“PBS pulls ads from Harper’s Magazine after critical essay,” by PBS's own Bill Moyers
That “critical essay” had PBS’s own Bill Moyers say, “Our Washington coverage, by design or not, serves up ‘news’ the way the butler serves tea on Downton Abbey, so as not to disturb the master class.” He knows well the master class; it’s as small as Downton Abbey, but vastly more powerful
Eric Zuesse
1: The ugly realities are covered up, not covered; here’s an example of what you don’t see in the regime’s media about the people whom Americans’ tax dollars are bombing and killing:
2: The great investigative journalist John Pilger discusses the systematic truth-suppression:
http://johnpilger.com/articles/war-by-media-and-the-triumph-of-propaganda
3: The great investigative journalist Robert Parry’s latest take-down of America’s press is here:
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/06/02/neocon-fugitive-given-ukraine-province/
4: As usual, a great journalist gets fired for being too honest:
http://yournewswire.com/cnn-journalist-governments-pay-us-to-fake-stories-shocking-expose/
CONCLUSION:
A shared feature of all of those news-reports, about news-suppression in the United States, is: they all concern foreign affairs; not a one of them concerns domestic matters, such as, for example, the Wall Street bailouts — even though those issues are also highly sanitized in the U.S. press. What the U.S. regime is doing abroad is even more horrible than that. As you can see from the above few examples: it’s not reportable (except by a very few of the small American news-media and on some foreign news-media that are independent of U.S. control).
In other words: U.S. ‘news’ media are actually propaganda-media.....................................................................
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/06/western-news-media-as-tyrannys-propagandists-hiding-reality.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
the report clearly showed that the IRS wasn't targeting conservatives - multiple groups were being investigated, and the report stated that only conservative groups were looked at because the elected official who asked for the investigation only asked that the treatment of conservative groups was looked at. That was in the report, which was only 18 pages long. Every news organization missed that, every liberal news outlet missed that, every blogger missed that. When it was pointed out on this board, most people dismissed it because it wasn't being reported in the news - even though it was directly from the report the news was based on.
(some groups managed to figure this out a few weeks later; they could have figured it out at the start by reading the 18 page report instead of just pontificating on it)
Fall of Ramadi - the media has recently gone nuts about that, no? But if you take a look at this map from The Economist a year ago, you'll see they already had Ramadi colored in as ISIS territory. Oh, if you read the side blurb it's because that's territory where controlled by ISIS, contested, or with some ISIS presence. Of course you've seen the reaction people have to that map (posts here are just one example) - "my god, ISIS is sweeping through the country and is about to surround Baghdad for the killing blow!"
Another favorite in the media is "Militant group is only a 2 hours drive from the capital of the country!"-type reporting. The usually neglect to mention that a two hours drive is the middle of the desert or the middle of a contested region controlled by a different sect. Mali and Irbil were too good example of this.
I've tried to spread the word when I can, but honestly, people don't seem to be that interested in narratives that differ from the mainstream news - even though the mainstream news has been shown to be terrible time and time again. When I throw stuff up on a blog, posts of the type "You'll never guess what Santorum said!" with three sentences got a ton more votes that well researched debunking of false news narratives. You can see the same here - informative posts sink quickly, unsubstantiated attacks ("Some DUers seem happy to support Nazis if that means blah blah blah"
get to 300+ posts pretty quickly.
The corrupted state of the media is the right wings biggest weapon.
And for them to have RW memes coming from the sources they falsely label as "left" is perhaps their greatest accomplishment.
PBS Self-Destructs
And what it means for viewers like you
By Eugenia Williamson
Last October, I watched as a passel of activists convened in front of WGBH, Boston’s public-television station. There were about three dozen of them on the concrete forecourt, many in matching T-shirts layered against the chill, but one middle-aged man wore a ministerial robe and clerical collar. Another activist of uncertain gender waved at passersby from the innards of an Elmo costume, which looked as though it had made one too many trips to the dry cleaners. WGBH employees, as well as cameramen and reporters on hand to cover the protest, weaved through the crowd.
The grassroots climate-change group Forecast the Facts had organized the rally as an attempt to expel David Koch from the station’s board of trustees. The members had collected and printed out 120,000 digital signatures and placed them in boxes, which they planned to present at that afternoon’s board meeting. (The trustees had already agreed to take delivery.) In the interim, they made brief speeches, mostly for the benefit of the reporters, since the studio’s location overlooking the Massachusetts Turnpike precluded much in the way of foot traffic.
(the rest of the article is behind a pay wall)
The bold is my highlighting of the story
link: http://harpers.org/archive/2014/10/pbs-self-destructs/
PBS pulls ads from Harper’s Magazine after critical essay Piece argues public broadcaster has fallen under the sway of political influence and outside money
After a sales representative at Harper’s Magazine received a phone call on September 18 from a disgruntled advertiser, the subject of a critical story printed the week before, Publisher John R. MacArthur wasn’t surprised that it decided to pull ads from subsequent issues. But he was shocked by who that advertiser was: PBS, the public broadcaster famous for Big Bird and Ken Burns’ epic historical documentaries.
“Our readers are their viewers, which is why we thought it was an important story,” MacArthur said, referring to an essay in the October issue, “PBS Self-Destructs,” which argues that corporate and political influence increasingly cloud the network’s programming. “We’re part of the same family. So to have done such a petty thing does make me suspicious.”
Pulling advertisements is an age-old tactic for businesses facing media criticism to seek retribution. But in the case of PBS, which exists in part as a way to limit commercial influence on educational television, doing so just feeds into writer Eugenia Williamson’s thesis — that the idealistic, Great Society-era initiative often behaves more like a corporate or political organism. [Disclosure: Williamson occasionally writes for CJR, too.] The broadcaster distributed a peculiarly labeled list of “talking points,” first obtained by Current.org, for station managers to respond to the criticism. And it will publish a letter to the editor in the November issue of Harper’s, which will not feature any PBS ads.
PBS Distribution, the network’s marketing subsidiary sometimes known as PBSd, ran a full-page spot hawking box sets of Burns’ latest saga, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, in the September issue of the magazine. But after the October edition was delivered to subscribers and posted online on September 11, MacArthur said, PBSd pulled ads from the magazine’s November and December issues. Citing an insertion order for the pair of ads, the publisher added that PBSd would have paid $6,000 for the former and nothing for the latter — part of a buy two, get one free deal.
More at the link: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/pbs_pulls_ads_from_harpers_mag.php?page=all
