Reply #207: It's not lack of interest...

[warren pease]

It's the fact that Americans don't look outside their borders or their narrow frames of reference for their news. So the usual disinformation purveyors get to spew the same old garbage with little or no criticism from readers and viewers. And when more than 90 percent of Americans say they get all or most of their "news" from TV, and when media consolidation has reduced TV's corporate voices to five, nobody's going to get much in the way of a typical BBC newscast -- or what's found on hundreds of internet news and information sites around the world.

Then there's the purpose of US media. Once so vital to the health of a functional democracy that it's the only business mentioned in the Constitution, the so-called "free press" has completely abandoned its role as government watchdog and scourge of the corrupt in favor of pure commercialism dedicated to delivering its consumers (us) to its advertisers. Sponsors hate controversy and so do corporate execs, so they're acting in perfect harmony and pursuing their mutual objectives by spiking any story that might cause a light to click on, or an unorthodox idea to hatch or an independent thought to emerge. So the objectives of high-level producers and editors, their corporate overlords and their advertisers dovetail perfectly and add up to a near-total blackout on political controversy.

Ultimately, though, it's marching orders from their corporate masters at GE, Viacom, CBS, Disney, TimeWarner and News Corp that make mass media the desert wasteland it is today. They hate change like normal people hate the flu, and they hire people into senior decision-making positions who are just like them. So you get a monolithic group of senior managers at the top of the food chain who act as filters, straining out the nutritious bits of information and only letting through a kind of tepid, unsatisfying thin gruel.

They're the same bunch of status quo apologists who marginalized Kucinich, and now Edwards. Who ignore global climate change. Who report uncritically on the recent incident in the Straits of Hormuz as if it actually happened. Who call Iraq a "war" and an escalation a "surge." Who won't touch grand theft election (2 counts). Who treat Dana Perino as a functional human.

The ones who run faux "exposes" on the private lives of D-class celebrities, but won't touch an honest story comparing the health care systems of the US and Canada. Who dutifully report on everything Bushie says and completely ignore context or fact checking. Who let themselves be "embedded" so that the propaganda stream could flow unimpeded by independent analysis. Who refuse to report on the numbers of US troop deaths, or those of Iraqi civilians. Who even obeyed KKKarl Rove when he forbade them to film coffins returning from Iraq. Who forgot about Pat Tillman the second the white house told them to. Who treat Twitany as news and the death of the republic as a sidebar.

You know... those guys. And how's the hunt for the anthrax going, eh? Got that herd of investigative reporters tracking down clues, or are they too busy staking out Paris' house to see if she runs into anything while navigating the driveway?


Ahhh.... that feels better. Now I'm awake.


wp