cann4ing:
‘Anarcissie, I did read what you said.  You suggested that those deceived “lack the capacity, the potential for autonomy.”’

No, that is the idea which I refuted.  It is given as the consequence of the “common view” described in the previous sentence—that the media are omnipotent and that the people require state intervention to be saved from them, e.g. PBS.  Then I say, “However” we see evidence to the contrary.

Anarcissie, I did read what you said.  You suggested that those deceived “lack the capacity, the potential for autonomy.”  My post was a rejoinder to that remark.  It’s not “lack of capacity” but lack of information vital to determining the true reality.  My post on elections was designed to demonstrate that very point.

Most Americans, including very well-educated Americans, accepted, without question, the “official reality” broadcast over the corporate media after the 2004 election.  They did so not because they “lack the potential for autonomy” but because they did not have access to the counter-narrative which Prof. Freeman has set forth in “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?”  If you took a poll, I would venture a guess that 90% of Americans are not aware of the fact that the exit-poll data was corrupted so that it would match the official results.  But if people are made aware of this and many other salient facts surrounding the 2004 election, they would prove quite capable of reaching a different conclusion than the one they now hold—the one in which most believe Bush trounced Kerry.

cann4ing—I wish you would read what I actually write and think about it, instead of throwing quotations at me.  I have not said that propaganda is not effective, and I said nothing at all about Ohio or other stolen elections.

Cann4ing, your points are well made. Thank-you.

I have been out of the States for 14 years now. Your comments make me feel somewhat out of touch…, and yes, naive. I felt personally certain that the Ohio results had been manipulated in 2004, but, when Kerry acquiesced and the results were certified one moves on.

What is unacceptable, and here I support you 100%, are the efforts to politicise media channels. In my experience (by proxy through my mother who was a journalist with the VOA in the early 50s) this struggle for the “soul of America’s public image” goes back at least to the fifties.

You are right to follow this and I hope somebody pays you well to show young people how they may have to do it for themselves one day.

Prior to leaving the States I spent 25 years in New Orleans, increasingly upset with the mediocrity of the State and the City. Only since settling in France have I had the leisure to read, write and think about public events.

Regardless of whether I might have made a difference had I stayed in New Orleans, I did not find leisure before settling in France. That said, creating a space for personal reflection has not been easy in this country either…, but for entirely different reasons.

I am glad to have the John Pilger reference and look forward to following “Democracy Now!”

Anarcissie- to anyone who has analyzed statistical data, as I have, the 2004 election was not only stolen, it was OBVIOUSLY STOLEN, as a number of studies have argued.  But the American people don’t analyze stat data, they watch TV.  And from watching TV it was obvious that Bush won.  Because the media excludes those truths that subvert the perception management of power.  this goes on continuously.

And before this happens we are Educated into the worldviews of authorized power, the identifciations of our parents.  Little Dems become big Dems, little Methodists become… etc We inherit our worldviews of reality that we are indoctrinated with as children.

But in some people, or at times of crisis, it changes.  Why and how does it change?  I don’t know but I’d sure like to find out.  Because the American people must be de-Educated, de-Informed and de-entertained of the background context that allows things like obviously stolen elections.

People do not perceive political and social reality.  Between the actuality and the perception falls the deceit of power.

Response to Anarcissie, Part I

Anarcissie, your persistence in ignoring extensive scientific research on the impact of propaganda is becoming a bit tiresome.

Neither Folktruther nor I said anything about people being “hapless or helpless.”  Even individuals with high IQs can be deceived by propaganda—especially when they mistake propaganda for the truth.  It doesn’t mean that they are “incapable” of understanding the truth, merely that they are ignorant of the true facts or have been deceived.

On Election Day 2004 Steven F. Freeman, Ph.D., a member of the teaching faculty of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate Program of Organizational Dynamics, experienced a 1984-like moment as he was confronted with the markedly different realities reflected on network websites and network news broadcasts.  “The laptop screen projected a Kerry victory in nearly every battleground state, in many cases by substantial margins.  But on TV James Carville was saying that Kerry needed to ‘draw an inside straight’….The Slate Web site indicated a narrow edge to Kerry in Florida; the networks all had Florida solidly in the Bush camp.  CNN’s Web site data informed us of commanding Kerry victories in Pennsylvania and Minnesota; TV anchors told us these states were too close to call…[In] Ohio…exit polls showed Kerry with a projected victory of more than 4%....TV viewers were left with little doubt that Bush had won.”

As a statistician, Freeman understood all too well the meaning of exit-polls.  As Republican pollster Dick Morris observed in the November 4, 2004 edition of The Hill, “Exit-polls are almost never wrong.  So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave that they’re used as guides to the relative honesty of Third World countries.”  In Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Freeman explains the “difference between conducting a pre-election telephone poll and conducting an Election Day exit-poll is like the difference between predicting snowfall…in advance of a snowstorm and estimating the region’s overall snowfall based on observed measurements taken at representative sites.”

Response to Anarcissie, Part II

A funny thing happened after the polls closed and the Kerry exit-poll lead, in state after state, slid into the Bush column.  The vast discrepancies between the exit-polls and the official results simply vanished as the pollsters “corrected” the exit-polls in order to reconcile them with the official results. The original “uncorrected” exit-poll numbers, which had been “available on CNN.com” but “never broadcast on TV” simply vanished, replaced on November 3, 2004 by the “corrected” exit-polls.  Freeman informs us that had “it not been for leaks from the media and a technical glitch on the CNN site that caused the unadjusted data to be aired, the unadjusted exit-poll data would never have been collected and preserved, and we might never have known about the exit-poll discrepancy at all.” 

The availability of the data permitted Freeman to both make short work of theories supporting the official count—like late Bush voter surge—and to demonstrate that the official result was a virtual statistical impossibility.  (Of course, there are extended works on such things as electronic DRE voting and massive irregularities that explain how the 2004 election was stolen.)

It isn’t just that the pollsters fed the inconvenient facts down the memory holes by “correcting” the exit-poll data to match the “official count” after the polls closed.  Freeman states that even before exit-poll correction, at a time when his “laptop screen projected a Kerry victory in nearly every battleground state, in many cases by substantial margins,” pundits like James Carville were stating that Kerry “needed to ‘draw an inside straight.’”  The NEP exit-polling had been commissioned by the corporate media networks.  The same data that appeared on Freeman’s laptop was available to all of the network pundits.  The fact that the pundits began to spin a Bush electoral victory prior to the exit-poll “correction” gives rise to only one reasonable inference.  Massive vote-flipping within the official count was already underway, and, given the choice between focusing on wholesale electoral fraud and simply reporting the official count, the networks chose the easier path of advancing the official count as the official reality.

As the official results poured in they overwhelmed the unofficial exit-polls, elevating the official count into the official reality.  Americans have long been conditioned not to challenge official reality.  Those that do are labeled “conspiracy theorists.” No matter the flaws—the Warren Commission Report’s pristine bullet, a 9/11 Commission Report, heavily reliant upon evidence obtained by torture, which fails to deal with let alone explain why WTC 7, which had not been struck by a plane, suddenly collapsed into its own footprint in the span of 8.7 seconds, or wild speculations about a Democratic Party scheme to rig the exit-polls rather than the official count—theories that support official reality are uncritically received.

No matter the scope of his academic credentials nor the scientific underpinning of his analysis, Freeman’s statistical demonstration will not make its way onto CNN.  Why?  Because it challenges the official count which has become official reality.  Professor Freeman’s statistical analysis is therefore a “conspiracy theory.”  All conspiracy theories are insane.  You don’t broadcast insanity.

cann4ing and Folktruther—the problem I see in the common view of the all-powerful media and their hapless, hopeless victims is that, if the latter are not participating in the deceptions with which they are being deceived, then they can never free themselves of them.  They lack the capacity, the potential for autonomy.  For such people, PBS or the like would not salvation but simply a change of masters.

However, as I noted, we do not see a lack of criticism of the media among the people.  The criticism may be usually foolish and mistaken from our point of view, but it exists, indeed, it is quite widespread and passionate.

By prgill, December 21 at 10:33 am #

There will always be a Faux TV and a PBS.
_____________________________

Sorry, prgill, but your observation that either of these “will always be” with us is overly optimistic when applied to PBS and too pessimistic when applied to what Keith Olbermann aptly refers to as Fixed Noise.

PBS came under a relentless right wing assault during the Bush administration, where Karl Rove aligned with Ken Tomlinson, seeking to destroy what they described as a “liberal bias.”

During a June 22, 2005 interview on Democracy Now! Bill Moyers discussed specifics with respect to Tomlinson, the individual who would lead the charge to remove Moyers and independent journalism from PBS.  “The really revealing moment came a couple of weeks ago when Kenneth Tomlinson gave an interview to The Washington Post, and he said he was watching Now himself one night, and he couldn’t stand what we were reporting from a little town in Tamaqua, PA.  My camera crew, one of the great journalists of our time…, Peter Bull, had gone with the team and spent time in this little town looking at what was happening economically…as a result of downsizing, outsourcing, loss of jobs, people losing $20 an hour jobs for $9 or $6 an hour jobs.  It was a really good reporting about the losers in the class war….And Kenneth Tomlinson, a right-wing Republican, couldn’t take that because it was contrary to the party line….Globalization, NAFTA, CAFTA, all of this really good for people….Well, we were reporting from the front lines of what’s happening on globalization to American workers, and he became furious.  And it was at that moment, he said, he decided I was a liberal advocate journalist….”

Tomlinson is not merely a right-wing Republican, but one who, in 1984, had run the Voice of America at a time “when Charlie Wick was politicizing the United States Information Agency of which Voice of America was a part.”  Under their leadership, a large number of journalists, writers and politicians were deleted from the list of prominent Americans who would be sent to lecture abroad, including “Walter Cronkite, James Baldwin, Gary Hart, Ralph Nader, Ben Bradley, Coretta Scott King and David Brinkley.”

Throughout the time that the scope of discourse was under a relentless assault, people like David Horowitz have sought to limit the scope of academic freedom in our universities while Fixed Noise has acted throughout as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party.  But Fixed Noise was not alone.  During the run-up to the war with Iraq, all major networks acted as propaganda networks.  At a time when 61% of Americans favored diplomacy, a F.A.I.R. study revealed that only 3 out of 393 on-air experts were associated with the peace movement.

A significant argument could be made that major networks, especially, Fixed Noise, have forfeited their right to renew their licenses.  However, since the creation of the FCC scheme in 1934, there has been only one instance in which a station was denied a renewal of its monopoly license to broadcast over the public airwaves.  That occurred in the 1960s when WLTB-TV in Jackson, Mississippi had its license revoked after it had consistently shut off feeds entailing speeches and interviews of civil rights leaders.

There will always be a Faux TV and a PBS and there will always be competition to serve as a “bearer of tidings”. This is a good thing.

To my way of thinking, the social question asked by Boyarsky essentially concerned the concentration of capital and the diminished credibility of the news industry. The ethical question I believe concerned professional ethics (asking the hard question, keeping business interests at arm’s length) as well as promoting competition on a level playing field.

I don’t believe the question is as much about some abstract value called “Truth” as it is about the “values you and I can agree on”, so that we can go forward.

My deep conviction is that such a dialogue can happen in the local press and is vital for the immediate community, where the scale is personal and immediate. This also implies significant courage. Imaging if you will, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger talking to the Mississippi establishment about racial fairness… And I do not mean to imply that the dialogue doesn’t exist, only that the dialogue has become staid and complacent.

It is in the local community that “solidarity” matters, where one’s work, honesty, rigour, assiduity, courtesy, and respect can make a difference. (It doesn’t hurt that the work we do has value outside of our communities!) Finally, fairness counts where I live. What kind of people would we be if we were to look away when some gross injustice is being done to a neighbor? to a child? to a black or latino teenager? And these things happen every day.

In short, I believe all democracy is local. So too are social movements.

I quote Chomsky & Orwell because I agree with them.  I agree with them because their reasoning and the evidence supporting their conclusions is compelling and must be accepted by anyone with half a brain.  It is difficult for someone to “know” they are being lied to when they do not have access to the truth and are not given a reason to suspect deceit.

The example I gave you of why people do not understand the true meaning of “foreign aid” is classic—it is part of the cultural psychosis in which most Americans actually believe that the U.S. is some benevolent world savior.

This is not to suggest that Americans are not responsible for shirking the duty of active citizenship—to inquire, to avoid accepting what they are told at face value, to question authority, especially in the 21st Century where so much invaluable information is available from alternative media.  That is why, on an individual, one-to-one level, I encourage people I know to link to Democracy Now’s week day broadcasts.

Well, Anarcissie, that’s a point I never thought of before. A truthee may know they are deceived, but it’s a good honest American deception rather than one of those outlandish Foreign deceptions.  It’s a deception that benefits me and my kind, whoever that is, against our Enemies.  touche.

But it is not autonomy that is going to make the historical difference, but solidarity.  Events, inclduing ideological events, must procede in historical sequence.  Solidarity is necessary to unite people agaisnt power, including class power.  Out of this solidarity autonomy can gradually be differenciated, including in token ways now, in the cooperatives that are being formed.

And I agree with Cann4ing that you underestimate the scope and intensity of the power delusions of the population. This tends to be the case with honest people who are intelligent.  As Goethe said, we all tend to see the world in the light of our own good qualities.

cann4ing:
‘The false assumption, Anarcissie, is yours.  You seem to believe that it is impossible to deceive people; that everyone has this vast reservoir of knowledge but “choose” to ignore it. ...’

I don’t think I said anything about a vast reservoir of knowledge.  I did give evidence that people generally can tell when they’re being lied to, and that many people do, in fact, believe that they’re being lied to by the mainstream media. 

Instead of quotations from Chomsky or Orwell, I’d rather read your theory on the subject.  Not that people are being lied to, on which we all agree, but whether they can detect being lied to, and to what extent they choose to be lied to, or at least choose not to know whether they’re being lied to.  To what extent are the deceived cooperating in the deception?

Cann4ing, your post 207460 very clearly states the case for properly funding public broadcasting and regulating natural monopolies. If we had been more vigilant in this area we might have avoided many of the problems of the past eight years.

Not all of them though. Students of American history would do well to remember the so called “Compromise of 1877” when in a contested election Louisiana and Florida electoral votes were awarded to the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, in exchange for a promise to “end occupation” (Reconstruction) of the South. I suspect the legal manuverings for that election could just as well have been portrayed in the press as righteous indignation by

otherwise law-abiding citizens whose anger had been aroused by an illegitimate effort by the [Tilden] team to steal the election.

My point is that issues of power and legitimacy will remain, regardless of how we organize public life. The core issue remains: how should we construct public life to ensure an informed citizenry and fair choice?

It is linguistically inevitable that our public discourse should reflect institutional reality. The nature of the system is to replicate itself and ensure its survival. (cf your quote from George Orwell). There will always be a Faux Television (I like the concept) and a PBS.

While you (Anarcissie and Cann4ing) have been looking at the problem of the message and its bearer (shades of Marshall McLuhan) I think the issue is at least partly an issue of scale.

At a minimum, the only reality I recognize is the reality of my existence and my right to survival. These facts are essentially local. My success is a reflection of my community’s success and vice versa. Inevitably our success will translate into demographic growth and require a change of scale. Increasing scale brings with it increasing complexity and the need to delegate authority for the management of such “scale”.

Increased scale implies decreased “personal autonomy”. Awareness of one’s scale of existence is somewhat like the Buddhist “practice of consciousness”: it cannot be experience without practice.

While manipulations are inevitable, what is necessary is a citizenry who have read Madison (the full quote) and who act out of self-interest to produce the common good.

It is the common good that will be our legacy. The rest is a matter to technique.

The false assumption, Anarcissie, is yours.  You seem to believe that it is impossible to deceive people; that everyone has this vast reservoir of knowledge but “choose” to ignore it.

You apparently neither grasp the meaning of propaganda nor its effectiveness.

Consider, if you will, the following passage from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four.

“The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself.  Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchal structure remains always the same. 

“All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitude that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present day society from being perceived.”

The Orwell quote is intended to provide context.  That context is acquired by substituting the words “corporate security state” for the word used by Orwell, the “Party.”  One must pierce “the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time,” to lay bare myths in order to understand the role played by a corporate media operating as an essential component of the corporate security state; a for-profit media acting to extend and perpetuate corporate wealth and power; a media functioning as a propaganda network in order to “maintain the mystique” of a corporate security state which masquerades as a democracy in order to “prevent the true nature of present day society from being perceived.” 

One small example.  Most Americans believe that we are a generous nation which provides foreign aid for the benefit of the less fortunate.  As exposed by John Perkins in “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” the reality, totally unknown by most Americans, is that what we “think” is foreign aid is actually a financial system resembling that of a mafia loan shark scheme—a system in which economic hit men entice corrupt foreign leaders to borrow extensively from the World Bank and IMF to build massive construction projects that benefit only a tiny class of wealthy elites in the third world country.  The so-called “aid” money never finds its way into foreign hands but is instead simply transferred into the account of a U.S. contractor like Bechtel.  The foreign nation is saddled with a debt it cannot repay, permitting the U.S. to later extract its pound of flesh—e.g., access to the foreign nation’s natural resources, placement of a U.S. military base etc.  And, as Perkins puts it, another nation is added to the Empire.

One cannot say that the average American is responsible for such a corrupt system when the truth is that the average American is unaware of its existence and thinks that we are this benevolent world savior that simply goes around the world “spreading democracy.”

cann4ing—I am having trouble understanding your model of our subject.  You seem to be suggesting that human beings are incapable of autonomy; that somehow they are forced to accept Fox News and the rest of the mainstream media.  If they are incapable of autonomy, however, then Fox News (or some other source of fables and fantasies) is appropriate for them.  I believe, however, they are capable of autonomy.

We can’t say that people cannot conceive of the media lying to them.  The popular myth of the “liberal media” embodies precisely this idea.  Moreover, anyone who was at least a teenager in the 1960s, many millions of people, had a direct experience of the media lying leading to a disastrous outcome, and could have conveyed the memory of this to their younger relatives, friends and neighbors—indeed, the latter would have demanded it if they cared about it.  Finally, anyone who makes the effort can quickly find discrepancies between media reports of events and situations which she or he personally experiences.

The only conclusion I can draw is that, for biological or cultural reasons, people do not want to exercise their capacity for autonomy and instead choose to participate with the media elites in a game of producing and consuming fables.

If the need to do so is biological, then the situation is hopeless.  If it is cultural, it can be changed, but the only way to change it is to somehow inspire people to desire the autonomy they are rejecting.

Still putting the cart before the horse, Anarcissie.  You seem to believe that people who watch the Faux News network actually know better, but “prefer” to be lied to.  The full quote from Madison runs like this: “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.” 

While the First Amendment insures press freedom from government censorship, it contains no provision to mandate that the press exercise the responsibility for ensuring that information vital to informed decision-making is conveyed to the people.  The framers’ unstated assumption was that once free of fear of government reprisal, a vibrant press would act to expose the deceits of those in power; not throw in with them. 

The Constitutional Convention took place in 1787, long before the heyday of the industrial revolution, the rise of corporate power, the military-industrial complex and the gaping wealth disparity these created—a disparity so great that by 1999 the net worth of just three individuals, Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Warren Buffett, exceeded “the combined GDP of the world’s 41 poorest nations and their 550 million people.”  As Kevin Phillips observed, quoting Samuel Huntington, “’money becomes evil not when it is used to buy goods but when it is used to buy power….Economic inequalities become evil when they are translated into political inequalities.’  Political inequalities, in turn, lead to more dangerous economic inequalities.”

The question arises as to the value of the First Amendment protection of a free press when corporations are granted exclusive monopoly licenses to control what citizens see, hear and read through the mass media.

By placing the public airwaves under corporate control, our nation entrusted the democracy-sustaining information dissemination function to institutions that are, by their very structure, hostile to democratic control.  Corporations do not exist to serve the public interest.  They exist to turn a profit.  Only a publicly owned media, subject to democratic control, can insure that the public decision-making is “informed.”  Secrecy; deception are tools that permit elites to ensure that true power does not rest with the masses.  The people cannot be said to have made a choice when they lack the information needed to even recognize that a choice can be made.

cann4ing—the people who watched Fox news watched Fox news because they wanted to watch Fox news.  The people who watched PBS wanted to watch PBS.  They watched whatever comported with their fables and fantasies.

The people can have publicly owned, independent media any time they want.  They own the airwaves.  The question is, how are we going to get them to want it, when they prefer fables and fantasies, even at significant cost to their own persons and interests?

I don’t know the answer to this question, but I am pretty sure appeals to the ruling class to be nicer are not going to do the trick.

Cann4ing, Anarcissie, Maani—Although I agree, Anarcissie, that there is a difference between being motivated by power rather than profit, the former dominating the latter, I think cann4ing is right that the basic problem resides in the power structure, not the population. 

ButI will agree that their is a biological-cultural tendency to identify with the power delusions of the powerful that Freud discusses in FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION, his analysis of religious delusions. 

Humans have a longer childhood than most other species where we must depend on the power of our parents for our very survival.  The more childish of us want to be protected in adulthood the way our parents protected us in infancy, and so identify with the gods of religion as a form of wish fulfillment.

Freud in a muted and difused way indicates that our identifcation with earthly power has the same delusive source as our identification with Divine power. (He does not sharply distinguish between illusions and delusions.) He says:

  “Having recognized religious doctrines as illusions, we are at once faced with a further question:  may not our other cultural assets of which we hold a high opinion and by which we let our lives be ruled be of a similar nature?  MUST NOT THE ASSUMPTIONS THAT DETERMINE OUR POLITICAL REGULATIONS BE CALLED ILLUSIONS AS WELL?  [Ny caps.]

It is this willingness to identify with oppressive authority that we have inherited from childhood that power structures have coopted that, in my opinion, is the source of all our woe.  For millenniums earthpeople have identified with class-based power systems which are currently on a historical trajectory to destroying us all, or destroying our children or grandchldren.

But it is opprresive power that is destroying us, not profit.

With all due respect, Anarcissie, there is a gaping hole in your logic.  If people always “get what they want”—even when they are the victims of fraud—then it could be said that all the victims of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme got precisely what they asked for.

Consider the following passage from Chomsky’s “Failed States:”

“The standard observation that the United States stood almost alone in rejecting the Kyoto protocols is correct only if the phrase ‘United States’ excludes its population, which strongly favors the Kyoto pact.  A majority of Bush backers not only support the protocol, but mistakenly believe that the president does so as well.  In general, voters in the 2004 election were seriously deluded by the positions of the political parties, not because of lack of interest or mental capacity, but because elections are carefully designed to yield that result….”

This brings us back to the function of a corporate media operating within a corporate security state, which entails keeping mass attention diverted through entertainment, celebrity gossip and athletics, all the while taking in enormous profits from commercial advertising—imagery designed to delude consumers irrespective of whether the ads focus on products or candidates.  But its core function is to act as a propaganda network in order to perpetuate the Sadar/Davies describe in “American Terminator” as a “cultural psychosis;” to convince Americans that they live in a functioning democracy.  The corporate media’s greatest accomplishment is embodied in the fact that 250 million Americans wake up each morning thinking that We the People are actually in charge. 

Your assumption that “if people wanted the truth, they would demand it from the media and the politicians,” erroneously assumes that the American people will always know when they are being lied to.  This ignores the basic fact that propaganda is most effective when it is invisible; that most often the target population is deluded into thinking that what they hear over the airwaves is true—a point borne out by studies that revealed that 80% of people (80%) of the people who watch Fox News mistakenly believed that we invaded Iraq because of either WMD or links to 9/11 as compared to only 23% who watched PBS.  (I suspect that the number would have been in low single digits if those whose primary source was Democracy Now were included).

Since “knowledge will forever govern ignorance,” the solution lies in a publicly owned media where censorship is banned and the mantra “speak truth to power” becomes the core basis for reporting.  In the field of print journalism, which is the focus of this article, that would mean a publicly owned and funded, non-commercial press to replace the existing commercial press which is not economically viable and which long-ago abandoned its core Fourth Estate function of information dissemination.

cann4ing—The state is replicated in daily life.

If people wanted the truth, they would demand it from the media and the politicians.  Instead they demand fables and fantasies, and that is what they get, along with exploitation and servitude.

If what Chomsky reported, and you quoted, is literally true, then much of the 30% of the electorate who bothered with the 1980 election voted for a man opposed to their will and interests.  That is the essence of fable and fantasy, of magical thinking.

The elites are sociopaths who behave as expected.  Their behavior is probably determined by their addiction to power.  They will not cure themselves.  The question worth asking is how to get people to stop believing in and worshiping them and do something else.

By Anarcissie, December 19 at 5:34 pm #

Americans would have a different kind of media, a different government, indeed, a whole different social order, if that is what they wanted.
_____________________________

Not even close, my friend.  You ignore what Noam Chomsky refers to as the “democracy deficit”—the significant gap between the policy positions of the electorate and their leaders—a deficit made possible because of deception employed in political advertising and the ability of the corporate media to limit access to individuals like Dennis Kucinich.

In “Failed States,” Chomsky informs us:  “In his landslide victory in 1984, just under 30 percent of the electorate voted for Reagan.  Of these, 4 percent gave as their primary reason that he’s a real conservative….Polls showed that by 3 to 2, voters hoped that Reagan’s legislative program would not be enacted…[and] that the public favored tax increases devoted to New Deal and Great Society programs.  Support for equal or greater social expenditures was about 80 percent in 1980, and increased in 1984.  Cuts in Social Security were opposed with near unanimity….The public preferred cuts in military spending to cuts in health programs by about 2 to 1.  Large majorities supported government regulations to protect worker health and safety, protection of consumer interests, help for the elderly, the poor….But none of this matters as long as elections are skillfully managed to avoid issues and marginalize the underlying population, freeing the elected leadership to serve the substantial people.”

Chomsky goes on to note:  “While the press reported that Kerry ‘took pains’ to deny that his health care plan would ‘create a new government program,’ because ‘there is so little political support for government intervention in the health care market in the United States,’ the truth lie in the fact that a large majority of the population supports extensive government intervention into health care.  An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that ‘over 2/3 of all Americans thought the government should guarantee ‘everyone’ the best and most advanced health care that technology can supply.’…The Pew Research Center found that 64 percent of Americans favor the ‘U.S. government guaranteeing health insurance for all citizens, even if it means raising taxes.’”  Chomsky notes that lacking “political support” is a polite way “of saying that the pharmaceutical and financial industries…are opposed.”

The American propaganda network, aka the corporate-owned media, insures precisely that Americans do not get the government they desire.  You put the cart before the horse.

cann4ing:
‘I disagree, Anarcissie.  Americans are not grateful that they were deceived by the media, any more than they would have been eager to attack Iraq if they had known that the subtle efforts to link that nation to 9/11 were a lie.  They were the targets of the propaganda blitz—the victims of the great deception which was designed, as Noam Chomsky observed, to “manufacture consent.” ...’

Americans would have a different kind of media, a different government, indeed, a whole different social order, if that is what they wanted.  In spite of all the grumbling, it’s obvious that they’re getting what they want.  Are they grateful now for the lies they were fed a few years ago?  Of course not—the rings in their noses smart from the hard pulls they’ve been given lately.  But at the time of 9/11 they settled down into the rancid patriotic schmaltz (which you recounted so accurately) with a sigh of relief.  No hard questions needed to be asked or answered!  When I asked the questions anyway I was told I was “spitting on the graves of the dead.”  This from a widely respected liberal pundit and sometime government official, by the way.

I disagree, Anarcissie.  Americans are not grateful that they were deceived by the media, any more than they would have been eager to attack Iraq if they had known that the subtle efforts to link that nation to 9/11 were a lie.  They were the targets of the propaganda blitz—the victims of the great deception which was designed, as Noam Chomsky observed, to “manufacture consent.”

Indeed, what makes the American corporate propaganda network so effective is that most Americans do not so much as suspect that when they turn on the nightly “news” they risk being bombarded with propaganda.

The fundamental distinction between the U.S. propaganda network and state propaganda organs was oddly enough explained to British journalist John Pilger by a dissident in 1970s Stalinist Czechoslovakia:

“In dictatorships we are more fortunate that you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know its propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West, we’ve learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive.”

http://www.democracynow.org/2007/8/7/freedom_next_time_filmmaker_journalist_john

cann4ing: ’... I take issue, however, with the notion that “we” “elected” George W. Bush once, let alone twice.  He was selected by the Supreme Court which prevented the recount.  Numerous studies reveal massive computer theft in both the 2000 & 2004 elections, and in both instances, this was hidden by a complicit corporate media.

The Gore team not only failed to recognize that the evidence of Republican electoral theft lay in the technological manipulations of electronic DREs and optical scanners.  Gore failed to appreciate the duplicity of the corporate-owned media….’

But “we”—that is, most of us, and not just Gore and Bush and their friends—support the corporate media as well as the government.  A few messages ago you admirably recounted the avalanche of rancid patriotic schmaltz with which the media inundated the people after 9/11, but they were grateful for the flood, eager to do the dumbest thing possible, which was start two open-ended wars with people who were at most bystanders to the crimes the wars were supposedly avenging.

If we want to see anything change, we have to change ourselves and the culture around us.

prgill:  I am not adverse to the concept of collective responsibility.  Indeed, I believe very much in what Obama refers to as co-responsibility—that is, what we owe not only to ourselves but to one another—the res publica or common good—a concept that is alien to the individual greed based system of neoliberal capitalism.

I take issue, however, with the notion that “we” “elected” George W. Bush once, let alone twice.  He was selected by the Supreme Court which prevented the recount.  Numerous studies reveal massive computer theft in both the 2000 & 2004 elections, and in both instances, this was hidden by a complicit corporate media.

The Gore team not only failed to recognize that the evidence of Republican electoral theft lay in the technological manipulations of electronic DREs and optical scanners.  Gore failed to appreciate the duplicity of the corporate-owned media or its ability to manipulate perception through image.  The televised image of Miami-Dade Canvassing Board officials squinting, staring at dimples and hanging chads, suggested an exercise in futility.  Gore was not simply a sore loser; he was the Caine Mutiny’s Commander Queeg ordering a search for the missing strawberries.  The image of clean-cut men in starched white shirts and ties, by itself, did nothing to suggest that the “Brooks-Brothers riot” was merely a calculated event carried out by Republican ideologues.  To the contrary, it conveyed the image of otherwise law-abiding citizens whose anger had been aroused by an illegitimate effort by the Gore team to steal the election. 

An astute and honest media, acting in its role of government watchdog, would have sought to immediately identify the rioters who had shut down democracy.  It didn’t.  It also failed to cover the significant question of voter suppression.  In London, investigative reporter Greg Palast revealed that in the months leading up to the 2000 election Katherine Harris teamed up with ChoicePoint’s DBT unit to create a purge list of supposed felons from Florida’s voter rolls.  In an election where Katherine Harris would ultimately proclaim George W. Bush the winner by a grand total of 537 votes, Palast was working on an illegal purge list made up of at “least 91,000…innocent legal voters.”  “The vast majority,” Palast proclaimed, “were guilty of nothing more than being Black, Democrats or both.”  “Typical was Reverend Willie Whiting, who was removed from the voting rolls for a speeding ticket twenty-five years earlier.”

cann4ing:
‘You’re missing the point, Folktruther.  There is a mutuality between profit and power—and since, as observed by James Madison, “knowledge will forever govern ignorance,” control of the flow of information through media becomes a source of both. ...’

Certainly, but when this discussion started there was a certain amount of assertion that the newspapers were coming to grief because they had been just trying to make money instead of advancing the noble cause of enlightening the masses.  Some people then pointed out that issues of political power were involved as well.  Of course power and wealth are associated; money is a specific kind of power, and large accumulations of it tend to have considerable political valence.  I don’t think anyone disagrees with that.

Cann4ing, I appreciate your insight and thoughtfulness.

You stop short however, of acknowledging our collective responsibility.

Collective responsibility is a matter of leadership and leadership is what was lacking in George Bush the political opportunist. Some might say we got what we deserved.

We elected him at least once, and he got into the first round by himself. George Bush is populist, just like Hitler, Mussolini and Huey Long before him.

For too long we have neglected the “center” in the struggle for a righteous life (a “moral” America) for the trappings of conformist morality and pseudo, membership-by-proxy in a self-proclaimed “moral majority”.

If there is an ethics of citizenship we have neglected if for a politics of self-interest.

Man is by nature a “coloniser” who will occupy any space not defended so that if we do not act, we must be content as victims. In the meanwhile we seem to have allowed a bunch of bad ideas (about capitalism, about consensus morality, about ourselves) to squat our public spaces.

cann4ing:

Bravo!  Very well put.

It is worth noting Teddy Roosevelt’s famous statement here: “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president…is morally treasonable to the American public.”  And the truism that flows from that: “Dissent is patriotic.”

Peace.

Unfortunately, eileen flemming, the corporate media was not simply MIA on 9/11.

The earliest use of the phrase, “war on terror,” came not from the government but from NBC’s Pat Dawson, who on 9/11/01, said:  “If this is a war, it’s a war against terrorism that started…here at about quarter to nine this morning.”  It is a phrase which borders on an oxymoron from a practical standpoint but as a propaganda device it was, and still is, exceedingly effective for it conjures endless war against a phantom menace who is everywhere and anywhere at all times.

The corporate media role in ensuring that “public acquiescence” was pivotal.  The media had to choose between competing images.  One image, the one that would not be shown until years later in Fahrenheit 911, was captured at a time when the fires were raging and people were leaping to their deaths from the upper stories of the Twin Towers.  It was the unscripted and embarrassingly long moments when a stunned George W. Bush, having just been informed of the attack, sat motionless listening to a teacher reading My Pet Goat; a thunderstruck idiot who would spend the remainder of the day flying about the country.  Then there was the carefully scripted image—George W. Bush, leader of the free world, standing tall at Ground Zero, arm around a firefighter, bull horn in hand, ensuring that “the people who knocked down these buildings will hear from us real soon.”
 
The corporate media chose not to present the former just as it chose not to question the ambiguity in the words “war on terror.”  The rationale was explained by Dan Rather when interviewed by BBC television on May 16, 2002.  “It starts with a feeling of patriotism within oneself.  It carries through with a certain knowledge that the country as a whole—for all the right reasons—felt and continues to feel this surge of patriotism within themselves.  And one finds oneself saying:  ‘I know the right question, but you know what?  This is not exactly the right time to ask it.”

The message of the corporate media entailed much more than a failure to ask the right questions.  It was a statement that what was required of the American people was blind obedience, a point underscored by a remark made by Rather on David Letterman’s show just six days after the planes struck the Twin Towers:  “George Bush is president.  He makes the decisions….Wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where.  And he’ll make the call.” This call for blind obedience was made against a backdrop of near continuous renditions of The Star Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful sung not only before sporting events but at half-time or the seventh-inning stretch, often beneath the roar of streaking F-16s—televised spectacles reminiscent of 1930s German torch-lit parades.

Simultaneously another image was broadcast—the “face of the enemy”—the angular features of the lanky, bearded Osama bin Laden in his robe with a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his shoulder; pictures of the 9/11 highjackers accompanied by stories of the danger of “sleeper cells.”  These were images conveyed to a culture that was already imbued by loathing and fear towards all things Arab and Muslim, and now Americans were being told that the enemy could be anywhere; everywhere.

This was Orwellian manipulation by a corporate-owned media—essential to all that transpired under the Bush regime.

There it is, you see?
Eileen Fleming, the free spirit, the pioneer and the acknowledged cost of creativity.
And the reward? Doing what you love.

The New Fourth Estate was birthed after THAT DAY we call 9/11, when the media went MIA and failed at their commission to ask the hard questions and get out of their comfort zones;

Like Rachel Corrie did who died for her altruism and active seeking of the truth that she reported from Gaza.

That is, until she was killed when a Caterpillar bulldozer driven by Israeli forces rolled over twice.

Citizen Journalists do not take assignments from editors or paychecks from conglomerates, and there are more and more of us rising up out of the wilderness of cyber space:

And we do it all for free for love of the truth and in service to the world.

Eileen Fleming, Author, Founder WAWA:
http://www.wearewideawake.org/
Producer “30 Minutes With Vanunu” and “13 Minutes with Vanunu”

You’re missing the point, Folktruther.  There is a mutuality between profit and power—and since, as observed by James Madison, “knowledge will forever govern ignorance,” control of the flow of information through media becomes a source of both.

Rather than providing a “revolutionary” remedy to “yellow journalism,” the concept of “professional journalism” provides ideological cover, masking the reality that corporate media elites are not merely aligned with the elites of the corporate security state but are an essential component of the corporate security state.  Indeed, if the entirety of 20th Century journalism is examined, the acceptance by the corporate media of “professional journalists” within its ranks and erection of the “Chinese firewall” can be seen as little more than a reflection of the corporate media’s need to operate within the legal framework of the 1934 Act and FCC regulations that had been designed to check the excesses of corporate control of the information dissemination function.  The profit-motive and ideological affinity to free-market capitalism created the inevitable push for deregulation alongside efforts to consolidate monopoly ownership and control of vast swaths of the media landscape.

At the same time the number of available media channels expanded on cable, diversity was reduced as giant conglomerates sought to swallow up the market.  When Ben Bagdikian first published Media Monopoly in 1983, “fifty giant firms dominated almost every mass medium; but just seven years later, in 1990, only twenty-three firms occupied the same commanding position.”  On December 1, 2003, Howard Dean informed viewers on “Hardball” that “eleven companies in this country control 90% of what ordinary people are able to read and watch on their television.”  We are now down to six, and, if Rupert Murdoch is an accurate prognosticator, the number of global media giants will eventually get down to three, with his News Corp. being one of them.

Murdoch’s control of multiple media have provided him with inordinate power—the power to control much of what is covered—as his Media Empire has made him one of the richest men on the planet.  The danger, the one cited by Bill Moyers as the reason for a public network, is that commercial values will overwhelm democratic values.

Folktruther:

Although you TRY to make a case against it, I would have to agree with cann4ing that there is very little difference between power and profit with regard to the media.

When you have the three major networks owned by corporations (NBC=GE, ABC=Disney, CBS=Westinghouse and Viacom), you are not going to see news reports critical of, say, nuclear power on NBC or CBS.  This is equally about “profit” (the parent companies will lose money if people perceive them as “bad”) as “power.”  Indeed, the two become almost hopelessly and inextricably intertwined.

Even some of what some TDers consider somewhat more “alternative” or even “progressive” media (or at least discuss it that way here) is corporate-owned (MSNBC=Microsoft and GE).  I suppose that this would make such shows as Olberman and Maddow “sops” to the “left,” since the major sponsors of both of these shows (the ones who buy the most ads) are oil companies (unctuously trying to convince us how much they are doing for the environment…), auto manufacturers and other “big business.”

By the way, you are wrong about “The Godfather.”  Although it is true that Don Corleone eventually agrees to provide “political protection” for the OTHER family’s drug rackets, he does so NOT because he would otherwise be “outgunned by their more money,” but because he simply wants to stop the “war” (violence) between the families.  The Corleones never actually get into SELLING drugs; only protecting the other family’s ability to do so.  (I’m not making a moral judgment here; only a statement of fact).

Peace.

Anarcissie:
Good grief! Aren’t you just the authority on the creative psyche.
You know, your values are showing.
Poverty = damaged lives
Art = shamanism
Problem = business ignorant
‘done all right’
Researcher; still driving a truck!
LOL!
Oh how Pathetic!

Calm down prgill. You’ll blow a gasket. These are donations to a CHARITY and a LIBRARY. Even the Australian government put in millions of dollars. Or do you think they’re terrorists and princes of darkness too? As for the Saudis: don’t make me laugh. If having anything to do with them is a crime then arrest Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, James Baker III et al. Remember Bandar Bush? Of course the rightwing lapdogs like Andrea (I hate the Clintons) Mitchell will beat it up for all its worth but doesn’t that just prove that people have good reason for not believing the lies manufactured by the newspapers, radio and TV? The way I see it, anyone who ever tries to do anything for the good of ordinary Americans by way of politics will always be attacked in the media by these bastards - and in the case of John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King will be killed by them. That’s how I know, in spite of all the flim flam that the Clintons aren’t on board with these maniacs. If they were they wouldn’t hate them so much. These people have spent a fortune discrediting Bill Clinton and they must have choked on their heart tablets when the American people (showing uncommon good sense) re-elected him. The fact is, in spite of all their ‘investigations’ the Clintons have done nothing criminal whatsoever. The only time these rabid dogs ever got them into court they were found innocent of all charges. Watch ‘The Hunting of the President’, a well-nigh incredible but true tale of rich fascists and their media toadies and their ten year campaign to destroy the Clintons. I find it hard to take anything in the media seriously after watching that. The hunting of the Clintons continues. Just another day in media paradise.

Yeah, Camm4ing, there’s a difference between wanting more money because you are greedy and needing more money to protect one’s power position in a market.  In the novel THE GODFTHER, he didn’t want to go into drugs for moral reasons.  But since his rival mob opponents went into it, he was forced to go into it as well, or otherwise he would be outgunned by their more money.

Power is a zero sum game.  If you don’t win, you lose. Economic development is a non-zero sum game.  It doesn’t matter how much pharmacedal corps make if you manufacture airplanes.  But it matters if they are other plane manufacturers.

Nor does one’s standrad of living depend on much you make if you are already a billionaire.  Indeed, one’s desposable income is spent on status toys that increase one’s perceived power.

Money, money, money. Whenever will we learn that money is as much the problem as free markets are the solution?

It is GMT+5 in New York and the headlines cry, Arab states and business moguls are big donors to Clinton charity (International Herald Tribune) or Donor’s list raises fears over Hillary Clinton role as Secretary of State (Times Online).

Hillary the talented. Hillary the Yale radical. Where are her principles? Is it about money and influence? Is it O.K. for her husband to be out hustling donors to finance a charitable foundation… and a monument to himself, as if he needed one?

I suppose it is O.K. to be an over-achiever, only the over-achievement is measured in money. And so the gulf between the “haves” and the “have nots” continues to grow. Yet we do not demand an equivalent effort or sacrifice for social justice, basic fairness.

How will the newspapers handle this? Will they poll their readers, write angry editorials and dare to say in the end, that maybe Hillary is not really a part of change we can believe in? They might if we write them. I think Truthdig might take a position on this issue.

Will not anybody stand up and ask why we need a standing army of 1 million men and women? When will we ask ourselves what is meant by “progress”? or why it is a citizen’s duty to consume and live in debt?

The only way to stop this nonsense is to educate our children to think for themselves, to consider their best interests and preserve a free press. Yes, to preserve and promote a free press while reclaiming the commons.

By Folktruther, December 18 at 12:17 pm #

The basic problem is not capitalist PROFIT but capitalist POWER.
___________________________

There’s a difference?  The profit motive is what drives the quest for greater power.  Wealth is converted to power in order to secure greater wealth.  Exhibit “1”—Ruppert Murdoch.

Cann4ing-  I don’t think that the core of the problem is in the profit motive. There is no inherent rason why a grouping of people could not get togehter and cooperatively own a turh organ that makes a profit in some way, and still provides hoenst, courageous and talented truth.

The basic problem is not capitalist PROFIT but capitalist POWER.  Which of couse its profit enhances.  But TV stations do not take progressive ads because of power considerations not profit considerations, as Chomsky points out somewhere. And as Anarcissie pointed out, scarcity is necessary to capitalist power as well as capitlist profit.

For example, in a huge dictionary of about a half million entries, costing over a hundred dollars, the jouralist Fisk pointed out that a meaning it included for anti-Semitism was anyone supporting the Palestinian cause. This was done for ideological power purposes, it did not in itself increase sales of the American dictionary.

That is why I think marxism must be generalized to a power perspective rather than a wealth perspective.  As Orwell, said in his newspaper column in 1946,  the desire for ower seems to be a much more dominating force than the desire for wealth.

The core of the problem lies in the profit motives of commercial journalism and the symbiotic relationship that creates in assuring access to official sources.  What is needed is a People’s press—a publicly-funded, commercial-free entity devoted only to speaking truth to power with rules in place preventing any form of censorship. 

In the hands of the corporate media the “revolutionary idea” of “objective journalism” has degenerated into what Bill Moyers refers to as “the charade of ‘fair and balanced’—by which two opposing people offer competing opinions with a host who assumes the viewer will arrive at the truth by splitting the difference—to substitute for independent analysis….Objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the malfeasance, deceits, hypocrisy, and lies of powerful people.”

The “flaws” in “professional journalism” are highlighted by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in “Manufacturing Consent,” an exhaustive study of the corporate media’s performance in relation to Vietnam, Central America and the Cold War.  “In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite.  It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship are absent.  This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest.  What is not evident…is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and its behavior performance.”

Folktruther:
‘Prgill-Thank you for your appreciation of my comment.  Unfortunately I can’t say the same for yours. It is-and I say this with all due respect- the kind of professional crap that evades the central point of the mass deception of the nedia.  Although it is professionally written, for those who prefer style to content.

I think Boyarsky is the kind of journalistic hack that, if Ham-archy is right and he is paid 25k, is way overpaid.  And the same for Dionne and Robinson.  These people suck up to whatever power source is within flying distance.  And I’m not overjoyed with Scheer either.

I didn’t come to this site to read their crap. ...’

Well, they do have a web site which attracted you (and me).  That’s something.

Maani:
’... I hate to be the one to tell you this, but among the serious researchers out there, Wiki has become a bit of a joke.  It is NOT relied upon for “truth” except in the broadest sense; i.e., that in innocuous cases, it provides relatively accurate information. ...’

I don’t know of any encyclopedia which is reliable.  There is just as much chance that Britannica is written by the CIA as that Wikipedia is.  And, who knows, the CIA may provide reliable information—although they must be very busy if they’re writing as much of Wikipedia as you think.  Rather than telling me something I don’t know, you seem to be exposing your own considerable naivete.

What I was trying and apparently failed to say is that Wikipedia is, or appears to be, the beginning of a cooperative truth project.  (Truth in the sense of veracious information.)  To each page there is attached a “talk” page where one can object to the article, something you won’t find in most encyclopedias, although the online ones may be forced to adopt it by competition.  Many such pages are the sites of struggles which are precisely the mark of autonomous determinations to obtain truth instead of accepting it from an authority.

The alternative to cooperative truth projects is the hierarchical-corporate model still practiced by most of the media and academia.  This model is fatally flawed from the point of view of those interested in the general distribution of truth because (good) knowledge is power, so its free distribution is not in the interests of those who desire power over others, such as the members of corporate hierarchies.  Instead, they will attempt to keep knowledge to themselves, or trade it at as high a price as they can get to other powerful and presumably secretive people.  Almost anyone who has worked in a large institution will have observed this same tendency toward secrecy.  And we have already observed and commented on how this has worked out in the case of the mass news media, again and again and again.

I would suggest that Americans use the UK’s BBC model to produce independent media of all types. Unfortunately, America is far too corrupt to allow an independent entity to stand. Witness the steadily increasing corruption of CPB.

Wow, socks, that was a mouthful!

Get in line Bill, behind all the manufacturing jobs that no longer exist in our grand capatalist free market economy. That there was scant notice of in your papers. Or the massive deragulations going on in DC for years now that hardly got any notice. And if it was noticed, not a bloody hint of how it would affect our nation. I guess yall were busy that day covering Britney Spears or something earth shaking like that.

That was a real touch of class, who will there be to watchdog on the criminal activity of our politicians and bureaucrats. After the most press favored Presidency is finally ending (Thank you Jesus) and least critically covered criminal administration, you have the gall to ask readers to pity the journalistc community. That is rich, Bill, and pathetic.

Did you know that Americans can go online and read real journalism from British, French, Aussie, New Zealand, or Isreali papers, when you refuse to tell us what is going on?

Did you know about the massive amounts of American money going into Iraq, that has done just about as much good as all the help the government has done in New Orleans, which BTW is all but piss-all. But a whole lot of war profiteers got loads of American taxpayer dollars.

If it was in your paper at all, it was in a 2 incher wayyyyyyyyy back in the nose bleed sections.

Plenty of great nobel people have lost their jobs for 2 decades now and no body in your profession did much but state it as a passing fact…........where’s the cake(job training)? Whole industryies are gone. cloth mills, steel, mining is back to stone age safty standards. Where have you guys been?

Lets face it Bill, you guys have covered for the present day Robber Barons almost too long. The jig is up on yall now. So it is your turn to cry.

Oh, did yall ever come to grips on why American inner cities are graveyards of crime and drugs and crummy schools yet?

You might earn a prize if you could tie the defunding of America with the mega monopolies like big oil, energy, healthcare and pharma that are robbing us blind. And how K street owns our Congress, but save that for bettrer days. We can wait…..................not.

Change or die.

The future is here and those that don’t see it are doomed to extinction.  News and information will always be important to most of the people; only the “media” will change, the method of delivery if you will.  I’m an author and haven’t even considered the print media.  I’m betting on the internet as the media of the future.  I have no idea about how, but I will find a way to get my works to those interested in my particular genre of story telling. 
Morn the past, but go with the future.  As a guy at Boyarsky’s meeting said,“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”
http://www.iauthorbooks.com

Anarcissie:

Folktruther said, “Anarcissie—Political groups have truthers who write what is usually sectarian truth.  Why would it not be possible to have subscription groups who would hire truthers based on broader criteria, such as yours?  Small playhouses do it, for example…Truth cooperatives.”

To which you responded: “These exist.  The best-known is Wikipedia (of which I am a contributing member).”

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but among the serious researchers out there, Wiki has become a bit of a joke.  It is NOT relied upon for “truth” except in the broadest sense; i.e., that in innocuous cases, it provides relatively accurate information.

But vis-a-vis the type of truth we are talking about - socio-political truth - Wiki is read the same way the MSM is: between the lines.  And this is even truer now that it has been estimated that 1 out of 5 (or possibly 1 out of 4) substantial (i.e., socio-political, historical, etc.) articles on Wiki is written and/or edited by political operatives, including the CIA.

You add that Wiki is “...also the site of a considerable amount of struggle over how truth and the other qualities I mentioned should be determined and presented.”

Wiki would be better able to determine and present the “truth” if it could get a better handle on some of its editors’ real backgrounds and agendas.

Peace.

As someone who has been in the news business for most of a lifetime, I’m concerned about the uncertain future of these women and men. Without them, who will “watchdog” politicians and bureaucrats, charity officials, cops, educators and the many others who help make our society run? Who will report and comment on the culture that binds us together? Who will explain the social tensions that tear us apart?
______________________________________________________

Oh puleeeese!  Newspapers seldom print stories of real importance.  Reporters are largely uneducated relative to the times in which we live.  They do not comprehend the dynamics of change or hyperculture.  They lack a solid background in history and economics and cannot put political changes into correct context.  Their views are narrow-casted and outdated.

They watched American citizens be transformed into mere consumers with little note.  They watched our Democracy being transformed into Fascism and were in the bleachers cheering the Iraq war.  Man bit the dog and they missed it.  Newspapers ruined themselves by appealing to Corporations not Citizens. I get very angry when I hear them say that I need them to put news into context.  What a whine and a self congratulatory slap on the back.  The Newspapers failed the American People and now they are dying the death they deserve.  No tears here.

Boyarsky’s commentary has no original insight at all and needn’t have been written for all it adds to the debate about the future of newspapers. The plucky journalism student sez “Yes we can!”.

I nearly wretched.

No you won’t pal. You don’t even play well in Boyarksy’s vapid melodrama.

How about a little analysis, Bill? For example: the corporatization and monetization of all aspects of American life has reduced everything to a “product” that is only as valuable as the profit it can send back to the holding company. Newspapers and books have been placed on a level playing field with toothpaste, Toyotas, & tampons. Newspapers have been strapped onto the Procrustean bed of corporate finance and tortured into making profits above and beyond their capacity to do so. Newspapers have been killed by corporate ownership.

What about that, Bill? Do you avoid speculation because you have corporate masters touchy about criticism?

This article is bad journalism. Of course every journalist has bad days. It’s a grueling profession. But if you, as a journalist, are incapable of defending newspapers or providing some explanation for their demise, then you might look in the mirror for the cause…..

Prgill-Thank you for your appreciation of my comment.  Unfortunately I can’t say the same for yours. It is-and I say this with all due respect- the kind of professional crap that evades the central point of the mass deception of the nedia.  Although it is professionally written, for those who prefer style to content.

I think Boyarsky is the kind of journalistic hack that, if Ham-archy is right and he is paid 25k, is way overpaid.  And the same for Dionne and Robinson.  These people suck up to whatever power source is within flying distance.  And I’m not overjoyed with Scheer either.

I didn’t come to this site to read their crap.  They don’t compare to Anarcissie, KDelphi, Outraged, Paracelsus, etc.  Honest, courageous, intelligent. Only the latter caracterizes mainstream reporters, and they pervert their intelligence to pander to power. 

When the papers go bankrupt, I hope a special place is reserved for them on skid row to beg from the public that they have deceived all their lives.  Spare change they can believe in.

Anaracissie- The problem in American social science is much worse than in the arts.  It simply isn’t possible to be honest and to be paid for it.  The bests work, like that of Michael Parenti, was done after he was blacklisted by American universities, as Finklestein now is.  So a day job is more or less essential.

Sepharad—surely you don’t believe that Tom Wolfe invented biased journalism.

Ham-archy—You did write, perhaps satirically, “The realists in the arts world know that they are choosing poverty when they decide to dedicate their lives to art.”  However, poverty isn’t guaranteed.  This isn’t to say that I don’t know several people whose lives have been seriously damaged by devotion to the arts.  They’re getting old and they have nothing.  Some of the problem, though, is that as young people they weren’t informed about the business side of art, or they didn’t want to hear about it.  Art is a shamanistic practice, but even shamans have to eat, and they have to decide how they’re going to translate their communication with and access to the spirits into putting bread on the table.  I knew I would have to eat, and I wasn’t fast enough for commercial art back in the 60s, and I wasn’t particularly charismatic or lucky, so I did a lot of computer programming and such and took some runs off the leash when I could.  However I know other people who have done all right with art alone and a couple who might break through into the lower tiers of arts celebrity.  It can happen.

I don’t know if the same economy would apply to independent journalists.  The New Yorker has an interesting tale about a fellow currently driving a truck who has done meticulous and fruitful research into the exact construction of the early atom bombs.  Self-published (print media) he is widely respected among those who interest themselves in that sort of thing.  But he’s still driving a truck.  I’ve done that, too, and it can be pretty wearing after awhile.

HA! Great thread.
Anarcisse: You have a nice concept of the arts business. But you obviously are not living it.
I have worked as a professional musician, and I have worked in the production business. I know and have worked with very many artists. I have lived in little tourist towns that have no other commerce. I didn’t say there was no money in it. You’re sounding like an MSM reporter.
Mr. Boyarsky seemed to complain of a $25k/yr salary. Well that’s pretty close to the poverty level in the eyes of middle class america. When I refer to poverty it is with deference to general domestic views. I am not talking about life in Somalia.
Also since I was disparaging of commercialism the kind of model in mind was like Folktruther, December 17 at 12:52 pm suggested.

Too many times management wants to sell the script. No one is buying the script.

http://maladjust.deviantart.com/art/Smile-6966135

I think the above makes the point well.

Too many times management wants to sell the script. No is buying the script.

http://maladjust.deviantart.com/art/Smile-6966135

I think the above makes the point well.

Folktruther:
‘Anarcissie—Political groups have truthers who write what is usually sectarian truth.  Why would it not be possible to have subscription groups who would hire truthers based on broader criteria, such as yours?  Small playhouses do it, for example.

This is’t the way to becoming rich, but it may be the way to better truth.  Truth cooperatives.’

These exist.  The best-known is Wikipedia (of which I am a contributing member).  It is also the site of a considerable amount of struggle over how truth and the other qualities I mentioned should be determined and presented.  There are also several subscription services of various kinds geared to particular audiences, purveying varying kinds and degrees of truth.

As yet not many people can make money from independently or cooperatively writing the truth because propaganda is generally preferred by both publishers and audiences.  But that may change.

Bill Boyarsky wrote:
“and death of the American newspaper is fast approaching.”

And many people will be glad to piss and spit on the
grave.
The newspapers and the rest of the MSM have become
nothing but mouth-pieces and propoganda organs for
the corporate/government complex.
Instead of information they provided misinformation
, distraction and misleading bull-shit.

First let me say that I do have empathy with the reporters that may loose their jobs.  However, as more and more of the media have “gone” corporate, and no longer produce those in-depth, objective reporting in which both sides were presented, it is no wonder that less and less people are reading it, IT IS BECAUSE THE NEWSPAPER IS NO LONGER TRUSTED!

You know if the newspapers of today were operating during the time of Richard M. Nixon - he never would have been brought up on charges for IMPEACHMENT!  Even now after: Weapons of Mass Deception, outing of a covert CIA operative, 2 illegal wars, massive incompetence in various offices by Bush appointed officials, lying, no-bid contracts - the press feels as though they have been asking the tough questions!  Hello, what are you people smoking? 

Maybe like that “free-market” the press continues to tout - the new and improved press will recover leaner, less willing to bow to corporate handlers and “advertising”!  Maybe now the “press” will be more willing to dig after the truth, and let the chips fall where they may!  Maybe the press will learn a couple of lessons out of all of this: (1) news is not a business - a commodity that can be bought and sold for profit (2)if people can’t trust you for the truth, than at some point you’re not even good enough to wrap their fish with!

Anarcissie and Folktruther, I think your comments are on the money.

Consider TruthDig. This website functions as a “gatekeeper” by selecting the articles to be published. Articles by journalists such as Boyarsky, Sheer, Curzon Price, Paul Rogers, and the list is long, attract readers and provoke discussion. These writers earn a living writing for publication and are paid (I hope well) for their professionalism and insightful analysis.

Boyarsky and Sheer would be of no interest, to us or to our favorite publisher, Truthdig, if ever they were perceived to “pander” to their audience. Indeed it is a hallmark of good journalism that such complacency (drivel?) would never get published. Professional writers strive for independence of thought and expression. Herein lies their value. But not all of what they write is news. Boyarsky’s article is not “news”. It is, in fact, commentary.

Newspapers work the same way, except that their costs structures are very different. In the past newspapers cultivated a “stable” approach, which is to say, journalists, features writers, investigative reporters and illustrators were considered a “stable of talent” managed by a publication’s editors. By locking in the talent publishers could stop writers from publishing in the paper across town.

By driving away competition the majors shrank the talent pool. In many cities the only “news” puplication that could withstand the crushing power of the local daily was the niche market weekly. Advertisers loved the idea of an upscale, investigative weekly publication where their messages were not lost in a sea of classified ads, obituaries and sports statistics.

Perhaps the key to understanding the Fourth Estate lies in examining relations between the publisher and writing talent. It is this talent that brings readers, page views and on-line discussion. These in turn, bring premium ad rates which, in the end, improves the publisher’s ability to attract talent. And so it goes.

If we are looking for a “smoking gun” in explaining the failure of the Fourth Estate in resisting the drumbeat for war, perhaps we should consider that relaxation of media ownership rules was among the first items on the the Bush agenda in 2001. The reform was led by the FCC, then chaired by Collin Powell’s son, Michael Powell.

Editors and news directors who might otherwise have felt confident in challenging the build-up to invasion of Iraq were doubly insecure: first the sheer brutality of 9/11 foreclosed any discussion of self-examination and secondly, their jobs were on the line. The business was changing. Whatever was anybody to do about the Internet?

Anarcissie—Political groups have truthers who write what is usually sectarian truth.  Why would it not be possible to have subscription groups who would hire truthers based on broader criteria, such as yours?  Small playhouses do it, for example.

This is’t the way to becoming rich, but it may be the way to better truth.  Truth cooperatives.

The newspapers threw their credibility out the window when they behaved like lapdogs of the rich and powerful and refused to investigate 9/11, the weapons of mass destruction, the anthrax attacks, Guantanamo Bay and the massive corruption of the Bush administration and their Wall Street cronies. The only part of the paper I bother to read now is the arts section. At least in there, things that are fiction are presented as fiction. The most recent destruction of the media overall’s credibility was their scandalous coverage (if you can call it that) of Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia. Even I was shocked at the blatant disregard for the truth and the international coverup that went on and I thought after what the media helped the FBI and the Bush administration do to Bruce Ivins that I was beyond shock. Knowledge is power and I think we should all inform ourselves and not trust gatekeepers to do it for us. There’s far more accurate information on the internet and in books than you’ll ever find in a newspaper. It’s probably the case that they always lied but what’s disconcerting now is that WE KNOW THEY’RE LYING. It’s leaves a bitter taste in your mouth.

Ham-Archy:
’... AND you need to realize that some sacrifice is inevitable, just as it is for book authors, poets, composers, graphics artists, performers etc. The realists in the arts world know that they are choosing poverty when they decide to dedicate their lives to art. Stop your sorry ass whimpering or get a REAL JOB.’

There is usually plenty of money to be made in the arts.  However, as with any other business, you can’t do anything you want, you have to do something someone else who has money wants, and will pay you for.  This lets out certain kinds of free expression, except for a few celebrities.  But that doesn’t mean there’s no money.  And the Internet is providing many new opportunities to put your work before people who may pay you for it.

However, I don’t know whether this model can be applied to journalism, because whereas a work of art stands for itself, a work of journalism is supposed to represent something in the outer world, and thus veracity becomes a serious issue, especially in the light of the performance of previous media in this business.

The powers that be in US government and high finance have long since acquired and occupied the Fourth Estate.

Journalism—the muzzled, leashed, spayed, and declawed “watchdog”—has been moved into the servants’ quarters out back.

I stopped buying local newspapers & a lot of folks seldom did because TADA it is all “fluff”; NO TRUTH THERE FOLKS: kinda like the Afghanistan war that has gone on for so long with a total time of 45 minutes given to it one year: & THAT was the “so called” visit by Ms Bush to SHOW the public that the WOMEN they are “reportedly” protecting there are so wonderful wonderful wonderful now! HORSE PUCKY! The women & children of THIS country are the ones needed to be protected & instead they LIE & ship the men off (with a few women as well) to KILL THEM OFF while they are waging chemical warfare thru the food chain here even more agressively than before; & entire families are being taken out with “it’s the people’s fault” when in reality the NAZI MINDED GOV is the ROOT CAUSE behind it all. THIS whole “we are a force for good” is a LIE set up by one of the most evil men of our time Don Rumsfeld: who got asparteme which contains formaldehyde one of the most dangerous & deadly toxins to humans put into the food supply of the USA; probably if truth be told is the one who got it into BABY SHAMPOO, as well as into all the carpeting, pressed wood, clothes, paint, & everything else he could do because he is a SADIST. And they make extremely good pay doing it; NO ONE is paying ATTENTION to the fact that over 120 servicemen/women died at least & truth be told probably many more than that A WEEK during 2005; NO ONE seems to know WHY all the service men/women committed “supposedly” suicide in Oregon; no one seems to know the DEATH RATES of infants in the USA; NO ONE SEEMS TO REPORT on the things AMERICANS WANT TO KNOW. THAT is why no one watches the “media’ or news; it is all “fluff”; no one wants the “magazines” which TELL YOU LIES TELL YOU LIES TELL YOU SWEET LITTLE LIES; THIS indeed is the reason for so many newspapers going out of business. Wait til the MANDATED HDTV comes into force; THIS woman’s TVS are landing up on the porch of my Congresspersons. I am having a T V PARTY! to PROTEST & perhaps LAUNCH a TRUTH REVOLUTION!

Maani—the MSM has not provided information that is relevant, veracious, reliable and clearly written (as I thought I said) and neither does the Internet—yet.  I think such a resource might be valuable enough to induce people to pay for it, but it is hard to know how to construct it, much less advertise and sell it.  But the MSM?  I have never seen a story in the MSM about which I knew the facts which was not somewhere between half wrong and all wrong, and I invite you (and anyone else) to compare their own experience with mine; I’ll bet there will be little difference.  The newspapers, radio and television—including NPR and PBS—have been mainly distribution systems for advertising and other forms of propaganda.

However, the question that Mr. Boyarsky opened was not how to have relevant, veracious, reliable and clearly written media but how to make money as a mass-media publisher or a living as the employee of such a publisher.  That problem may have a different solution than dealing in relevance, veracity and so forth, as it certainly has in the past.

This issue is hardly unique to Journalism.
Much controvery exists regarding ‘Intellectual Property’. With the current level of communications technology it is almost impossible to protect. Yes, change is happening very rapidly. Making the adjustments and figuring out where it is all going is a major challenge. Your newspapers have been running on pure commercialism. Of course the guy paying the bills is going to call the shots. So in terms of social questions the changes may be a very good thing. Is advertising not a source of revenue on this site? And can a Web site not reach an infinitely greater audience than print media? And for much lower cost? How on earth can you conclude that the print editions are providing greater income? If printing a newspaper were so profitable, they would never have become advertising outlets. The publisher would not have evolved to become solely a commercial tool for captitalism.
There now exists what you call a ‘Window of Opportunity’. Yeah, you better figure it out. AND you need to realize that some sacrifice is inevitable, just as it is for book authors, poets, composers, graphics artists, performers etc. The realists in the arts world know that they are choosing poverty when they decide to dedicate their lives to art. Stop your sorry ass whimpering or get a REAL JOB.

Felicity- we dumped the LATimes when they dumped Scheer too.  Not because we loved Scheer so much but hated the LATimes more.  I wonder how many others did as well.  Hopefully it contributed to the wonderful, wonderful news that it is going bankrupt.

fuck’um.

The very first thing newspapers must do to stave of their demise is to reduce the number of their sports pages to one or two in any issue and let go all but one or two sports journalists. Sure, sports is a significant happening in our society but when it comes to a matter of life-or-death it is the very first section that a newspaper must curtail from wildly overblown to extremely modest. Information on sports is not “the foundation of a free society” after all. I have little or no sympathy for failing newspapers as they are now. Let them go where the dodo bird resides.

Anarcissie:

You say, “The Internet has broken all that open. Anyone can write anything and anyone can read it…One thing that is valuable is information that is relevant, veracious, reliable and clearly written.”

True: anyone can write anything.  But that doesn’t make what they write any more “relevant, veracious, reliable and clearly written” than the MSM.

The Internet may “level the playing field” in one sense, but in another all it does is create a Wild, Wild West of information.  And BECAUSE there are more voices, there will naturally be a higher percentage of IRrelevant, mendacious, UNreliable and BADLY written information.

Don’t get me wrong: the Internet is a critical tool, and one which is, at its best, a crucial alternative to the MSM.  And the MSM has definitely failed to be the “watchdog” it was meant to be, particularly when it became a tool of the corporate interests.

But methinks that the tacit (and sometimes direct) suggestion by some here that the MSM simply be eliminated is a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Peace.

I ‘fired’ the LATimes when it fired Scheer.  Every so often I get a week of free Times thrown on my driveway.  I can’t stand to even open it up remembering what it used to be and what it has become so I toss it sight unseen.

During the Depression and War, San Franciscans could choose between two morning papers, two afternoon papers and an evening paper.  (My parents took three/day.) Maybe it was the competition for subscribers, who knows, but some of those publishers put out quality papers.  Other than a few locals, the Times has no competition (A NYTimes subscription means no LA news.)  Bears thinking about.

Readily accessible news is a public good. A vibrant and viable 4th estate is a societal issue of the utmost importance.

What I consider “news” is different from what my parents who were born in the 1920s considered news. News for me is a reflection of my centers of interest. I worry that I am not getting enough diversity of opinion and views. Others worry about the financial markets and the money supply.

For my parents and many others, “news” was a matter of editorial consensus arrived at by a group of editors meeting in the morning hours on the eve of publication.

The consensus approach to news is hardly credible given the failures of the past 12 years, especially in the matter of respect for the truth, and safeguards to the public good. The consensus approach is viable as a strategy for the “pursuit of self-interest” only if one’s intersts are aligned with those of the “majority”.

Whoever would want to belong to a martyred minority?

Communities differ if only geographically. And community fortunes will rise and fall according to the success of local efforts to overcome adversity. New Orleans failed to overcome a state-wide biais against social fairness in resolving the failures of metropolitan governance. We have seen the consequences.

My own feeling is that we bought the Republican line on derregulation, the build-up to the war in Iraq and the importance of easy credit through the complacency engendered by a “consensus view”. We have at the same time turned our backs on social justice at home and abroad. Why should anyone care what the consensus view reports as news?

We threw out the last possibility for nurturing a diversified, “contrarian” view with the relaxation of the media ownership rules. By allowing greater capital concentrations than necessary for the maintenance of news services we all but killed the goose that laid the golden egg.

Today the Internet and the web are our best chance at restoring diversity and nurturing individual centers of interest. I’m afraid the daily newspaper with its consensus approach is going to have to do a much better job of reporting public opinion. Maybe this way we can avoid a Third Iraqi war… Heaven help us!

In order to make money from a product it is necessary not only to produce it but to create and maintain a scarcity of it.  If you look back to the rise of the print media in the 17th and 18th centuries you’ll see that while it was relatively easy for a person of modest means to get something printed, it was very hard to make money from it, especially from such refined literary exercises as news reporting or fiction.  However, during the 19th and 20th centuries, big corporations were gradually able to drive small-timers out of business, and concentrate print journalism (and many other forms of information production and distribution) completely under their control.  From many speaking to many we went back to a few speaking to many and deriving significant profit and power from doing so.  Radio and television didn’t really change the few-to-many paradigm, which enables the critically necessary creation of scarcity.

The Internet has broken all that open.  Anyone can write anything and anyone can read it.  To restore profit and power to an elite class (publishers) and their favored servants (reporters, authors, flacks, yes men, and so on) it will be necessary to somehow get centralized corporate control of it.  Whether that can be accomplished is as yet an unanswered question.  Large corporations are striving mightily to do so, but it may be a case of the Devil raging because his time is short.  On the other hand, they did succeed with the print media, which at one time was almost as diffuse as the Internet.

One thing that is valuable is information that is relevant, veracious, reliable, and clearly written.  This kind of information seems to be naturally scarce; a person or group could charge something for it and perhaps make a living.  But this is a product the mainstream media seem to know nothing about, as witness the lying, obfuscation and ignorance shown about the most important issues of the last decade (and more), such as Iraq or the market bubbles, to say nothing of more difficult and esoteric matters like science, technology, art and history.  Clearly, not only a new model of monetizing writing, but a new kind of product, begs for development.

Newspapers, watchdogs? Surely you jest. Not one fish wrapper you mentioned is/was a watchdog. Even during the days of Mike Royko the Chicago Tribune was a whore paper.The famed Washington Post was a disgrace for collaborating with every President. Will I miss the newspapers? Maybe, there are a few columnists I enjoy, but for news I do better with the Internet.
Newspapers have fallen to the level of TV news..there is no news, people, just spins. NPR leads the way in my area for news and it ain’t much.
For the brain-dead there is always Rush.

Amazes me how some ‘journalist’ are ready to condemn the Big 3 for failing to serve the US citizens needs in that industry, but never admit how MSM Failed US when it came to reporting facts before we were misled into invading Iraq.
Seems now adays there should be a label attached to every newspaper and TV/Cable station designating whether it is a Repub or Dem affiliate.Each side is given their talking points and misrepresentation to present to the public As “News” Or “Fact”.
Whens the last time a newspaper did any indepth investigation into ANYTHING? Doesn’t FREE Press mean it is not beholden to any Politcal Party or industry, but only to the People.
When Karl Rove is given a pulpit to continue his propaganda, All objectiviity (thus usefulness) of such mediums have been destroyed.
Newspapers have fallen into the same arrogant mindset as cable shows…Thinking Americans have not already figured out when you are lying.
We Knew we were not attcked for ‘Our Freedoms’ on 9/11- one need only review what was targeted (and what was not), but you all kept beating that hollow drum.When Saddam was implicated, WE already knew it was just an oil land grab, but the MSM kept up the Pom Pom Cheering. Infact many helped proliferate the idea of being ‘UnAmerican’ if you did not blindly support Bush’s agenda.Loved to belittle ‘Tin hats’ and ‘conspiracy Theorists’ as mentally unbalanced and UnPatriotic. You all Never Looked for the Story, never bothered to investigate opposing views or concerns. So we went somewhere Else. Soemwhere many voices could be heard, debated and discussed. Most of your ‘Journalist’ have been proven to have been on the take the entire time.
Teh other Stake in your heart has been the onesidedness in and of itself. Packed full of articles with obvious bias, Your editors allow only a few “letters to the Editor’ to be printed- those of course which they approve of. This is where the Internet, esp the Blogoshpere,Kicks you ass. For every One article written there are multitudes of ‘Letters to the Editor’ printed in response. WE get to tell you when you are ‘dead on’ and when you are full of shit. This is the Public Forum no one- sided media can compete with, the innate Desire (and Right) for Americans to voice their Opinions. Print and TV has had the luxury of never being challenged on their reporting or coverage. The internet has just provided US the avenue to do so.We have the opportunity to respond, and if our questions and concerns aren’t being addressed by one Website, we go to the next.
Americans are far more Curious,engaged and Intelligent than MSM thinks or cares to admit.
We are no longer waiting with Baited breath for newspapers or ‘news’ channels to tel US what is happening or what is important..We already Know, we’ve grown tired of waitng for you all to catch up. always a Day late & a dollar short.
Heres an example…Dick Cheney has been in EVERY REpug Admin since Nixon. Why does W’s Delusions of Granduer (Kingship) sound so much like Nixons? why has the last 40 yrs been a death roll for our rights, freedoms, International standing and economic livlihood?
Come On you guys haven’t bothered to follow the neon flashing Beacons ‘Dots’ from the Nixon Regime to the W Regime…How can you tell me you have missed the Commonality (and criminality) of Cheney,Rummy & Wolfie? Conspiratorial Treason? Woodward & Berstien brought down Nixon , but you can’t find a thing about W’s admin’s crimes…You haven’t tried.Stop Regurgitating and tell US something NEW! Print needs to find their balls (and their own brains)

The vast majority of journalists are like the vast majority of lawyers: they perform no useful social function.  If anything, their “contribution” to society is negative.  The sooner both categories are obliged to confront this, the sooner they’ll consider themselves obliged to find something useful to do. 

There is a watchdog function in any society.  Without it, a society will decay and eventually disappear.  But if a society considers that much of the responsibility for this function can be relegated to one of more groups, instead of being spread widely throughout the population, that society will continue on the route ours is on. 

Modern society requires a major re-organisation.

@ Bill Boyarsky;

I liked what you said and I hope your summary is correct.  Information; good, accurate, timely information is the foundation of a free society.  Hopefully we are emerging back into the light of day after 8 years of darkness.