corporate-controlled vote counting systems remain in place--which puts us in great peril. Our secret government, which, I believe ended the Bush/Cheney putsch (over the impending nuking of Iran, circa late 2006), may have permitted Barack Obama to be elected president, with a significantly and fraudulently shaved mandate, but we are not out of the woods, by any means. The corpo/fascist media have already started blaming him for the horrors of the Bush Financial 9/11, and the corpo/fascist voting machine CEOs can easily--EASILY!--deny him re-election in 2012, with the flick of a few lines of code.

Milton Friedman called it making the economy "scream" in regard to Chile back in the 1970s, just prior to the Pinochet dictatorship (and the slaughter of thousands of leftists). You make the economy "scream," then you bring in the dictator and install him in power.

The corporate media allowed the first two stolen elections, in 2000 and in 2004, and are already writing the narrative for another one. And I don't believe that the very uneasy coalition of Pappy Bush and others, who ousted Rumsfeld, de-fanged Cheney, and stopped the nuking of Iran, would hold together and prevent such a thing. They may want it. They just didn't want armageddon (and full on martial law--which is where we were heading).

Voting is our ONLY real power. We must get that power back, and we have to do it under conditions of all out fascist media (except for the internet). But have heart. They did it in South America, where the media remains even worse than here. And they did it largely by hard, long term work on clean elections.