Three Things Every American Should Know About Corporate McPravda

[Octafish]

Professional Liar by susan m hinckley.

The official voice of the Republikkkon Party also seems the official voice of Big Media:

ABC and the rise of Rush Limbaugh

The other thing the great Carl Bernstein reported should've got him another Pulitzer:

The CIA and the Media

His old paper still hits a homer on occasion, most recently on how the Government has privatized Secret Government:

Top Secret America: A Hidden World.

Media were pretty much silent about that series, too. And that is why our nation creeps, literally and figuratively, rightward.

PS: This post really has four things everyone should know about Corporate McPravda.

[Octafish]

1. Something Everyone Should Know That Is Never Mentioned by Corporate McPravda

Ben Bagdikian warned us.

The safest method of reporting news was to reproduce the words of authority figures, and in the nature of public relations most authority figures issue a high quotient of imprecise and self-serving declarations. Physical crime, natural disasters, and accidents were politically safe, which accounts for the peculiar American news habit of reporting remote accidents regardless of their relevance to the audience. News became more official and establishmentarian.

Fear, anyone?

[blm]

7. they did it behind their big smokecloud lie 'liberal media' so working class would welcome fascist

takeover of the country's newsmedia.

[Scuba]

2. Explains the wholesale assualt on "open internet" or whatever it called.

[Octafish]

3. Free and Open Internet Means Democracy

The Internet and Democracy Project

While across the Quad we have:

Obama confidant's spine-chilling proposal

We got to stand up, while we still can.

[Scuba]

8. Yes. Open web and anonymous free speech need to be rolled into one issue for the left to tackle.

[unkachuck]

4. K&R....n/t

[Octafish]

5. GIGO

Bagdikian observed:

Television entrepreneurs found from the beginning that they had to maintain maximum attention among a wide disparity of consumers. Far more than in print, TV presentations-in regular entertainment, public affairs, news, or commercials- could not dwell too long on any one subject, and they could not be socially or politically controversial. Television found the answer early in its history. It was the twin sovereigns of attention-getting in history-sex and violence. Sex had to be used obliquely, given the national public morality, so it permeated television by innuendo, in themes of entertainment, in selection of actresses and actors, in double meanings in commercials, and in sophisticated appeals to the subconscious. Violence was easier to stress, given the prevalence of crime as a standard ingredient in printed news and the place of guns and violence in the mythology of the country. Violence could be politically safe in programs of cops and robbers, in which cops won by violence, or spy dramas, in which selected foreign enemies were defeated by violence.

Nothing in the history of public complaints has lessened the combined incidence of sex and violence. Some social scientists, as well as the Surgeon General of the United States, have measured the high incidence and concrete social consequences of sex and violence on television. If television producers momentarily reduce one in the face of organized criticism, they raise the level of the other.

The social and psychological costs of these television twins are incalculable. The Surgeon General's studies have shown that television violence increases actual violence and acceptance of violence in children. Other studies have shown that children who watch a great deal of television are more cynical than are children who watch less television. The television commercial is the most expensive and highly skilled artifact in American society, using the most polished producers, actors, and technical reproduction and spending more for the creation and transmission of a series of thirty-second commercials than some school districts spend to educate children for a year. The artful construction of commercials has created thirty seconds as a basic attention unit, ideal for selling marginal goods but with negative psychological and intellectual consequences for the average American child, who, the statistics show,' watches television for twice as many hours as he or she attends school.

It is not simple moral perversity that keeps sex and violence on the air and serious subjects off. It is television executives' desire to maintain as large an audience as possible for as long as possible for the purpose of selling goods and services.
The same persistence, with more subtlety, has characterized emotional manipulation in television commercials. Commercials, too, have been immune to a variety of serious objections from consumer agencies, social critics, and parents. Cynical manipulation in commercials, like that in television programming generally, comes not from capricious malice but from the power of annual profit statements for both the corporations that advertise and the corporations that own the media.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media/DemoMedia_Bagdikian.html

A nation cannot progress with intellectual zombies for a citizenry led by sociopathic zeroes. Thanks, unkachuck, for giving a damn.

[Scuba]

9. If those that watch the most TV are the most cynical, perhaps it's not so bad. n/t

[unkachuck]

11. thank you....n/t

[Gabi Hayes]

12. I'm sure 3d world travelers like robert mcchesney and rick hertsgaard

consider bagdikian to be a worthy predecessor

their contributions to the site are also quite astute, quite relevant

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/McChesney/RichMedia_PoorDemocracy.html

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/On_Bended_Knee.html

oh, let's toss in Walter Karp, too, though he's closer to Bagdikian's age (dead, actually)

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Walter_Karp/Liberty_Under_Siege.html

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE CARTER PRESIDENCY BY THE DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS

>>>>>this is mine>>>>>>he mentions the media's role, as well>>>>>>>>

"I can get to your constituents faster than you can by going on television," Carter reportedly warns the visiting party leaders. A dire threat indeed, an empty bluff, never to be carried out, but already necessary, or the first hostile shots have already been fired. Nine days after the election <1976>-Veterans' Day-
the Committee on the Present Danger makes its first public appearance with a declaration of war against Carter's hopes for arms control and improved relations with the Soviet Union. "The principal threat to our nation, to world peace and to the cause of human freedom," goes the martial declaration, "is the Soviet drive for dominance based on an unprecedented military buildup"-in fact, a 3 percent average increase yearly since 1970, 2 percent since 1974, but America's "will"-and America's oligarchy can be strengthened only by "massive understandable challenge."

The committee members, it is said, form a "who's who of the Democratic Party establishment." Chairman and founder is Eugene Rostow, Lyndon Johnson's Under Secretary of State, head of the foreign-policy task force of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, some twenty of whose members have become Present Dangerists. "We started over, but with the same people and the same ideas," explains Rostow. To discredit the democratic reforms in 1972; to discredit détente in 1976. The same "ideas" indeed: rule by the few, oligarchy restored, one way or another. Cochairman of the Present Danger is Lane Kirkland, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO and "heir apparent" to its president, eighty-three-year-old George Meany; heir to the votes of 14.5 million powerless union members; heir to trade unionism's unswerving devotion to the Democratic machine and the endless Cold War; oligarchy revived, one way or another.

Chief counsel of the Present Danger is Max Kampelman, once one of the chief political advisers to Hubert Humphrey, now gravely concerned, among other worries, over the excessive "power of the press." The nine-man executive committee includes Dean Rusk, Secretary of State under Kennedy and Johnson, one of the first American officials to argue that a President's authority as Commander-in-Chief of U.S. forces allows him to make war at will. What loathing of liberty burns in these hearts! 'What scant love of truth! Chairman of the committee's "policy studies" is Paul Nitze, former Deputy Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, arms control negotiator for Nixon, who quit in "disgust" in June 1974, now a member of Team B, the tumorous appendix to the CIA. Nitze has lived for twenty-five years in an atmosphere of ever-present danger: principal author in 1950 of a momentous State Department warning to President Truman that unless the U.S. embarked at once on the largest military buildup in its peacetime history, the Soviet Union would launch its drive for world conquest around 1 956-Nitze's "year of maximum danger"; principal concocter of the fictitious "missile gap" in 1957; principal author in 1972 of the newest present-danger: Allied "perception" of Soviet nuclear superiority will bind them in terror to the Soviet will unless the U.S. demonstrates its "will and resolve" with a renewed race for nuclear supremacy.


The board of directors of the Present Danger includes a large and varied collocation of trade union leaders, bankers, financial speculators and retired officials of both parties: John Connally; William Casey; Sol Chaikin, president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union; and Richard Mellon Scaife, generous supporter of right-wing causes. Also several future "neoconservatives" from the Democratic Majority: Norman Podhoretz; his wife, Midge Decter; Seymour Martin Lipset, the Stanford University political scientist who demonstrated in a 1970 work that the greatest menace to political liberty in America is its exercise by ordinary people. And Jeane Kirkpatrick, that busy tongue of Hydra-headed oligarchy, now convinced that the millions of Democratic primary voters who form a pernicious "elite" have gone one step further into evil and now generate a spirit of appeasement, and even, says colleague Podhoretz some months hence, a "culture of appeasement."

Appeasement, in fact, is the leading "idea" of the Present Dangerists. "We are living in a prewar and not a post-war world," says Rostow. "Our posture today is comparable to that of Britain, France and the United States during the Thirties. Whether we are the Rhineland or the Munich watershed remains to be seen." The Soviet Union is Hitler's Germany on the verge of launching a war; the United States, like pre-war Britain, is stewing in fear; détente is cowardly appeasement, Senator Jackson is a second Churchill crying in the wilderness (or so readers of Commentary are told). It remains only to demonstrate-such is the Present Danger's grand object-that Prime Minister Chamberlain, weak, self-deluded appeaser of Hitler, who returned from Munich in 1938 announcing "peace in our time," has been reborn as-Jimmy Carter. The e opening salvo has been fired.


...................

that book made me madder than just about anything this side of The Hunting of the President, cause it was his own party theat did him in, along with his own lack of experience at the national level.

never forget what should have been the crown in a very successful presidency: his Energy Speech, given in 1977, which was amazingly prescient. that was one of the major motivating factors in moving everybody in power against carter. energy independence, along with campaign funding reform, were by FAR the most important goals of his presidency

read the speech. it's very short, and almost totally prescient (except the paragraph about coal; but, back then, who really knew?)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_energy.html

[EFerrari]

6. K&R

[Initech]

10. There's a lot of great info in this link here:

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/LiberalFAQ.htm#Backliberalmedia

Oh and fuck the CIA. Seriously.

[G_j]

13. K&R

[Dawson Leery]

14. .

[bobthedrummer]

15. kick