America Dodged A Bullet Despite A Negligent Press
Last edited Tue Dec 11, 2012, 11:44 PM - Edit history (1)
Obamacare has death panels. President Obama was born in Kenya. Taxing the top 2% will kill jobs. The Rich are the job creators. Obamacare throws grandma off the cliff. Obamacare increases the deficit. President Obama removed the work requirement from the food stamp program.
The previous statements are all provably false. There needed to be no further debate on their veracity. It is fact that water boils at 100 degrees centigrade at sea level. There is no other side to that fact and as such it warrants no further debate. Attempting to entertain an “alchemist” questioning the validity of the boiling point of water would serve no useful purpose to society. In fact it would give the fallacy of water not boiling at 100 degrees centigrade at sea level the air of plausibility.
The current state of the press, the mainstream media, is described accurately if not sufficiently critical of in Dan Froomkin’s blog post at The Huffington Post titled “How the Mainstream Press Bungled the Single Biggest Story of the 2012 Campaign”.
Froomkin states:
But according to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.
Mann and Ornstein are two longtime centrist Washington fixtures who earlier this year dramatically rejected the strictures of false equivalency that bind so much of the capital's media elite and publicly concluded that GOP leaders have become "ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."
The 2012 campaign further proved their point, they both said in recent interviews. It also exposed how fabulists and liars can exploit the elite media's fear of being seen as taking sides.
The misinformation that the media have been complicit in making part of the political debate did not start with the 2012 election or with the election of President Obama. It has been ongoing at least since the 1980 elections. In the primaries between George HW Bush and Ronald Reagan, the press was derelict by giving plausibility to Reagan’s supply side economic policies which Bushed coined as voodoo economics. The media was again derelict in not examining the inconsistency of the pairing of Reagan/Bush. This dereliction made Reagan/Bush plausible. Their win created the systematic decline of the middle class because the core of their policies was maintained.
Inasmuch as there is correlation between the decline of the middle class relative to the level of supply side policies in effect, the press has continued to give supply side credence even as it disregards economists like Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Richard Wolff, whose pronouncement match the realities of what actually occurred in the economy.
It is the purpose of the press to be the unbiased source of information for the citizenry to ensure that the government is transparent. While politicians controlled by corporate moneyed interest are responsible for the failure of government, it is the press that has allowed it to happen by keeping the citizenry misinformed and uninformed. This likely occurs either from an attempt to appear unbiased or simply for the sake of financial survival. After-all, a free press dependent on revenues from corporations whose goal is to control government, cannot be a free press.
The paradigm shift of a less centralized media is the only solution to a negligent mainstream media. Luckily with this election that realization is starting to bear fruit. Inasmuch as corporations have spent an inordinate amount of money to influence the 2012 election, alternative message delivery played a strong role in preventing fallacies from both the mainstream media and corporate advertising to take significant effect. America dodged a bullet by having an open Internet where alternate messaging could be disseminated. Going forward it is imperative that one fight to keep this medium open. Its success may be its biggest danger.
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it was a time when the Shock Doctrine was becoming all too painfully clear. And I agree, what a tool. Fortunately Copps is still there, not sure who else is on that panel, guess I need to have a look.
freswest. Has this Powell Manifesto every been an OP? If it has, I missed it. (And I do miss a lot these days.) And if it has, it needs to be OPed over and over and over again until everyone on DU has read it. From top to bottom.
What sticks out is the fact that they not only implemented it, but have turned into what this manifesto attacked!
tucked deep into the pockets of the ownership class. 
As another poster so aptly points out, the media presents whatever will allow them to sell more advertising. And they can't afford to upset powerful corporate apple carts.
Cable t.v. was supposed to be an answer to that: no advertising, and subscriber supported.
Snort...we can see how long that lasted. 
It is very frightening to think of the ownership class taking over the 'net. Yikes. 
it also is negligent in under-reporting LW concerns, i.e., every environmental and peace action, labor rights and the rise of the militarized police/prison-industrial complex. Where's the progressive balance to those reports? Why are we the nutcases who can't be part of the national conversation while teabaggers are slashing our schools and communities fighting for corporate masters who don't give a shit about regular people?
Effing spot on! [URL=http://www.sherv.net/dancing.banana.warrior-emoticon-3184.html][IMG]
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but we're still far from "safety" IMHO and the press is still working hard with the Republicans on getting those Social Security/Medicare cuts they are lusting over. 
... on my x-mas list...
Then
[font size=7]BOHICA[/font]
Even MORE Media Consolidation scheduled before Christmas.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021896902
And THIS round of Consolidation is being pushed by President Obama's close personal friend,
Julius Genachowski, appointed by the President to Chair the FCC in 2009.
You will know them by their WORKS,
not by their rhetoric, promises, or excuses.
[font size=5 color=green]Solidarity99![/font][font size=2 color=green]
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Well Duh 
The fact is, for all the people who say "duh interweb killed journalism", the truth is, the media companies were already buying souls of journalists, and destroying those they could not buy off. It is only because the internet gave space to those THAT DID NOT HAVE A PROFIT MOTIVE that any truth was presented. Anyone that could be choked out, even PBS, was compromised. The reason people abandoned newspapers and magazines so quick is that they knew the talking heads were either already on the payroll or had a gun to their head.
Of course the powers that be know this..after all, why is the only "liberal" network a branch of Microsoft? Ever notice that MSNBC offers liberals candy like Rachel, but always gives the Joe Scab time as well? I may love Rachel, but I have no illusion about the fact that MSNBC is the network set up as the Diet brand liberalism, the people that get listened to before the hard leftists do. Current is only free because for the moment, the owners do not care about money as much, and that can always change. Of course, the same people that talk about Obama as if he is some Islamic plot are the same people who let Murdoch and the Saudis own Fox.
The point is, outside the internet, all media is compromised. Even on the internet, there are enough cranks and goons that it becomes hard to hear genuine voices. Keep in mind, the internet is under full assault from both left and right: from paid activists in their mother's basements sending out GOP talking points, to certain folks at the UN that really do not care that the Chinese and other nations really want to choke out any potential "Arab Spring" style actions where even the humble Twitter played a helpful role. We have to keep the internet free, because the minute it stops bring free, then the media will no longer to worry that someone can expose the truth they tried so hard to ignore or outright bury!
