WITH 'NO EXCUSES' NEO-LIBERALISM CORPORATIONS OPENLY FLEECE CITIZENS WITH THE HELP OF YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS. TV MEDIA IS FILLED WITH BUSINESSES READY TO TAKE YOU. WHEN YOU HAVE A FUNCTIONING STATES ATTORNEY OFFICE AS MARYLAND DOES NOT---YOUR PUBLIC JUSTICE AGENCIES FIND AND GET RID OF THESE BUSINESSES BEFORE THEY GET YOU.
Remember, there are G-20 industrialized nations representing the developed world so the US ranking below places the US in second world and close to third world ranking.
Ranking of United States press freedom
Freedom House, an independent watch-dog organization, ranked the United States 30th out of 197 countries in terms of press freedom.[19] The report lauded the constitutional protections afforded American journalists, but criticized authorities for placing undue limits on investigative reporting in the name of national security. Freedom House awards countries a score out of 100, with 0 representing most free and 100 representing least free. The score is broken down into three, separately weighted, categories: legal (out of 30), political (out of 40), and economic (out of 30) environments. The United States scored a 6, 10, and 5 respectively. This gave it a cumulative score of 21.[20]
As of February 12, 2014, the United States is ranked 46th in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index.[21] This is a measure of freedom available to the press, encompassing areas such as government censorship, and not indicative of the quality of journalism. There was a fall from 20th in 2010 to 42nd in 2012, which was attributed to arrests of journalists covering the Occupy movement.[22]
For 2012, Finland and Norway tied for 1st worldwide. Canada ranked 10th, Germany tied 17th with Jamaica, and Japan tied 22nd with Suriname. The UK ranked 28th, Australia 30th, and France 38th.
Extraterritorial regions of the US ranked 57th.
I showed yesterday that Obama pretended to protect net neutrality because the 2016 election is coming and Clinton neo-liberals want to give the impression someone is working for labor and justice. TPP would negate net neutrality as Obama tries to Fast Track it. Also, I showed how Baltimore pols running as Democrats are the source of much of the handing of state utilities to ever more consolidation and deregulation----knowing this will create the costs to ratepayers and loss of vital products like energy, water, and communications to the working class and poor. THIS IS HOW YOU KNOW YOU DO NOT HAVE A DEMOCRAT ! All of Baltimore's pols are neo-conservatives working for Johns Hopkins.
The American people know almost nothing about public policy and civics in their own towns and cities because people are too busy watching celebrity gossip ----progressive liberals had local shows filled with public debate on politics from all points of view. It is painful to watch Baltimore's morning and weekend programs offering nothing of value. I heard one TV commentator say----LET THEM WATCH CRIME SHOWS ALL DAY AND INDEED----THAT IS WHAT WE SEE MOST.
THAT IS THEIR JOB---FILLING AIRSPACE WITH NOTHING THAT SAYS----WAKE UP----A TOTALITARIAN TAKEOVER OF AMERICA IS HAPPENING.
Fighting Media Consolidation
Who owns the media has a huge impact on the stories that get covered in our communities.
Today absentee corporations own more and more of our media. Focused only on the bottom line, they are cutting journalists, gutting newsrooms and replacing meaningful debate with celebrity gossip and junk news. And many of these corporations are dodging the Federal Communications Commission’s ownership rules to snap up more outlets and create media monopolies in markets throughout the country.
When the last two largest telecommunications corporations in the US merge----Americans will have the equivalent of North Korean state media---no free press or Democratic free speech. That is to where Baltimore pols with Martin O'Malley are heading with this consolidation and monopoly-building in Maryland. What kind of media do you get when corporations control all content? In Baltimore it is one paid infomercial after another and one advertisement geared to defraud the citizens at every turn. If you have Democrats in office you would have a states attorney's office that monitored these media commercials to protect citizens from fraud----if you have neo-cons and/or Clinton neo-liberals you have no protection and the government thinking this fraud is a job-creator. Blanketing every public space and air wave with corporate commercials.
You know the economic crash is right around the corner when national and local media are filled with these same kinds of subprime mortgage loans as in 2008----no credit check Veterans Mortgage refinance----100% of the value of your house. Below is the top advertiser in Baltimore all geared to defraud veterans just before the economic crash. Infomercials and talk shows make Americans the most uninformed citizens in the developed world and it happens because Clinton neo-liberals have dismantled public education and civics and humanities from our schools and media.
QUALITY PROGRAMMING COURTESY OF NAKED NEO-LIBERALISM.
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A talk show or chat show (as it is known in the UK) is a television programming or radio programming genre in which one person (or group of people) discusses various topics put forth by a talk show host.[1]
Usually, guests consist of a group of people who are learned or who have great experience in relation to whatever issue is being discussed on the show for that episode. Other times, a single guest discusses their work or area of expertise with a host or co-hosts.
Chris Hedges on ‘The Death and Life of American Journalism’
Posted on Feb 26, 2010
By Chris Hedges
We are shedding, with the decline and death of many newspapers, thousands of reporters and editors, based in the culture of researched and verifiable fact, who monitored city councils, police departments, mayor’s offices, courts and state legislators to prevent egregious abuse and corruption. And we are also, even more ominously, losing the meticulous skills of reporting, editing, fact-checking and investigating that make daily information trustworthy. The decline of print has severed a connection with a reality-based culture, one in which we attempt to make fact the foundation for opinion and debate, and replaced it with a culture in which facts, opinions, lies and fantasy are interchangeable. As news has been overtaken by gossip, the hollowness of celebrity culture and carefully staged pseudo-events, along with the hysteria and drama that dominate much of the airwaves, our civil and political discourse has been contaminated by propaganda and entertainment masquerading as news. And the ratings of high-octane propaganda outlets such as Fox News, as well as the collapse of the newspaper industry, prove it.
Corporations, which have hijacked the state, are delighted with the demise of journalism. And the mass communications systems they control pump out endless streams of gossip, trivia and filth in lieu of news. But news, which costs money and takes talent to produce, is dying not only because citizens are migrating to the Internet and corporations are no longer using newsprint to advertise, but because in an age of profound culture decline the masses prefer to be entertained rather than informed. We no longer value the culture or journalism, as we no longer value classical theater or great books, and this devaluation means the general public is not inclined to pay for it. Journalists, like artists, are expected to provide their work free—this is the idea behind websites like The Huffington Post—and the only people who receive adequate compensation in our society are those skilled in the art of manipulation. Money flows to advertising rather than to art or journalism because manipulation is more highly valued than truth or beauty. Journalism, like culture, in America has become advertising.
Certainly, as the authors point out, the faux objectivity and neutrality of the traditional news industry hastened the cultural irrelevance of traditional news gathering. The narrowing of debates within the press to the minor differences among the power elite had a debilitating effect on news. The structure of “objectivity” works far better when there are powerful social movements, such as the civil rights movement, that provide an actual alternative and demand a voice. But without these movements the press functions as courtiers in the corridors of power. It dutifully reports the Democratic and Republic positions, a condition that imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. The two parties are in fundamental agreement about the underlying economic, political and military structures which are largely responsible for our decline. The power elites do not question the permanent war economy, unfettered capitalism and the rise of the security state, and voices that do are, in effect, censored out of the commercial press because they have no power base. This has left most traditional reporters without a moral core and trapped in a ridiculous court pantomime that has damaged their content as much as the loss of advertising and the rise of the Internet. The lie told by newspapers and traditional news is the lie of omission, which is not as bad as the outright lies told on Fox News, but in the end it is still a lie. Our power elite are bankrupt, and the press, tethered to the elite, is as bankrupt as those it covers.
“The real problem with professional journalism becomes evident when political elites do not debate an issue and march in virtual lockstep,” the authors write. “In such a case professional journalism is, at best, ineffectual, and, at worst, propagandistic. This has often been the case in U.S. foreign policy, where both parties are beholden to an enormous global military complex, and accept the right of the United States, and the United States alone, to invade countries when it suits U.S. interests. In matters of war and foreign policy, journalists who question the basic assumptions and policy objectives and who attempt to raise issues no one in either party wishes to debate are considered ‘ideological’ and ‘unprofessional.’ This has a powerful disciplinary effect upon journalists.”
American society, once we lose a system of information based on verifiable fact, will become disconnected from reality. All totalitarian societies impart their propaganda through manipulated images and spectacles. And the death of traditional news is one more stage in the terminal illness that is ravaging American democracy. The rise of a totalitarian capitalism will follow, and we already have many of the new system’s information networks in place. Corporations, as the authors point out, “will be better positioned than ever to produce self-promotional ‘information’—better described as ‘propaganda’—that can masquerade as ‘news.’ The technology actually makes it easier. A major development in the past decade has been video news releases, PR-produced news stories that are often run as if they were legitimate journalism on local TV news broadcasts. The stories invariably promote the products of the corporation which funds the work surreptitiously.”
Journalism will again become what it was more than a century ago—a form of art. It will be as concerned with truth and beauty as it is with justice. It will no longer speak in the deformed language of balance and objectivity but instead be a conduit for unvarnished moral outrage and passion. It will, like classical theater, be relegated to the margins of society but will endure for the literate and the moral. It will sustain all who seek to live with a conscience in an unconscious age. Journalism will survive, but it will reach a limited audience, as the sparsely attended productions of Aristophanes or Racine in small New York theaters are all that is left of great classical theater. The larger society will be deluged with propaganda, spectacle and entertainment as news. Those who carry the flame of journalism forward will live lives as difficult, financially precarious and outside the mainstream as most classical actors and musicians.
___________________________________________
Anyone who follows my blog knows I am working here in Maryland on what is election rigging on a grand scale. Baltimore is ground zero for this and Clinton neo-liberals have captured the Democratic primaries across the nation. When corporate media have no checks----will it promote free and fair elections? Of course not----who wants a progressive liberal labor and justice platform in a Global Corporate Tribunal election? Neo-cons and Neo-liberals need only apply/run for office!
Keep in mind this is only happening because Clinton handed the people's Democratic Party to Wall Street. Democratic voters could well control American politics and all these democratic structures like telecommunications and media would return. EASY PEASY----GET RID OF THESE CORPORATE POLS!
As you see below----corporate media has made the entire election coverage about statistics and talking points with no broad analysis of policy -----history or goal ----or a politician's voting history or past career connections. Media has politics pegged to global corporate pols talking about a small set of issues. Here in Baltimore it gets even more captured as public meetings on policy are filled with hand-picked 'panel' who make sure the discussion does not leave these talking points. THIS IS MORE AUTOCRATIC THAN IRAN.
All of this happens because media conglomerates are allowed to own all media outlets from local and state to national TV, radio, and print
COVERAGE OF POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS
Elections are the centerpiece of democracy. Through voting, people can voice their opinions, express their hopes and aspirations, discipline their leaders, and ultimately control their nation's destiny. According to democratic theory, elections are the public's source of power, but in order to use its muscle effectively it has to know where candidates and parties stand on public policy issues. Besides the people themselves, two groups have major responsibilities in this regard.
Those running for office must state their positions. Otherwise, there is no real choice and elections lose their meaning. But they are not solely responsible for the success of the system. The mass media have a duty to report thoroughly and accurately what the contestants stand for.
This role is perhaps the media's major challenge. All news is important, but campaign coverage is crucial because of its capacity to empower the electorate. What voters know about campaigns comes to them almost entirely secondhand from newspapers, television, and magazines. The table below shows, for example, that voters in 1988 rarely met candidates face to face but learned about them indirectly from television and newspapers. Therefore, in assessing how well the political system works in America, it is essential to inspect the media's treatment of elections.
In reporting on campaigns, the news media bring their usual procedures and tendencies to the campaign trail. In other words, far from simply mirroring all that politicians say and do, journalists select the information to be reported. Because time and space constraints do not allow speeches and rallies to be described in their entirety, certain parts are mentioned, others ignored.
Thus, once again the basic question is not whether the media are selective--they have to be--but what they include and exclude, and how these choices affect voters' beliefs and behavior.
Campaigns as Sporting Events
HIGH STAKES IN NEW ORLEANS CAN BUSH GET BACK ON TRACK?
THE DEBATE: HARDBALL
BUSH COMES ON STRONG
HOW BUSH WON
One wonders if these headlines from 1988 editions of Newsweek and Time described an athletic contest or a presidential election. Using metaphors is perfectly good journalism, yet Thomas Patterson, along with countless others, believes that the media take the metaphor literally: "The dominant theme of presidential news coverage is winning and losing." 2
Instead of examining issues, reporters tend to describe campaign hoopla: the size of crowds, surges and declines in the polls, organizational triumphs and failures, endorsements won and lost, and above all the ebb and flow of momentum. Elections are likened to horse races in which attention centers on who is ahead, who is behind, who is gaining, who has dropped out.3 What gets lost in the excitement is why the race is being run at all. The numbers in the next table demonstrate the point.
Similarly, Patterson analyzed Time and Newsweekarticles and showed that the "horse race" aspect and campaign maneuvers account for close to half of the election content in these magazines. Issues, as they are normally understood, receive only a fraction of the coverage. Over the years media scholars have repeatedly confirmed these sorts of findings. 4 One observer, himself a politician and campaign strategist, summarized the situation this way:
Political coverage has become too much like a pregame sports show, elevated to the color and drama of the athletic event.5 What is attractive about a sporting event? Its action--the faster, the better; its drama; its tension; its unexpected plays; and the uncertainty of the outcome. Perhaps these are the reasons why reporters tend to treat elections as athletic contests: Doing so makes them seem more interesting and appealing.
Still, a price has to be paid. Thomas Patterson, for example, believes that the electorate is flooded with the wrong kind of information. Patterson and Richard Davis found that a newspaper as prestigious as The New York Times spent nearly a third of its coverage of the last week of the 1984 presidential election on polls.6
The media do not enlighten voters but leave them mystified about complex issues.
__________________________________________
I was reading this article and saw a headline in THE PROGRESSIVE----Hillary needs to champion public education. We all know that it is the Clintons that corporatized our universities and installed an education reform in the 1990s that defunded and brought educational achievement to where it is today all with the goal of corporatization of K-12 with neo-liberal education as is happening with Race to the Top. So, if we know the Clintons are the face of corporate neo-liberal education, why would a media outlet like THE PROGRESSIVE even ask that question or allow any coverage of Hillary? News journals like Mother Jones, The Nation, The Progressive all went out of business a decade ago and these progressive brands were bought by Clinton neo-liberal leaning investors. We literally have very few real progressive media because the American people are being made too poor to think of a luxury like subscribing to magazines. Progressive media were outing Clinton neo-liberals decades ago as progressive posers but as you see now----we are to believe that all Hillary needs to do is say she supports strong public schools and health care and VOILA----we are to believe it. IF YOU KNOW THESE ONCE PROGRESSIVE JOURNALS WENT OUT OF BUSINESS A DECADE AGO----YOU KNOW TO SUSPECT THE MEDIA THAT COMES FROM THEM NOW. NEO-LIBERALISM IS THE OPPOSITE OF PROGRESSIVE.....IT IS REGRESSIVE AND REPRESSIVE.
Progressive journals spent decades warning of the Clinton neo-liberal conspiracy with Bush neo-cons but as they went out of business-----the new owners question less Clinton neo-liberals and move further right wing to the Tea Party or in this case-----The Birchers and Koch Brothers!
Center for Media and Democracy is a Clinton neo-liberal outlet! If a media outlet emphasizes Koch Brothers over and over and never mention Clinton neo-liberals as just as bad for the American people-----you know it is not a progresive liberal labor and justice outlet!
By Lisa Graves on July 08, 2014
Like His Dad, Charles Koch Was a Bircher (New Documents)
Today, as announced on Amy Goodman's DemocracyNow!, the Progressive Inc. and the Center for Media and Democracy are publishing new information and analysis documenting that billionaire oil industrialist Charles Koch was an active member of the controversial right-wing John Birch Society during its active campaigns against the civil rights movement.
Many commentators have noted that the father of the controversial Koch Brothers, Fred Koch, was a leader of the John Birch Society from its founding in 1958 until his death in 1967. But, in fact, Charles Koch followed his father's footsteps into the John Birch Society for years in Wichita, Kansas, a hub city for the organization in that decade of tremendous societal unrest as civil rights activists challenged racial segregation.
Charles Koch was not simply a rank and file member of the John Birch Society in name only who paid nominal dues. He purchased and held a "lifetime membership" until he resigned in 1968. He also lent his name and his wealth to the operations of the John Birch Society in Wichita, aiding its "American Opinion" bookstore -- which was stocked with attacks on the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, and Earl Warren as elements of the communist conspiracy. He funded the John Birch Society's promotional campaigns, bought advertising in its magazine, and supported its distribution of right-wing radio shows.
The reactionary ideas learned from his father and stoked by his ideological ally in Wichita, Bob Love of the Love Box Company, were not simply passing fancies of the young scion of an oil fortune. The tools of the trade he absorbed in his late twenties and early thirties appear to continue to animate some of his actions decades later, as with his 2014 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal claiming those who criticize him are "collectivists." The echoes of his past role reverberate along with the millions he and his brother David Koch have spent fueling a John Birch Society-like "Tea Party" peopled with right-wingers like Birchers of decades past who contend against all reasoning that the president is a communist. David Koch himself has claimed President Obama is a scary "socialist." These roots run deep in the Kochs.
In many ways, the playbook deployed by the Kochs today through myriad organizations resembles a more sophisticated (and expensive) playbook of the John Birch Society back then. Even the recent announcement of the Kochs to give a $25 million gift to the United Negro College Fund (with strings attached requiring the recruitment of free market African American college students) echoes that past. In 1964, in the face of criticism for its assault on the civil rights movement, the John Birch Society also funded a scholarship program to give college funds to African Americans who were not active in the civil rights movement, according to documents the Progressive.org/Center for Media and Democracy has obtained.
Below is an excerpt of a new story just published by The Progressive magazine in its newly redesigned summer issue, summarizing some of the long-term research of the Center for Media and Democracy, which is now part of the Progressive Inc. The complete version of that story, which sheds new light on the political activities and environmental record of the Kochs, is available in the digitial edition of the magazine.
Below the excerpt are some key quotes from the John Birch Society's attacks on the civil rights movement and its outlandish claims about the circumstances faced by African Americans in the 1960s. When Charles Koch resigned from the John Birch Society in 1968, he did so along with running a full-page ad taking the opposite position of the John Birch Society on the Vietnam War. But, he made no similar gesture expressing any opposition to its long-standing, high priority anti-civil rights agenda, which his financial support made possible.
In leaving the John Birch Society, Charles Koch had become enamored with a more anarchical expression of his attachment to unregulated capitalism that at its root opposes government action other than that which is necessary to protect property and freedom of contract, two theoretical "ideals" at odds with the very kind of anti-discrimination laws, labor laws, and social programs that the John Birch Society attacked. Since the 1960s, Charles Koch and his brother David have spent untold millions to move these related theories into the mainstream. And, like the John Birch Society spearheaded in recruiting their father, they too have done so by recruiting other industrialists, as with their billionaire "Freedom Partners," to join them in funding efforts to dramatically change this country by trying to takeover Congress and the states and rewrite the laws to suit their own interests.
----
From The Progressive magazine July-August 2014:
In 1961, at the age of twenty-six, Charles moved home to Wichita, Kansas, to work for Rock Island Oil and Refining Company, which was led by his father, Fred Koch, who was on the national council of the John Birch Society. Charles subsequently opened a John Birch Society bookstore in Wichita with a friend of his father, Bob Love, the owner of the Love Box Company in Wichita, according to Dan Schulman’s Sons of Wichita.
The John Birch Society’s “American Opinion Bookstores” were stocked with material opposing the civil rights movement
Birchers had put up billboards in Kansas and elsewhere calling for the impeachment of Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who had ordered the desegregation of the public schools in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
There’s no indication that Fred or Charles objected to the Birch campaign to impeach Warren.
There is no indication they objected when it ran ads in Dallas in 1963 with President John F. Kennedy’s head depicted like two mug shot photos, with the word “Treason” below, shortly before the assassination of the President ...
Or when it opposed the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, based on the Bircher claim that the movement was created as a forty-year front for the communists.
Or when it supported billboards calling Martin Luther King a communist.
None of these things was cited by Charles Koch and Bob Love in their resignation from the John Birch Society in 1968, according to correspondence with Robert Welch, who had launched the organization a decade earlier with Fred and a few other businessmen.
Oddly, it was Welch’s “Win the War” strategy of signing up people to support the Vietnam War that caused the breakup between Charles Koch and the John Birch Society.
In 1968, Charles Koch bought a full-page ad, “Let’s Get Out of Vietnam Now,” based on the isolationism of a competing flank of the far right movement....
Charles also gave public speeches espousing the view that government’s only proper role was to police the interference with the free market—an ideology that inherently rejects child labor laws, minimum wages or safety rules, the protection of union rights, and more....
Remember, there are G-20 industrialized nations representing the developed world so the US ranking below places the US in second world and close to third world ranking.
Ranking of United States press freedom
Freedom House, an independent watch-dog organization, ranked the United States 30th out of 197 countries in terms of press freedom.[19] The report lauded the constitutional protections afforded American journalists, but criticized authorities for placing undue limits on investigative reporting in the name of national security. Freedom House awards countries a score out of 100, with 0 representing most free and 100 representing least free. The score is broken down into three, separately weighted, categories: legal (out of 30), political (out of 40), and economic (out of 30) environments. The United States scored a 6, 10, and 5 respectively. This gave it a cumulative score of 21.[20]
As of February 12, 2014, the United States is ranked 46th in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index.[21] This is a measure of freedom available to the press, encompassing areas such as government censorship, and not indicative of the quality of journalism. There was a fall from 20th in 2010 to 42nd in 2012, which was attributed to arrests of journalists covering the Occupy movement.[22]
For 2012, Finland and Norway tied for 1st worldwide. Canada ranked 10th, Germany tied 17th with Jamaica, and Japan tied 22nd with Suriname. The UK ranked 28th, Australia 30th, and France 38th.
Extraterritorial regions of the US ranked 57th.
I showed yesterday that Obama pretended to protect net neutrality because the 2016 election is coming and Clinton neo-liberals want to give the impression someone is working for labor and justice. TPP would negate net neutrality as Obama tries to Fast Track it. Also, I showed how Baltimore pols running as Democrats are the source of much of the handing of state utilities to ever more consolidation and deregulation----knowing this will create the costs to ratepayers and loss of vital products like energy, water, and communications to the working class and poor. THIS IS HOW YOU KNOW YOU DO NOT HAVE A DEMOCRAT ! All of Baltimore's pols are neo-conservatives working for Johns Hopkins.
The American people know almost nothing about public policy and civics in their own towns and cities because people are too busy watching celebrity gossip ----progressive liberals had local shows filled with public debate on politics from all points of view. It is painful to watch Baltimore's morning and weekend programs offering nothing of value. I heard one TV commentator say----LET THEM WATCH CRIME SHOWS ALL DAY AND INDEED----THAT IS WHAT WE SEE MOST.
THAT IS THEIR JOB---FILLING AIRSPACE WITH NOTHING THAT SAYS----WAKE UP----A TOTALITARIAN TAKEOVER OF AMERICA IS HAPPENING.
Fighting Media Consolidation
Who owns the media has a huge impact on the stories that get covered in our communities.
Today absentee corporations own more and more of our media. Focused only on the bottom line, they are cutting journalists, gutting newsrooms and replacing meaningful debate with celebrity gossip and junk news. And many of these corporations are dodging the Federal Communications Commission’s ownership rules to snap up more outlets and create media monopolies in markets throughout the country.
When the last two largest telecommunications corporations in the US merge----Americans will have the equivalent of North Korean state media---no free press or Democratic free speech. That is to where Baltimore pols with Martin O'Malley are heading with this consolidation and monopoly-building in Maryland. What kind of media do you get when corporations control all content? In Baltimore it is one paid infomercial after another and one advertisement geared to defraud the citizens at every turn. If you have Democrats in office you would have a states attorney's office that monitored these media commercials to protect citizens from fraud----if you have neo-cons and/or Clinton neo-liberals you have no protection and the government thinking this fraud is a job-creator. Blanketing every public space and air wave with corporate commercials.
You know the economic crash is right around the corner when national and local media are filled with these same kinds of subprime mortgage loans as in 2008----no credit check Veterans Mortgage refinance----100% of the value of your house. Below is the top advertiser in Baltimore all geared to defraud veterans just before the economic crash. Infomercials and talk shows make Americans the most uninformed citizens in the developed world and it happens because Clinton neo-liberals have dismantled public education and civics and humanities from our schools and media.
QUALITY PROGRAMMING COURTESY OF NAKED NEO-LIBERALISM.
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A talk show or chat show (as it is known in the UK) is a television programming or radio programming genre in which one person (or group of people) discusses various topics put forth by a talk show host.[1]
Usually, guests consist of a group of people who are learned or who have great experience in relation to whatever issue is being discussed on the show for that episode. Other times, a single guest discusses their work or area of expertise with a host or co-hosts.
Chris Hedges on ‘The Death and Life of American Journalism’
Posted on Feb 26, 2010
By Chris Hedges
We are shedding, with the decline and death of many newspapers, thousands of reporters and editors, based in the culture of researched and verifiable fact, who monitored city councils, police departments, mayor’s offices, courts and state legislators to prevent egregious abuse and corruption. And we are also, even more ominously, losing the meticulous skills of reporting, editing, fact-checking and investigating that make daily information trustworthy. The decline of print has severed a connection with a reality-based culture, one in which we attempt to make fact the foundation for opinion and debate, and replaced it with a culture in which facts, opinions, lies and fantasy are interchangeable. As news has been overtaken by gossip, the hollowness of celebrity culture and carefully staged pseudo-events, along with the hysteria and drama that dominate much of the airwaves, our civil and political discourse has been contaminated by propaganda and entertainment masquerading as news. And the ratings of high-octane propaganda outlets such as Fox News, as well as the collapse of the newspaper industry, prove it.
Corporations, which have hijacked the state, are delighted with the demise of journalism. And the mass communications systems they control pump out endless streams of gossip, trivia and filth in lieu of news. But news, which costs money and takes talent to produce, is dying not only because citizens are migrating to the Internet and corporations are no longer using newsprint to advertise, but because in an age of profound culture decline the masses prefer to be entertained rather than informed. We no longer value the culture or journalism, as we no longer value classical theater or great books, and this devaluation means the general public is not inclined to pay for it. Journalists, like artists, are expected to provide their work free—this is the idea behind websites like The Huffington Post—and the only people who receive adequate compensation in our society are those skilled in the art of manipulation. Money flows to advertising rather than to art or journalism because manipulation is more highly valued than truth or beauty. Journalism, like culture, in America has become advertising.
Certainly, as the authors point out, the faux objectivity and neutrality of the traditional news industry hastened the cultural irrelevance of traditional news gathering. The narrowing of debates within the press to the minor differences among the power elite had a debilitating effect on news. The structure of “objectivity” works far better when there are powerful social movements, such as the civil rights movement, that provide an actual alternative and demand a voice. But without these movements the press functions as courtiers in the corridors of power. It dutifully reports the Democratic and Republic positions, a condition that imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. The two parties are in fundamental agreement about the underlying economic, political and military structures which are largely responsible for our decline. The power elites do not question the permanent war economy, unfettered capitalism and the rise of the security state, and voices that do are, in effect, censored out of the commercial press because they have no power base. This has left most traditional reporters without a moral core and trapped in a ridiculous court pantomime that has damaged their content as much as the loss of advertising and the rise of the Internet. The lie told by newspapers and traditional news is the lie of omission, which is not as bad as the outright lies told on Fox News, but in the end it is still a lie. Our power elite are bankrupt, and the press, tethered to the elite, is as bankrupt as those it covers.
“The real problem with professional journalism becomes evident when political elites do not debate an issue and march in virtual lockstep,” the authors write. “In such a case professional journalism is, at best, ineffectual, and, at worst, propagandistic. This has often been the case in U.S. foreign policy, where both parties are beholden to an enormous global military complex, and accept the right of the United States, and the United States alone, to invade countries when it suits U.S. interests. In matters of war and foreign policy, journalists who question the basic assumptions and policy objectives and who attempt to raise issues no one in either party wishes to debate are considered ‘ideological’ and ‘unprofessional.’ This has a powerful disciplinary effect upon journalists.”
American society, once we lose a system of information based on verifiable fact, will become disconnected from reality. All totalitarian societies impart their propaganda through manipulated images and spectacles. And the death of traditional news is one more stage in the terminal illness that is ravaging American democracy. The rise of a totalitarian capitalism will follow, and we already have many of the new system’s information networks in place. Corporations, as the authors point out, “will be better positioned than ever to produce self-promotional ‘information’—better described as ‘propaganda’—that can masquerade as ‘news.’ The technology actually makes it easier. A major development in the past decade has been video news releases, PR-produced news stories that are often run as if they were legitimate journalism on local TV news broadcasts. The stories invariably promote the products of the corporation which funds the work surreptitiously.”
Journalism will again become what it was more than a century ago—a form of art. It will be as concerned with truth and beauty as it is with justice. It will no longer speak in the deformed language of balance and objectivity but instead be a conduit for unvarnished moral outrage and passion. It will, like classical theater, be relegated to the margins of society but will endure for the literate and the moral. It will sustain all who seek to live with a conscience in an unconscious age. Journalism will survive, but it will reach a limited audience, as the sparsely attended productions of Aristophanes or Racine in small New York theaters are all that is left of great classical theater. The larger society will be deluged with propaganda, spectacle and entertainment as news. Those who carry the flame of journalism forward will live lives as difficult, financially precarious and outside the mainstream as most classical actors and musicians.
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Anyone who follows my blog knows I am working here in Maryland on what is election rigging on a grand scale. Baltimore is ground zero for this and Clinton neo-liberals have captured the Democratic primaries across the nation. When corporate media have no checks----will it promote free and fair elections? Of course not----who wants a progressive liberal labor and justice platform in a Global Corporate Tribunal election? Neo-cons and Neo-liberals need only apply/run for office!
Keep in mind this is only happening because Clinton handed the people's Democratic Party to Wall Street. Democratic voters could well control American politics and all these democratic structures like telecommunications and media would return. EASY PEASY----GET RID OF THESE CORPORATE POLS!
As you see below----corporate media has made the entire election coverage about statistics and talking points with no broad analysis of policy -----history or goal ----or a politician's voting history or past career connections. Media has politics pegged to global corporate pols talking about a small set of issues. Here in Baltimore it gets even more captured as public meetings on policy are filled with hand-picked 'panel' who make sure the discussion does not leave these talking points. THIS IS MORE AUTOCRATIC THAN IRAN.
All of this happens because media conglomerates are allowed to own all media outlets from local and state to national TV, radio, and print
COVERAGE OF POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS
Elections are the centerpiece of democracy. Through voting, people can voice their opinions, express their hopes and aspirations, discipline their leaders, and ultimately control their nation's destiny. According to democratic theory, elections are the public's source of power, but in order to use its muscle effectively it has to know where candidates and parties stand on public policy issues. Besides the people themselves, two groups have major responsibilities in this regard.
Those running for office must state their positions. Otherwise, there is no real choice and elections lose their meaning. But they are not solely responsible for the success of the system. The mass media have a duty to report thoroughly and accurately what the contestants stand for.
This role is perhaps the media's major challenge. All news is important, but campaign coverage is crucial because of its capacity to empower the electorate. What voters know about campaigns comes to them almost entirely secondhand from newspapers, television, and magazines. The table below shows, for example, that voters in 1988 rarely met candidates face to face but learned about them indirectly from television and newspapers. Therefore, in assessing how well the political system works in America, it is essential to inspect the media's treatment of elections.
In reporting on campaigns, the news media bring their usual procedures and tendencies to the campaign trail. In other words, far from simply mirroring all that politicians say and do, journalists select the information to be reported. Because time and space constraints do not allow speeches and rallies to be described in their entirety, certain parts are mentioned, others ignored.
Thus, once again the basic question is not whether the media are selective--they have to be--but what they include and exclude, and how these choices affect voters' beliefs and behavior.
Campaigns as Sporting Events
HIGH STAKES IN NEW ORLEANS CAN BUSH GET BACK ON TRACK?
THE DEBATE: HARDBALL
BUSH COMES ON STRONG
HOW BUSH WON
One wonders if these headlines from 1988 editions of Newsweek and Time described an athletic contest or a presidential election. Using metaphors is perfectly good journalism, yet Thomas Patterson, along with countless others, believes that the media take the metaphor literally: "The dominant theme of presidential news coverage is winning and losing." 2
Instead of examining issues, reporters tend to describe campaign hoopla: the size of crowds, surges and declines in the polls, organizational triumphs and failures, endorsements won and lost, and above all the ebb and flow of momentum. Elections are likened to horse races in which attention centers on who is ahead, who is behind, who is gaining, who has dropped out.3 What gets lost in the excitement is why the race is being run at all. The numbers in the next table demonstrate the point.
Similarly, Patterson analyzed Time and Newsweekarticles and showed that the "horse race" aspect and campaign maneuvers account for close to half of the election content in these magazines. Issues, as they are normally understood, receive only a fraction of the coverage. Over the years media scholars have repeatedly confirmed these sorts of findings. 4 One observer, himself a politician and campaign strategist, summarized the situation this way:
Political coverage has become too much like a pregame sports show, elevated to the color and drama of the athletic event.5 What is attractive about a sporting event? Its action--the faster, the better; its drama; its tension; its unexpected plays; and the uncertainty of the outcome. Perhaps these are the reasons why reporters tend to treat elections as athletic contests: Doing so makes them seem more interesting and appealing.
Still, a price has to be paid. Thomas Patterson, for example, believes that the electorate is flooded with the wrong kind of information. Patterson and Richard Davis found that a newspaper as prestigious as The New York Times spent nearly a third of its coverage of the last week of the 1984 presidential election on polls.6
The media do not enlighten voters but leave them mystified about complex issues.
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I was reading this article and saw a headline in THE PROGRESSIVE----Hillary needs to champion public education. We all know that it is the Clintons that corporatized our universities and installed an education reform in the 1990s that defunded and brought educational achievement to where it is today all with the goal of corporatization of K-12 with neo-liberal education as is happening with Race to the Top. So, if we know the Clintons are the face of corporate neo-liberal education, why would a media outlet like THE PROGRESSIVE even ask that question or allow any coverage of Hillary? News journals like Mother Jones, The Nation, The Progressive all went out of business a decade ago and these progressive brands were bought by Clinton neo-liberal leaning investors. We literally have very few real progressive media because the American people are being made too poor to think of a luxury like subscribing to magazines. Progressive media were outing Clinton neo-liberals decades ago as progressive posers but as you see now----we are to believe that all Hillary needs to do is say she supports strong public schools and health care and VOILA----we are to believe it. IF YOU KNOW THESE ONCE PROGRESSIVE JOURNALS WENT OUT OF BUSINESS A DECADE AGO----YOU KNOW TO SUSPECT THE MEDIA THAT COMES FROM THEM NOW. NEO-LIBERALISM IS THE OPPOSITE OF PROGRESSIVE.....IT IS REGRESSIVE AND REPRESSIVE.
Progressive journals spent decades warning of the Clinton neo-liberal conspiracy with Bush neo-cons but as they went out of business-----the new owners question less Clinton neo-liberals and move further right wing to the Tea Party or in this case-----The Birchers and Koch Brothers!
Center for Media and Democracy is a Clinton neo-liberal outlet! If a media outlet emphasizes Koch Brothers over and over and never mention Clinton neo-liberals as just as bad for the American people-----you know it is not a progresive liberal labor and justice outlet!
By Lisa Graves on July 08, 2014
Like His Dad, Charles Koch Was a Bircher (New Documents)
Today, as announced on Amy Goodman's DemocracyNow!, the Progressive Inc. and the Center for Media and Democracy are publishing new information and analysis documenting that billionaire oil industrialist Charles Koch was an active member of the controversial right-wing John Birch Society during its active campaigns against the civil rights movement.
Many commentators have noted that the father of the controversial Koch Brothers, Fred Koch, was a leader of the John Birch Society from its founding in 1958 until his death in 1967. But, in fact, Charles Koch followed his father's footsteps into the John Birch Society for years in Wichita, Kansas, a hub city for the organization in that decade of tremendous societal unrest as civil rights activists challenged racial segregation.
Charles Koch was not simply a rank and file member of the John Birch Society in name only who paid nominal dues. He purchased and held a "lifetime membership" until he resigned in 1968. He also lent his name and his wealth to the operations of the John Birch Society in Wichita, aiding its "American Opinion" bookstore -- which was stocked with attacks on the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, and Earl Warren as elements of the communist conspiracy. He funded the John Birch Society's promotional campaigns, bought advertising in its magazine, and supported its distribution of right-wing radio shows.
The reactionary ideas learned from his father and stoked by his ideological ally in Wichita, Bob Love of the Love Box Company, were not simply passing fancies of the young scion of an oil fortune. The tools of the trade he absorbed in his late twenties and early thirties appear to continue to animate some of his actions decades later, as with his 2014 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal claiming those who criticize him are "collectivists." The echoes of his past role reverberate along with the millions he and his brother David Koch have spent fueling a John Birch Society-like "Tea Party" peopled with right-wingers like Birchers of decades past who contend against all reasoning that the president is a communist. David Koch himself has claimed President Obama is a scary "socialist." These roots run deep in the Kochs.
In many ways, the playbook deployed by the Kochs today through myriad organizations resembles a more sophisticated (and expensive) playbook of the John Birch Society back then. Even the recent announcement of the Kochs to give a $25 million gift to the United Negro College Fund (with strings attached requiring the recruitment of free market African American college students) echoes that past. In 1964, in the face of criticism for its assault on the civil rights movement, the John Birch Society also funded a scholarship program to give college funds to African Americans who were not active in the civil rights movement, according to documents the Progressive.org/Center for Media and Democracy has obtained.
Below is an excerpt of a new story just published by The Progressive magazine in its newly redesigned summer issue, summarizing some of the long-term research of the Center for Media and Democracy, which is now part of the Progressive Inc. The complete version of that story, which sheds new light on the political activities and environmental record of the Kochs, is available in the digitial edition of the magazine.
Below the excerpt are some key quotes from the John Birch Society's attacks on the civil rights movement and its outlandish claims about the circumstances faced by African Americans in the 1960s. When Charles Koch resigned from the John Birch Society in 1968, he did so along with running a full-page ad taking the opposite position of the John Birch Society on the Vietnam War. But, he made no similar gesture expressing any opposition to its long-standing, high priority anti-civil rights agenda, which his financial support made possible.
In leaving the John Birch Society, Charles Koch had become enamored with a more anarchical expression of his attachment to unregulated capitalism that at its root opposes government action other than that which is necessary to protect property and freedom of contract, two theoretical "ideals" at odds with the very kind of anti-discrimination laws, labor laws, and social programs that the John Birch Society attacked. Since the 1960s, Charles Koch and his brother David have spent untold millions to move these related theories into the mainstream. And, like the John Birch Society spearheaded in recruiting their father, they too have done so by recruiting other industrialists, as with their billionaire "Freedom Partners," to join them in funding efforts to dramatically change this country by trying to takeover Congress and the states and rewrite the laws to suit their own interests.
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From The Progressive magazine July-August 2014:
In 1961, at the age of twenty-six, Charles moved home to Wichita, Kansas, to work for Rock Island Oil and Refining Company, which was led by his father, Fred Koch, who was on the national council of the John Birch Society. Charles subsequently opened a John Birch Society bookstore in Wichita with a friend of his father, Bob Love, the owner of the Love Box Company in Wichita, according to Dan Schulman’s Sons of Wichita.
The John Birch Society’s “American Opinion Bookstores” were stocked with material opposing the civil rights movement
Birchers had put up billboards in Kansas and elsewhere calling for the impeachment of Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who had ordered the desegregation of the public schools in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
There’s no indication that Fred or Charles objected to the Birch campaign to impeach Warren.
There is no indication they objected when it ran ads in Dallas in 1963 with President John F. Kennedy’s head depicted like two mug shot photos, with the word “Treason” below, shortly before the assassination of the President ...
Or when it opposed the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, based on the Bircher claim that the movement was created as a forty-year front for the communists.
Or when it supported billboards calling Martin Luther King a communist.
None of these things was cited by Charles Koch and Bob Love in their resignation from the John Birch Society in 1968, according to correspondence with Robert Welch, who had launched the organization a decade earlier with Fred and a few other businessmen.
Oddly, it was Welch’s “Win the War” strategy of signing up people to support the Vietnam War that caused the breakup between Charles Koch and the John Birch Society.
In 1968, Charles Koch bought a full-page ad, “Let’s Get Out of Vietnam Now,” based on the isolationism of a competing flank of the far right movement....
Charles also gave public speeches espousing the view that government’s only proper role was to police the interference with the free market—an ideology that inherently rejects child labor laws, minimum wages or safety rules, the protection of union rights, and more....
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