The media's vast rightwing idiocy

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/30/vast-rightwing-conspiracy-media-clinton-obama

From birthers to teabaggers, from talkshow host Glenn Beck's denouncing Barack Obama's alleged "deep-seated hatred for white people" to Confederacy-worshipping congressman Joe Wilson's yelling "You lie!" at the president, it's clear that the extreme right is as irrational and vocal as it was in the 1990s. And now, more than ever, the extremists are virtually indistinguishable from the mainstream of the Republican party.

But another, equally toxic element has carried over from the 90s – an element that Gregory, not surprisingly, failed to bring up and that Clinton was too polite to mention. It is simply this: Major elements of the media, terrified of accusations that they're in the tank with Democrats and liberals, would rather deny reality than tell the simple truth. This abject spinelessness is a significant factor in how the lies of the right infect public discourse.

The trouble these days is that one of our two major parties has run entirely off the rails. And our media system, dependent as it is on false notions of objectivity, rarely acknowledges it.

The media's first obligation should be to the truth – not to some phony notion of journalistic balance. Evidently they have learned nothing after all these years.

[Demeter]

1. The Best Media Money Can Buy

And believe, me, they have been bought and sold into right-wing slavery.

[Octafish]

2. Kick for truth.

Now, let's spread the word and start the work of building a new media that serves democracy and peace, not the War Party.

IIM: I will not be anybody's slave, nor should anyone else.

[Doctor_J]

3. I don't think the media members are "afraid of being called liberal"

I think that 20 years of hiring practices have saturated the media with real, honest-to-god psychotic right wingers. Mika is not spineless - she's a republican whore. Same thing with Brian Williams and Charlie Gibson and all the rest.

[depakid]

4. And the same applies to seior news editors and subeditors

who make decisions about which stories are covered (or buried) and how they are written.

[jotsy]

5. MSM isn't about informing the public anymore, just conditioning it.

It's about the concentrated ownership of media venues, first and foremost. Deep pocket alliances are what's trying to keep the public from a more genuine information source, consider it a by product of monetary might and its consuming nature to control image and the perception of it.

There's even more money available for talking heads and other viral voices because big pharma now markets its fixes directly to an unsuspecting public, generating some serious ad revenue.

The gate keepers are shepherds of all messages, both real and imagined. When they chose to do the corporatocracy's bidding, they turned their backs to the public service nature of their calling, which in turn accelerated the process to widespread use of a more independent and peripheral media. Technology provided a venue for honest journalism to remain a factor and perhaps serve as a catalyst to shame more established venues into remembering what they're supposed to be standing for.

[Zoeisright]

6. I remember back in the 1970s when I learned that Pravda was owned

by the Soviet Government. I couldn't understand how media could work when it wasn't separate from government.

Now I know. It doesn't work. We get Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the Iraq War, teabaggers, health insurance executives playing people like puppets - it' amazing. And sick.

[yurbud]

7. it's not just fear of right wing media, it's fear of the owners of their own companies

Google GE CEO Jack Welch's newsroom tirade about NBC calling the 2000 election for Gore for the clearest example.