Corporate Media: Beware The Propaganda

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG BY MARK KARLINeware The PropagandaA Corporate Media Owned by Wealthy Interests is Going to Disseminate Propaganda Aimed at Perpetuating Wealth for the Wealthy.

Why is this so hard to understand? If the airwaves were truly public, we would see diversity in news and the return of hundreds of billions of dollars in broadcast profits to the public treasury.

But in the spirit of corporate welfare, private corporations have been given or sold for nominal amounts the right to further enrich the wealthy and global businesses using airwaves that belong to the American citizens.  That's not free enterprise; that's socialism for the super rich and stockholders at the expense of the working stiff.

And what do we get from this socialized corporate bonanza?

We get entertainment and news that is just filler in between segments of advertising that make the owners of Big Media very wealthy indeed.  In fact, at a time when we most need a broadcast media with a sense of civic responsibility to sort out public policy issues, we get celebrity entertainment.

Politics has become just another reality TV show, a soap opera of the never-ending saga of Sara Palin.  Or there is the daily overload of the "Tea Party," which was literally created in part by FOX Fraudcasting and its allies in the right wing. Television media -- and radio to a great extent -- aren't neutral providers of information; they have taken sides in the great political class conflict of our time, and they side with the numbing message that the status quo of trickle down corporate welfare is good for America, when, in reality, it's good for the owners of television outlets but not for the average American.

Politics has been reduced to a trivialized game of "American Idol on Capitol Hill."  Public policy becomes more an issue of covering spectacle and personality trivia and speculation than significant issues that confront the nation.

Distraction of the masses is good for the corporate media barons, as they consolidate ownership of Big Media, because a poorly or misinformed public is easier to feed lies to.

When Sarah Palin and the Tea Party become real soap operas, who is able to tell the difference from the soaps that are generated out of a script room so that the stations can sell soap and feminine hygiene products?

For some reason, wealthy Democrats have shown little interest in buying media, maybe because they feel good talking about economic justice but less motivated to see the Reagan tax cuts rolled back, so they are content with the merger of GOP talking points, celebrity news, personality politics and entertainment that dominate what used to be called "news."

It's not news.

It's the rich broadcast media corporations that thrive on increased ratings when all news becomes titillation and sensationalism.

You can make a killing that way, and make the very rich even richer, because it's much easier, to paraphrase Marie Antoinette, to "Let them watch Sarah!" than to actually engage in reporting on the great issues of the day.

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG BY MARK KARLIN

Let The Sun Shine In......

The Brutal Clarity of the "L" Word

Keep telling low-information people that they are in hell, they will vote for the devil, himself, to get out.....of course, they will find themselves in the deeper recesses of the pit.

Last week, NY Times economics correspondent Floyd Norris noted a major development that, as major developments go, is elsewhere observed with peculiar infrequency: "The American economy," began Norris' lede, "appears to be in a cyclical recovery that is gaining strength.

"Firms have begun to hire," he continued -- indeed, in the first quarter alone the economy added more than a million jobs, "the best performance since the spring of 2005" -- and of perhaps even better news for the long-term outlook, that prime mover of the economic machine, consumer spending, "seems to be accelerating."

Additionally, the stock market has rallied more than 3,000 points since President Obama took office, and that's enormously good news for many an individual's retirement plans.
So all in all, the economic legacy of the previous administration's blinding misrule, mismanagement and miscalculation is happily turning from present reality to good-riddance history.

Yet, although we're hardly out of the woods, which even the White House is randy to remind us at every podium and press-release opportunity, "it is surprising," wrote Norris, "that many commentators ... seem to doubt that such a thing could possibly be happening."

Worse, in this layman's opinion, is that their complicating "doubt" is often converted to simple dismissal, which, in J.M. Keynes' famous metaphorical terms, only suppresses the economy's "animal spirits" -- a collective kind of spooky financial zeitgeist that plagued FDR's New Dealers to a palsied frustration; they soon found themselves boxing dark and elusive shadows rather than toasting the economy's somewhat optimistic tangibles. It's a pathology that feeds on itself.

In Norris' answer to Why all the doubt (and dismissal)? he offered several explanations "for the glum outlook that are unrelated to the actual economic data," including empirical evidence of traditionally slow recoveries; economic gurus' mortification at having blown past predictions, so now there exists their "understandable hesitation to appear foolishly optimistic again"; those plucky Republicans who "are loath to give President Obama credit for anything"; and, counterintuitively, Congressional Democrats who "would love to give the president credit" but also want "another stimulus bill ... [and] chances for that are not enhanced by the perception the economy is getting better."

Given the shortest shrift in Norris' piece, however, is possibly the most conspicuous reason for the nation's sustained gloom: the GOP's cranky, relentlessly depressing doomsday machine (see above; the Great Depression's psychological factors).

I'm certainly not saying that 24/7 Republican gloom and doom is the principal contributor to the economy's structural troubles -- of which there are many, most notably vast inequalities in wealth and the redistributive shortfalls that maintain and exacerbate those undeserved inequalities -- but in the way of unremitting drags on indispensible optimism, you'll find no better source than the Grand Old Party.

To hear Republicans tell it, we are, in fact, doomed. The economy may have added hundreds of thousands of jobs, the markets may be bubbling upwards, and consumer spending and business investment may indeed be on the wary uptick, but we're doomed, they'll tell you: doomed, Doomed, DOOMED!

Sure, that's politics; that's the way it goes, and no one should expect those tirelessly patriotic hypesters of the indomitable American Spirit and the American Way and the American Dream to say anything different (wait, is there a rhetorical flaw somewhere in that?). There are, after all, only 535 jobs + 1 that Republicans are interested in -- and the invincible gloom of "Anything is better than this" is always a splendid entry in the "Objectives" section of any political resumé.

No, what irks me -- and quite possibly irks Floyd Norris -- is that Democrats are so repeatedly hesitant to rebuff the Republicans' gloom: Isn't it becoming a trifle close to reelection time to be downplaying economic improvement, notwithstanding the Democratic desire for an additional stimulus package?

But what irks even more is Democratic resistance to the simple yet devastatingly accurate use of the "L" word: Republicans, despite alpine mountains of economic data which prove otherwise, are simply lying to the American people when they hammer away at the invented ineffectiveness of last year's stimulus package -- hundreds of billions spent and "Not one job created," they cry.

There's no better word for it. They're lying. Republicans aren't just distorting, they're not merely twisting, and they're far exceeding any tasteful boundaries of political spin. They're lying. They know it and Democrats know it; problem is, millions of low-information, American would-be consumers -- those prime movers -- don't know it.

On the whole, the news that first filters down and registers among habitually inattentive voters is the Big Bad Lie of altogether negative information. And the only way to effectively combat and conquer the Lie is to pointedly, ruthlessly call it what it is: that makes the news -- pound, pound, pound, Democrats Call Republicans Liars, pound, pound, pound -- and that then registers in the woefully part-time civic mind.

Little lightbulbs ensue.

Some might object that calling a lie a lie -- traditionally, to be sure, a political no-no -- would only add hostility to our already overhostile and polarized environment. No doubt, it would. The counter-objection, however, is that calling a lie a lie adds perhaps brutal but necessary clarity.

Please respond to P.M.'s commentary by leaving comments below and sharing them with the BuzzFlash community. For personal questions or comments you can contact him at fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

Let The Sun Shine In......

Would Karl Rove Lie About His Own Name?

Me thinks he would, but doubt it would work. Most people in the world would recognize the fat, pink frog.

Rove Falsely Claims Bush Administration Never Said Iraqi Oil Revenue Would Help Pay For War

In his new book and in recent media appearances promoting it, former top Bush aide Karl Rove has been revising the history of the Iraq war, particularly regarding the issue of Saddam Hussien’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Today on NBC’s Meet the Press, Rove continued with his Iraq war history revision campaign. Noting that the Bush administration had mishandled the management of the war, host Tom Brokaw mentioned that “the cost of the war skyrocketed almost from the beginning. There was not a sharing of the oil revenue that a lot of people had promised.” But Rove flatly denied that the Bush administration said Iraqi oil revenues would help pay for the war:

ROVE: No, no. Tom with all due respect that was not the policy of our government that we were going to go into Iraq and take their resources in order to pay for the cost of the war. … [T]he suggestion that somehow or another the administration had as its policy, “We’re going to go in to Iraq and take their resource and pay for the war” is not accurate.

Rove’s claim is simply not true. In fact, days after the U.S. invasion, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a congressional panel that Iraqi oil revenues would help pay for reconstructing the country, i.e. a cost of the war. “The oil revenue of that country could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We’re dealing with a country that could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon,” he said.

One month before the war, then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Iraq “is a rather wealthy country. … And so there are a variety of means that Iraq has to be able to shoulder much of the burden for their own reconstruction.”

Since the start of the Iraq war, the U.S. has spent tens of billions of dollars in reconstruction costs.

Let The Sun Shine In......