Media

Propaganda Video Reports Shown as News http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040606N.shtml

A report prepared by the Center for Media and Democracy said that many of the 69 stations took steps to blend the fake segments into their news broadcasts. Some had their news reporters or anchors read scripts supplied by corporations, the report said, and many had altered screen graphics to include the station's logo.

From Robert McChesney

A host of recent developments have made it clear that the Bush White House is doing battle against the journalistic standards and practices that underpin of our democracy. With its unprecedented campaign to undermine and stifle independent journalism, Bush & Co. have demonstrated brazen contempt for the Constitution and considerable fear of an informed public.

Free Press has launched a campaign to chronicle and combat Bush’s war on the press. Today, we published a new report showing the scope and intensity of the administration’s assault on press freedoms. The growing list of attacks on the press is truly astonishing:

Infiltrating Public Broadcasting

Tomlinson's goal was clearly to fire a shot across the bow of all public stations so managers would shy away from the sort of investigative journalism that might expose Bush administration malfeasance. Tomlinson resigned in disgrace but left behind a cast of cronies to carry out his partisan crusade. And we still don’t know the extent to which Karl Rove and others at the White House orchestrated his efforts.

Manufacturing Fake News

The segments — which trumpeted administration “successes,” promoted its controversial line on issues like overhauling Medicare, and featured Americans "thanking" Bush — have been repeatedly labeled "covert propaganda" by investigators at the Government Accountability Office.

Bribing Journalists

The administration has even exported these tactics. According to the Los Angeles Times, the U.S. military is now secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops.

Lying about the Iraq War

As Frank Rich recently wrote in the New York Times, the administration’s "web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House."

Eliminating Dissent in the Mainstream Media

Bush has all but avoided traditional press conferences, closing down a prime venue for holding the executive accountable. On those rare occasions when he deigned to meet reporters, presidential aides turned the press conferences into parodies by seating a friendly right-wing “journalist,” former male escort Jeff Gannon, amid the reporters and then steering questions to him when tough issues arose.

They have effectively silenced serious questioners, like veteran journalist Helen Thomas, by refusing to have the president or his aides call on reporters who challenge them. And they have established a hierarchy for journalists seeking interviews with administration officials, which favors networks that give the White House favorable coverage.

Gutting the Freedom of Information Act

Consolidating Media Control

The administration continues to make common cause with the most powerful broadcast corporations in an effort to rewrite ownership laws in a manner that favors monopoly control of information. The Federal Communications Commission will announce plans to rewrite the ownership rules soon – it could happen as early as February – with aims of unleashing a new wave of media consolidation. The administration’s desired rules changes would strike a mortal blow to local reporting and further squeeze journalists.

In a famous 1945 opinion, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black said that "the First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society." In other words, a free press is the sine qua non of the entire American Constitution and republican experiment.

We started Free Press because our democracy demands a diverse and independent media. The Bush administration’s attack on the foundations of self-government requires a response of similar caliber. I hope you’ll join me in the year ahead as Free Press works to hold the administration accountable for all its attacks on journalism and see that such abuses will not be repeated in the future.

Please take a moment to visit our online campaign to defend democracy from the White House assault on the media.

Onward,

Robert W. McChesney
President
Free Press
www.freepress.net

Misinformation

"A substantial percentage of scientists also say that the news media have done a poor job educating the public. About three-quarters (76%) say a major problem for science is that news reports fail to distinguish between findings that are well-founded and those that are not. And 48% say media oversimplification of scientific findings is a major problem. The scientists are particularly critical of television news coverage of science. Just 15% of scientists rate TV coverage as excellent or good, while 83% say it is only fair or poor. Newspaper coverage of science is rated somewhat better; still, barely a third (36%) of the scientists say it is excellent or good, while 63% rate it as only fair or poor."  (Survey 7/2009)

Of course broadcasters vigorously oppose the fairness doctrine.

Worldwide Press Freedom Index :           

The annual worldwide press freedom index from Reporters Without Borders shows the United States, which is supposedly spreading freedom and liberty throughout the world, is in a fast decline regarding the freedom of its own press. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10839.htm or http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12102005.html

David Dadge's book "Casualty of War" details Bush assault on the free press.

This is terrible for democracy. I have been in 47 states of the USA since 9/11, and I can attest to the horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had on the national psyche. I have found America a place of great and confused fearfulness, in which cynically placed bits of misinformation (e.g. Cheney's, "If John Kerry had been President during the Cold War we would have had thermonuclear war.") fall on ears that absorb all, without filtration or fact-checking. Leading journalists have tried to defend their mission, pointing to the paucity of accurate, edited coverage found in blogs, internet sites, Fox-TV and talk radio. They argue that good old-fashioned newspaper editing is the key to providing America with credible information, forming the basis for wise voting and enlightened governance. But their claims have been undermined by Jayson Blair's blatant fabrications, Judy Miller's bogus weapons of mass destruction coverage, the media's inaccurate and inappropriate convictions of Wen Ho Lee, Richard Jewell and Steven Hatfill, CBS' failure to smell a con job regarding Bush's Texas Air Guard career and, sadly, so on.

Laurie Garrett's resignation letter from Newsday (subsidiary of the Tribune.)

Media Repression

NSA continues surveillance of Journalists.(8/20/2008)

FBI and IndyMedia

Index on Censorship

Video

Orwell Rolls in His Grave (you can watch it on-line)

Links

Project Censored Study of Media Bias at the Associated Press.

Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting

The War Criminal in the Living Room: Paul Craig Roberts

Media Tell the Rich Man's Story, Starve the People of Real News (10/6/2009)

Why media ownership matters. Who owns CNN ? Check out these media watchdogs: FAIR and also FreePress.net

Weapons of Mass Deception (2004) 98 minute movie

US media is dead.

Court has ruled that media lies and distortion of the truth are legal. That's why the story about BGH didn't get out. See the comments at the Organic Consumers Association website.  

Bibliography

The Kingmakers, How the Media Threatens Our Security and Our Democracy; Senator Mike Gravel and David Eisenbach, Phd.

Digital Destiny: Jeff Chester How Congress sold out the public interest to conglomerate media for money. Excellent description of the issues, and good ideas to improve policy. What you don't know can hurt you, but don't expect broadcasters to tell you about it.

Blinded By the Right: David Brock.

BROCK David. The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy. New York, Crown Publishing, 2005.

So Wrong For So Long: How the Press, The Pundits, and the President failed on Iraq: Greg Mitchell, Editor of Editor and Publisher.

Casualty of War, David Dadge

Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists expose the Myth of a Free Press. " appallingly convincing book, a book that suggests that the truth about our media-military-industrial complex might go beyond even our paranoid imaginings." Michelle Goldberg (click to see the entire review.)

Guardians of Power, the Myth of the Liberal Media: David Edwards and David Cromwell; Media Lens.

Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy (Paperback) by Jeffrey Feldman

Waldman, Paul, "Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn't Tell You." Although this is five years old, Waldman does a superb job of showing where the bias really is in our media.

Boehlert, Eric, "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush"

Nightly news nightmare By Stephen J. Farnsworth, S. Robert Lichter

The Exception to the Rulers: Amy Goodman with David Goodman

Rich Media, Poor Democracy, Robert W. McChesney.

The Political Economy of Media, Robert W. McChesney

Family of Secrets: Russ Baker (Note) Check out media connections with the CIA in this book.

Regret the Error: Craig Silverman

End Times, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Claire

Watchdogs of Democracy ? The Waning Washington Press Corps and how it has failed the Public. Helen Thomas

The Case Against Media Consolidation available for download at no charge under a creative commons license:  Contact: Jen Howard, Free Press, 202-265-1490, x 22

Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power: Gerry Spence

Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War: John MacArthur (Hill and Wang,1992

Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence (Crown Publishers, 1999) by David Grossman

Centerwall, Brandon S., "Exposure to television as a risk factor for violence," American Journal of Epidemiology, 129/4, pp 643-652, April 1989. An Epidemiologist who has examined the evidence and found that media causes violence.

Derailing Democracy, The America The Media Doesn't want you to see. Dave McGowan, Common Courage Press, 2000. "Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths. The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state." --Dave McGowan, from the introduction to "Derailing Democracy"

"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." --Former CIA Director William Colby

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." --Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

THE MEDIA MONOPOLY by Ben Bagdikian. (Beacon Press. Boston. updated 1992.)Media is, increasingly, concentrated. Although the situation was bad enough in 1992 when this book was first published, the trend has accelerated.

MANUFACTURING CONSENT. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Pantheon Books, New York. 1988. How issues are framed and topics chosen. Documents how propagandistic our mass media are, the manner in which the marketplace and the economics of the media shape the news. Edward Herman is Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Noam Chomsky is an MIT professor, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Stealing Time, Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner: Alec Klein

The More You Watch, the Less You Know. Danny Schechter. Seven Stories Press. 1997. "In America, the very idea of using publicly owned airwaves to broadcast in the public interest has been under attack for decades. Privatization is our ruling ideology in part because privately owned media restricts serious discussion of how it might be different. They do so less to serve abstract ideology that concrete interests, but the deeper effect is to undermine the very idea of a public interest."

Make-Believe Media, the politics of entertainment. Michael Parenti. Saint Martin's Press. NY. 1992.

Inventing Reality, the politics of the Mass Media" by Michael Parenti.

WHO WILL TELL THE PEOPLE. William Greider. Simon and Shuster 1992. Who gets heard, who gets ignored, and why. Relationships that link politicians with corporations and subvert the needs of ordinary citizens. How modern "methodologies of persuasion" from public relations firms, direct mail companies, opinion-polling firms, foundations, and consultants, have created a new hierarchy of influence over government decisions. A lone congressman who tries to represent the public interest can find himself aligned against an army of well paid authorities. The institutions designed to represent people: unions, political parties, press, are gone or transformed so radically that they no longer speak for the people. With lone exceptions, no one is intelligently monitoring the action for the taxpayers and alerting them to trouble. Political parties used to perform this role, but have abandoned it. The media report on selected events, but style and focus of their news do not fulfill this function either. Neither, for that matter, do the ranks of reformers and civic organizations, which are mostly devoted to their own specific issues.

Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy. Robert McChesney. and Global Media with Edward Herman.

'Secrets' by Angus Mackenzie, University of California Press, 1997. subtitled the CIA's war at home. Describes the CIA's illegal, direct intervention into the domestic press.

CENSORED. the News That Didn't Make the News and Why. Carl Jensen (Founder of Project Censored) The Top Censored story: The Great Media Sellout to Reaganism. In return for loosened regulation, big media dispensed relentlessly positive news about Reaganism and the great trickle-down dream. The FCC relieved broadcasters of traditional public service requirements, made it almost impossible for citizens groups to challenge station license renewals and lifted limits on the number of stations a single corporation can acquire.

Sound & Fury. Eric Alterman. The Washington Punditocracy and the collapse of American Politics. A community that lacks the means to detect lies, . . . also lacks the means to preserve its own liberty.

Vulgarians At the Gate: Steve Allen

"Made possible by ... the Death of PBS". Danial Ledbetter. 1997

Air Wars, The Fight to Reclaim Public Broadcasting, Jerold M. Starr

The Decline and Fall of Public Broadcasting: David Barsamian.

The Chain Gang. One Newspaper versus the Gannett Empire. Richard Mccord, University of Missouri Press. 1996. This excellent book was an award winner, but you didn't hear about it from the newspapers. Richard Mccord, University of Missouri Press. 1996

Breaking the News. How the Media undermine American Democracy. James Fallows. Pantheon Books. New York. 1996.

Networks of Power, Corporate TV's Threat to Democracy. Dennis W. Mazzocco. South End Press. Boston, Mass 1994.

The Mighty Wurlitzer: Hugh Wilford

Abandoned in the Wasteland. Newton Minow. (Formerly of the FCC) Children are not the only victims of broadcasting, but Minow is not too concerned about the rest of us.

The Newscasters by Ron Powers: 1980. St. Martins Press. "Until local television news ceases to exploit the entertainment bias that is conditioned by its host medium, and shares some of the profit with its "market" in the form of comprehensive, compact newscasts, it is engaging in a pollution of the worst sort: a pollution of ideas. Its options should be the same as those of any polluter: clean up the mess or pay the consequences.

HOW TO TALK BACK TO YOUR TELEVISION SET. Nicholas Johnson. Atlantic Monthly Press. 1970. This book is old, but the problems described are more severe today. (Nicholas Johnson was a member of the FCC.)

Adventures in Medialand. Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, Common Courage Press. Monroe, Maine. 1993.

"By the time American kids are 18 years old they have watched 26,000 murders on television alone. Heavy metal and rap lyrics often encourage rape and bigotry. It is contrary to common sense and research to think you can create such a culture and not have any effects." (From: Boys will be Boys: Breaking the link between masculinity and violence, by Myriam Miedzian. reviewed in Time magazine 9/16/91.)

The FCC: The Ups and Downs of Radio-TV Regulation, by William B. Ray, Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press. 1991. (Ray has been there. Chief of complaints for the FCC.) TV and radio programs have often broadcast wildly inaccurate news and/or information, only to be inadequately policed by the FCC. How Eisenhower FCC licensed only Republican stations, LBJ became wealthy, corruption in station licensing (assign then justify), and the disgraceful Reagan FCC promoted trafficking in stations, eliminated the fairness rules and generally has abandoned its role as protector of the public interest.

Read All About It! James D. Squires. How Corporate owners of American Newspapers have sacrificed the ideals of a free press for profit and how democracy has suffered as a result. Insights into the relationship between the Chicago Tribune and the Cubs (baseball team), and on ownership of the New York Daily News. (Al Neuharth appears frequently. See his "how I became an SOB".)

THE NEXT CENTURY, David Halberstam, 1991, William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York. pg. 106. "Thanks to television, the national agenda becomes not what our long-range or our most pressing problems are, but those that produce the best film. This means that in a mass democratic society, the most critical part of the communications circulatory system, network television, is essentially blocked. As the network news format trivializes political debate, the political system adapts to it. Serious discussion of serious issues is too complicated. Candidates and their advisers learn what the networks want: a telegenic background and a hyped-up attack or counterattack, the more simplistic the better. Television runs only ten and fifteen second sound bites from our leading politicians; soon the politicians begin to talk in such brief bites; finally they begin to think in them."

The Electronic Republic. Lawrence K Grossman. Viking. Twentieth Century Fund Book. 1995. Lawrence K. Grossman former head of NBC news and president of the Public Broadcasting Service describes events at NBC after it was purchased by General Electric. Mr. Grossman has excellent recommendations but, as always, Republicans are on the other side. The fact is there is strong control of the press and communications by a small group that are control our agenda for their own ends.

Three Blind Mice: How the Networks lost their way. Ken Auletta; Random House; 656 pages. "Now everyone can see how a diet deprived of independent journalism in the mass market, that is can shrink society's stomach for the truth." It may not be possible to reform an information-delivery system so deeply commingled with the political and economic command system that is so well entrenched in this country. "Book review in Time, August 12, 1991 (p 60):