The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn’t serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. "We" take care of that.
Noam Chomsky
Our corporate controlled media is lazy and superficial. They often fail in their job of holding those with power accountable and making sure the American people remain informed. (In 2006 a Harris poll showed 50% of US citizen believed Saddam had WMD.) Our corporate controlled media is more interested in entertaining us with sensational stories, than with news that directly impacts our lives.
I think this is a fairly common opinion. Jon Stewart, Noam Chomsky, and Al Gore all have made great media critiques.
Imagine if the media gave as much time covering the sensational stories as they did to stories that really matter?!? Here's a lil' list of stories they can report on.
1A.) lies of our leaders
A declassified report by the Pentagon's acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble provides new insight into the circumstances behind former Pentagon official Douglas Feith's pre-Iraq war assessment of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection — an assessment that was contrary to US intelligence agency findings, and helped bolster the Bush administration's case for the Iraq war.
1B.) and really highlight how fu#ked up Iraq is
one of the most dedicated and informed journalists who has been immersed in the ongoing tragedy, Nir Rosen, has just written an epitaph entitled "The Death of Iraq" in the very mainstream and quite important journal Current History. He writes that "Iraq has been killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols, who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century," which has been the perception of many Iraqis, as well. "Only fools talk of 'solutions' now," he went on. "There is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained."
How many people know that Oxford Research Bureau, has updated its estimate of deaths in Iraq due to the invasion? The number now stands at 1.3 million. (That's excluding two violent provinces, Karbala and Anbar.)
There are also over two million displaced within Iraq. ( Obama can't be our next president because of what his Pastor said? John McCain should not be our next President because he has always and continues to support the occupation without shame or reserve.)
2.) the failure of our banks,
We should also remember that the Third World debt crisis was caused by the drastic unilateral hike in interest rates imposed by the Fed in 1982. Up to then the private banks had been happily handing out variable rate loans to countries that were already over-indebted. The crash came when these countries could no longer sustain repayments. Today history is repeating itself, this time in the North: overindebted households in the US are faced with mortgages that they can never repay as they watch the value of their properties plummet.
3.) Our sick economic system, with subsidies to giant corporations, an unfair trading system, millions with out health care, etc. A lot of possible stories there.
- The humanitarian crisis that plagues the world.
If the media chose # 4, here are some things the talking heads in the media could spend some time on.
The effects of climate change are increasingly driving people in sub-Saharan Africa to migrate in search of better living conditions, according to experts who gathered this week in the Senegalese capital, Dakar.
Or how about giving us coverage of the human rights crisisin Tibet.
The government of Nepal should cease arbitrary arrests and detentions, harassment, and the use of excessive force to silence Tibetan protesters, activists and journalists, Human Rights Watch said today. Nepal’s government, which came to power after protests against the rule of King Gyanendra, should reaffirm its commitment to freedom of assembly, association, and expression.
Oh, that's right there is little entertainment quality in those stories, we can't have media personalities going on self-righteous rants about stories that actually matter.
What pains me over the Wright is not because Wright made some comments that offended the patriotic thought police. But how our media covers some stories and fails to cover others. And the excessive amount of time on stories that are quickly passing and giving lack of time to issues that are of much importance.
I have to keep my outrage directed to more pressing matters- issues of war, torture, human rights, the 4th amendment- those issues concern me so much much more.
Sherwood Ross writes
The language used by Reverend Jeremiah Wright to denounce his country is certainly "inflammatory" and has brought him wide vilification. Yet, the words of this otherwise gentle man of peace are nowhere as damnable as the actions of the man of war in the White House responsible for killing more than a million human beings in Iraq. Yet the president's uncounted lies have never been subjected to the intense scrutiny on TV that the networks are now devoting to Rev. Wright's comments! And why is that?
It's the media. And it is at these times Daily Kos is to be valued. Because there is an actually a place in which to fight back against the corporate controlled media. Even if it is just throwing pebbles at a beast that thrives on protecting the powerful and misinforming the public.
When & if Obama becomes Pres. he could hit back hard against the corporate media. Obama's payback will be media reform. His administration should hire or listen to media critic and professor Robert W. McChesney. He makes some proposals for media reform.
• Creating hundreds of new non-commercial community radio stations
• Applying existing antimonopoly laws to the media and, where necessary, expand their reach to restrict ownership of radio stations to one or two per owner. Consider similar steps for television stations and moves to break the lock of newspaper chains on entire regions.
• Establishing a formal study and hearings to determine fair media ownership regulations across all sectors.
• Revamping and supercharge public broadcasting to eliminate commercial pressures, reduce immediate political pressures, and serve communities without significant disposable incomes.
• Providing for a $200 tax credit that every taxpayer can use to apply their tax dollars to any nonprofit medium, as long as it meets Internal Revenue Service criteria. This tool would allow new low-power radio and television stations, as well as existing community broadcasters, labor union newspapers, and other publications to have the resources to provide serious news coverage and cultural programming.
• Lowering mailing coats for nonprofit and significantly noncommercial publications.
• Eliminating political candidate advertising as a condition of a broadcast license; or require that a station must run for free ads of similar length from all the other candidates on the ballot immediately after a paid political ad by a candidate.
• Reducing or eliminate TV advertising to children under twelve.
• Decommercializing local TV news. In return for the grant of access to the airwaves, which makes media companies rich, require that those companies set aside an hour each day of commercial-free time for news programming, with a budget based on a percentage of the station's revenues. This would free journalists to do the job of informing citizens, and allow stations to compete on the basis of quality newsgathering as opposed to sensationalism.
• Revamping copyright laws to their intended goal: to protect the ability of creative producers to earn a living, and to protect the public's right to a healthy and viable public domain.
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"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." Orwell
Bill Moyers spoke at National Conference for Media Reform in 2005. He spoke of the need for a news media that actually kept the people informed.
I told our producers and correspondents that in our field reporting our job was to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth. This was all the more imperative in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. America could be entering a long war against an elusive and stateless enemy with no definable measure of victory and no limit to its duration, cost or foreboding fear. The rise of a homeland security state meant government could justify extraordinary measures in exchange for protecting citizens against unnamed, even unproven, threats.
Furthermore, increased spending during a national emergency can produce a spectacle of corruption behind a smokescreen of secrecy. I reminded our team of the words of the news photographer in Tom Stoppard's play who said, "People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse when everyone is kept in the dark."
I also reminded them of how the correspondent and historian Richard Reeves answered a student who asked him to define real news. "Real news," Reeves responded, "is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms."
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