Media Control Over Public Opinion

[mlingley]

"If the people were not convinced (that the Free World is in mortal danger) it would be impossible for Congress to vote the vast sums now being spent to avert this danger. With the support of public opinion, as marshalled by the press, we are off to a good start. It is our job - yours and mine - to keep our people convinced that the only way to keep disaster away from our shores is to build up America's might."
- Charles Wilson, Chairman of the Board of General Electric (NBC)

This quote was taken from a speach to the Newspaper Publishers Associatoin in 1950 just after Wilson was appointed to head the Office of Defense Mobilization.

Lawrence Grossman, who was in charge of PBS and NBC News for many years described the role of the press this way:
"The job of the President is to set the agenda and the job of the press is to follow the agenda that the leadership sets."

The television news media are owned by some of the largest corporations in the country. NBC is owned by GE, CBS is owned by Viacom, ABC is owned by Disney (soon to be comcast), and CNN is owned by AOL Time Warner. The members of the boards of directors of these powerful corporations also sit on the boards of weapons manufactures and other companies with vested interests around the world such as Sum Microsystems, EDS, Lucent Technologies, Prudential, etc.
http://www.netadvantage.standardpoor.com

[delFoolio]

It is a sick world.

[Poetic_Justice]

we should do a tree of major corporations like Viacom and see exactly how many companies they own...

[mlingley]

http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/

A great tool to see who owns what in the media

[mythicflow]

Here's a media ownership picture from January 2002: http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html

The specifics may have changed, most likely in the direction of lesser diversity - http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/mediaconsol.html

I don't think it's alarmist to think that our media are not as free as most Americans might think. The idea that only the government can endanger our freedom is so entrenched in our culture that we are loath to consider that private ownership of the media by for-profit corporations can also result in the subordination of this public service to the profit motive. Furthermore, when the government itself, rather than furthering the public good, makes common cause with the motives of these corporations, I wouldn't at all count on the integrity of the information being dished out.

[Impenitent]

yes the television tells you lies... the schools teach you lies... all the books and magazines are filled with lies... it's all a plot to make you into slaves for the corporation...

take a prozac or a valium and smile

[mythicflow]

</span><blockquote><span class="smallfont">Quote:</span><hr size="1" />Originally Posted by (Impenitent,)
yes the television tells you lies... the schools teach you lies... all the books and magazines are filled with lies... it's all a plot to make you into slaves for the corporation...

take a prozac or a valium and smile<hr size="1" /></blockquote><span class='postcolor'>

That's not a very original strategy. Enslaving us by hooking us on drugs that we buy from corporations is textbook villiany. Is it that easy to dupe us?

[tman_ndsu08]

If you can't watch tv and tell what might be real and what's BS, then i would suggest throwing it out the window.

[castille]

Did you know teachers lie to you too?

Did you know schoolbooks lie to you too?

Did you know people like Adams, Marx, Hitler, and Stalin all lied to you?


The world is a lie. Lets all destroy the lies, revolt, and start our own lies!

[Impenitent]

exactly... revaluation of all values...

[mlingley]

Bush Backs New Terrorism TV Series
"In what would be a highly unusual action for a president, George W. Bush is apparently giving the White House seal of approval to a television series, D.H.S.--The Series, a drama about the Department of Home Security being introduced Thursday night to prospective networks at an Industry gathering."

http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,1358...4,00.html?tnews

[Impenitent]

clinton backed his own terrorism tv series, it is called west wing...

[castille]

I believe stupid people control the media.

Look at the shows today - Big Brother (bunch of morons fuck around in a house), those survivor shows, etc.


Why are they shown?

Because we viewers vote with our eyes. There is a huge demand for those reality shows, thus media companies have to show them.

[tman_ndsu08]

I like survivor

[Pooeypants]

I can't stand any of those reality TV shows, especially pop idol, what a bag of sh...

[mlingley]

"The PR psychiatric manipulation industry is now enormous. Corporations spend at least $10 billion each year hiring PR propaganda experts (pg. 26) and our federal government spends another $2.3 billion or so (pg. 27) -- and these are no doubt underestimates. But these huge sums are not wasted -- they provide major benefits to the clients. For example, about 40% of all stories that appear in newspapers are planted there by PR firms on behalf of a specific paying client. Because most radio and TV news is simply re-written from newspaper stories, a substantial proportion of the public's "news" originates as PR propaganda. Naturally the connection to the PR source is edited out."
http://journeytoforever.org/fyi_previous3.html#070701

One can determine the strength of media influence by examining polls. All they do is illustrate what information has been fed to the populace.
Ref. corporate ownership. These large corps. con't involve themselves in the day to day activity of their news groups. If they did I doubt the news would look as it does today.

[PatrickHenry]

A provocative speech/essay by a prominent journalist:

An Eye On Power By Bill Moyers t r u t h o u t | Address Tuesday 25 May 2004 Delivered at the Newspaper Guild/Communication Workers of America dinner on May 19, 2004.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/052604B.shtml

the greatest moments in journalism have come not when journalists made common cause with power, but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.

Is an independent press worth demanding? Worth fighting for? Do any of you think the US has an independent press today? Read on...

why, when we pause to celebrate it, as we are tonight, why despite plenty of lip service on every ritual occasion to freedom of the press-why are we so uneasy, so uncertain, so anxious for our craft? Partly it's because of the secrecy. The secrecy today is so thick as to be all but impenetrable. In earlier times there were padlocks for the presses and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers as our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom with blunt instruments of the law. Now, the classifier's 'top secret' stamp, used indiscriminately, is as potent a silencer as a writ of arrest. It's so bad the president and CEO of the Associated Press, Tom Curley, last week called publicly for a media advocacy center to lobby in Washington for an open government. "You don't need to have your notebook snatched by a policeman," he said, "to know that keeping an eye on government has lately gotten a lot harder."

Is there increasing secrecy in government, in your opinion? If so, are there legitimate reasons for increased secrecy or is it that officialdom is abusing its authority and wishes to have their misdeeds concealed?

It's not just government that's squeezing out this news. Some of the media giants are doing it themselves. As they consolidate ownership they are shrinking their news holes, isolating public affairs far from prime-time. A study by Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America reports that nearly two-thirds of today's newspaper markets are monopolies.

Are media monopolies contributing to the stated "press freedom" guaranteed in the First Amendment?

it won't be long before America is reduced to half a dozen major print organizations. According to the Non-Partisan Project for Excellence in Journalism, newspapers have 2,200 fewer employees than in 1990. The number of full-time radio news employees dropped by 44 percent between 1994 and 2000. The number of broadcast network correspondents has dropped by one third since the 1980s. And the number of TV network foreign bureaus is down by half. Except for 60 Minutes on CBS, the network prime time newsmagazines "in no way could be said to cover major news of the day." Furthermore, the report finds that 68 percent of the news on cable news channels was 'repetitious accounts of previously reported stories without any new information."

Aah, 60 Minutes, my favorite show. The cable news shows run 24/7, but are they really contributing anything to public awareness or just background noise?

Meanwhile, as secrecy grows, and media conglomerates put more and more power in fewer and fewer hands, we have witnessed the rise of a new phenomenon-a quasi-official partisan press ideologically linked to an authoritarian administration that is in turn the ally and agent of powerful financial and economic interests that consider transparencies a threat to their hegemony over public opinion. This convergence dominates the marketplace of political ideas in a phenomenon unique in our history. Stretching from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch's empire to the nattering nabobs of know-nothing radio to a legion of think tanks bought and paid for by corporations circling the honey pots of government, a vast echo chamber resounds with a conformity of opinions, serving a partisan worldview cannot be proven wrong because it admits no evidence to the contrary. When you challenge them with evidence to the contrary-when you try to hold their propaganda to scrutiny-you're likely to wind up in the modern equivalent of a medieval iron maiden, between the covers, that is, of an Ann Coulter tirade, or wake up in an underground cell at FOX News, force fed leftovers from a Roger Ailes snack, and required for 24 hours a day to stare at photographs of Rupert Murdoch on the walls of the cell while listening to a piped-in Bill O'Reilly singing the Hallelujah Chorus in praise of himself.

OK, a little polemical, but it describes a certain mentality that I encounter often right here on volconvo. Not naming any names, but you know who I mean. Come on out and fight!

[samsara15]

Let's do our lying and try and sell our own lies to the world. Propaganda. That's what it all about. A sales pitch. And let's elect the most skillfull liar.