The myth of the liberal media bias was created decades ago but the talking points eventually stuck. Thankfully the only good thing from the past eight years is the obvious fact that there is no liberal media bias. In fact, it is quite obvious that the opposite is the case. There is a corporate media bias. Thanks to the concerted deregulation efforts of the Bush Administration in the media, all mainstream media is now owned and controlled by less than 10 companies. They are also primarily owned by pro-GOP companies. NBC for example is owned by General Electric, who does millions of dollars worth of business with the Bush government. Recently, I saw a new McCain ad extolling the gracious press for Sarah “The Empty Moose” Palin. Featured prominently was a recent gushing report from the Wall Street Journal. Of course many may have forgotten that the WSJ was recently bought by Rupert Murdoch, who promptly fired all independent thinkers and replaced them with GOP henchmen. This is the damage that is done by a corporate media. The truth is packaged instead of reported.
Looking back over the past decade it is impossible to have any discourse on the state of the media without a discussion of the FOX effect. FOX has never been a news agency. It has been a propaganda arm of the Murdoch Conservative News Empire. Murdoch, an Australian billionaire is renowned for his conservative bent and desire to see it spread worldwide. He subsidizes the New York Post to the tune of multi-million dollar losses every year simply to keep his twisted version of reality on the New York streets. Now, everyone knew when FOX came out that it was a joke, and a poorly crafted one. There was no real news. Their silly catch phrases were immediately identified as being designed to be the polar opposite of what they really represented. They were not fair and balanced; they were unfair and imbalanced to the right. They never “reported and let you decide”; they packaged their opinion as news and tried to tell you what to think. Their broadcasts were all designed to sell the GOP talking points. They cast clearly right-wing-nuts such as Bill O’Reilly as “moderates” or independents and gave them prime-time news-opinion slots. Even the show that was supposed to present both sides, Hannity and Colmes was designed to give the right wing opinion far more weight. It started by matching up the belligerent and jaw-jutting Hannity as the right wing opinion with the milquetoast quiet guy in Colmes as the “left” opinion. They would schedule far right wingers as guests and match them up with moderates; but they pretended the moderates were left-wingers. The result is that all of the coverage was heavily slanted to the right and the moderate voices began being marketed as the left, all but eliminating true liberal opinion from the network. We saw the results immediately, as it was FOX that initially called Florida for George W. Bush, when they never should have. The other networks, fearing they were being “scooped”, followed suit. Never mind that the analyst “calling” it for Bush was actually related to him and that every fair analysis since proves that Gore actually won Florida.
The FOX effect would soon infiltrate other networks. Soon even formerly fair networks such as MSNBC copied the model. At one time, just a few years ago, the MSNBC prime time lineup included hosts such as Tucker Carlson, a noted Republican spinmeister and Joe Scarborough, a former GOP Congressman being offered as “independent.” Chris Matthews was the standard-bearer but he has always been a Bush apologist and was linked to Jack Abramoff as well. The result was palpable. The guests were all designed to copy the FOX model. Pat Buchanan was and still is a regular guest on all shows, despite the fact that he is as far right wing as humanly possible. But the people offered on the left were never far enough left to properly balance. Then something funny happened on the way to another propaganda network. Keith Olbermann entered the picture and the American people responded.
Olbermann would eventually start to balance out the prime time lineup by covering the stories previously covered up and presented the other opinion and often the unreported truth. His scathing “special comments” would gain instant fame on youtube as a truth starved nation was eagerly eating it up. He also restored some sanity to the guest list and eventually would bring in a real liberal, Rachel Maddow, of Air America fame. I am sure the network big wigs assumed Olbermann would fail but instead he started beating everyone, including O’Reilly in the ratings. Seems America had finally caught on that they were being spoon fed GOP talking points instead of the news. They liked a show that actually tried to discuss the truth. Soon Tucker would be jettisoned by the network and Scarborough had been shifted to the AM shows because he was not being bought anymore by the public as a “regular Joe.” Recently it was announced that Maddow would get her own show; a real sign of the times and admission by MSNBC that the balance of power had finally started to shift back to the center. Things were looking great for the upcoming election season. You still had GOP shills such as Matthews and Buchanan but at least you had Olbermann and Maddow to provide balance. Never mind that you would still see discredited folks such as Stephen Hayes and Michael Brown on the NBC networks, at least there was someone to counter the spin and talking points with some reality.
Apparently however, the folks who really call the shots behind the scenes have decided that they do not want that honesty this election season. It was announced today that MSNBC has pulled Olbermann and Matthews as the co-anchors of their election season coverage. The alleged reason is there was “growing criticism” that they were too opinionated. Can’t have honest opinions during a corporate election now can we? They were afraid supposedly that they could not be seen as neutral. Are you kidding me? Do you think Brit Hume is seen as neutral? What about Wolf Blitzer? These are all administration whores dressed up as “neutral” newsmen. The report of this change went on to criticize Olbermann for being critical of the GOP for airing an 11 minute tribute to 9-11 during the RNC. Unfortunately for the corporate media heads, Olbermann, who lost friends in the attacks, was spot-on. The “tribute” was nothing more than political theater using the memories of the dead for political gain. The images used were crude and insensitive. I understand the GOP desire to pay tribute to 9-11 because without it they would not have much control over anything nowadays but Olbermann was correct to denounce it. The fact that MSNBC is using that brief apology and that is all Olbermann did - apologize, as an excuse is beyond reprehensible.
They are saying that this will allow Olbermann and Matthews more opportunity to express their views but this sure smells like the folks who have the contracts with the government and want those dollars to keep rolling in have decided to lay the ax to the root of any real criticism. Is news supposed to be neutral? Sure, in terms of uncovering the truth. If that truth however implicates one party or the other, it is not being partisan to report that truth. THAT is where this explanation falls short. News is not supposed to be a blank slate for political parties to use as they see fit. There should be discernment and follow up questions. Just once when John McCain says his silly “drill here, drill now” sound bite I would like to see someone in the media ask him, WHY? Why, when all studies have concluded that it will result in nothing for 30 years and even then, it will have no real effect at all. Just once when a GOP talking head claims that Palin has “executive” experience, I would like to see a reporter tear that argument apart. We do not need the media to regurgitate what the candidates say. We need them to analyze them for accuracy and report the truth, not talking points.
We started to see glimmers of this. Last week Campbell Brown of CNN grilled a top McCain flack about the obvious experience problem their campaign has with Sarah Palin. The poor flack had been so unused to actually having his nonsensical talking points questioned that he became all flustered and couldn’t answer. The McCain team response was to cancel the appearance for McCain on that evening’s Larry King Live show; out of pure spite. They told CNN they canceled the appearance because they felt Brown had “crossed the line.” I kid you not. A journalist asked real questions of a candidate’s spokesperson and THAT is deemed as crossing the line. When asked about Palin not doing the Sunday talk show circuit, the campaign arrogantly replied that they can “do whatever we want.” So they hide Palin from the media because they know she cannot answer anything substantively and think they can dictate to the media. As if the media needs to McCain campaign and not the other way around. Why can they be so arrogant? Because the media is owned by administration puppets who know that if the Campbell Brown’s of the world get too honest, they can be cut off at the knees. They can be arrogant because they know that if the Keith Olbermann’s of the world hit too close to the truth, they can be removed as the anchor of the network election coverage.
John McCain can run roughshod over the corporate media because he knows they want him elected. Not the actual persons covering the news but the people behind the decisions. The men behind the curtain. The same ones who take a Katie Couric interview with John McCain and cut out an incorrect answer on foreign policy and splice in stock footage and a sound bite. When caught, they have the audacity to say, “Mistakes happen.” Yeah, so does a corporate media pimping propaganda through the subversion of democracy. It is a shame; there had finally been some progress in the media lately. The Tuckers of the world had finally been exposed and dumped. The balance had started to shift back to the center but someone in the back office took note and just shoved it violently back to the right. We can’t have the truth ruining a corporately staged election now can we?
Anthony Wade, a contributing writer to opednews.com, is dedicated to educating the populace to the lies and abuses of the government. He is a 41-year-old independent writer from New York with political commentary articles seen on multiple websites. A Christian progressive and professional Rehabilitation Counselor working with the poor and disabled, Mr. Wade believes that you can have faith and hold elected officials accountable for lies and excess.
Wade's article does a good job summarizing some of the many manipulations that have been occuring in the press. Here on the web, most all OpEdNews.com readers are familiar with the story, but we need to constantly replenish our ammunition wagons in order to debate with the Right a key salient: that the mainstream media has lost its independence.
Media consolidation has been a largely unhindered express train towards positioning Right wing views favored by a small group of stoutly Republican media moguls. Figures like Phil Donahue, and now Olbermann, have been victimized by the political undercurrents driving coverage steadily rightward.
For many years the transition was subtle, a series of backroom deals between the Bush administration's FCC and cronies like Murdoch. The end result has been a dumbing down of the news quality and the mainstreaming of what I call censorship-by-omission. What we don't learn, won't threaten the status quo, or so they believe.
The next goal needs to be educating the masses about how wrong it is to only get one side in the political debate. Maybe by appealing to Americans' sense of fairness, we can push this issue to the center.
It's no surprise that the fairness issue has been pushed into the shadows by the other side. Keeping people ignorant is the ONLY way the more popular appeal of progressive values (and of Reason itself) can be overcome by the less popular Right.
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JohnPeebles (8 articles, 10 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 40 comments)
on Monday, September 8, 2008 at 3:39:58 PM
The history of oligarchic control of the media is much longer than you seem to realize. Read The Political Economy of Media by Robert McChesney. The capitalists' control of journalism was so well established by the early 20th century that Upton Sinclair wrote The Brass Check (1919), which was even more critical of capitalist journalism than The Jungle was of capitalist industry. The thesis of the book was that "American Journalism is a class institution serving the rich and spurning the poor."
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Jim Eldon (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 184 comments)
on Monday, September 8, 2008 at 4:24:10 PM
It goes back centuries with the advent of the printing press. Of course, today the control is virtually total. Lets face it, control goes back thousands of years. Only the elite were educated and had time to read, and those who could write were paid by the elite to write. Writing that Plato a fascist was not good for your career.
As Mark Twain said, those who do not read newspapers (MSM) are uninformed, those who read them are misinformed.
Even the internet has so much misinformation and is under control to a large extent now. Without the ability to reason and think, people just select articles to read that fit their own ideology. The menu of the Consensus Reality has many choices.
Outside the Consensus reality, those who had crossed the line are ridiculed, attacked or worse. Hired hacks come in to disrupt discussions on these issues (you know who they are).
Olberman, Goodman, Chomsky, Cockburn, etc are gatekeepers. They do not cross the line of the approved consensus reality. Polarizing the so called left and so called right is part of their divide and rule strategy. People at the bottom 90% argue with each other over their different views, while the important issues are not discussed much, and perhaps not even understood.
Over a hunderd articles about Palin while the government bailout of Fannie and Freddie is met with a yawn.
by
pft (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 576 comments)
on Monday, September 8, 2008 at 7:36:46 PM
AS Many here also know, debate about the U.S. and just about any aspect of society, government and so forth is clearly constrained. A good example is the left wing press - just as controlled corporately and by the CIA as is the MSM. Indeed, the so-called left wing press has been even more virulent in its criticism of various issues (e.g., 9/11 truth) than has the right wing. But both wings are truly connected to the same corporate-secret government vulture and you can expect no real truth from the bird as a whole. Just the same old myths, the same old lies.
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richard (0 articles, 5 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 976 comments)
on Monday, September 8, 2008 at 4:59:25 PM
They're only doing what they should have done long ago
"MSNBC Removes Olbermann and Bows to Internal Corporate Pressure to Quash Fairness"
Just the opposite. This is not about "quashing fairness", it's about adopting some fairness. The problem with MSNBC is that they've been putting these guys with their blatant left leanings in positions as anchors and moderators, positions which should be occupied by people without demonstrable bias, even though we all know they're still mostly all Democrats at heart.
They'll still be appearing in analyst/opinion positions, which is entirely fine, assuming hopefully they also have some balance on the other side. They'll actually have much more freedom to express themselves in this more proper position.
By your logic, having Sean Hannity anchor/co-anchor the Democrat convention, or Bill O'Reilly moderating a debate would be perfectly fine. I wouldn't be comfortable with that, just as you shouldn't be about Olberman and Matthews doing so.
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Alan Williams (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 776 comments)
on Monday, September 8, 2008 at 5:42:06 PM
...a studied and deliberate effort to remove the middle ground from the debate, the only viable position remaining is where one's bottom-line values truly abide. These are the non-negotiable, deeply held, beliefs and values that are not available for debate or discussion.
While I would be willing to compromise with individuals whose values and beliefs allow for the steering of the ship of state down the middle, there is nothing to negotiate with or about when dealing with neo-conservatives. They have made the middle ground radioactive with their constant repetition of right wing positions and talking points.
So now the body politic can not only ridicule the quality of one's public service, but the fact that they've served the public trust at all. This is lawless nonsensical rhetoric. Repeating it in the public commons IS harmful and DOES weaken society. It teaches children and supports adults who value winning above all other values.
If one wins according to fairly constructed, reasonable rules of conduct, then that is a valuable accomplishment which society can and should support. Winning through deceit and unethical conduct is not a meaningful achievement and society can, but should not, support it.
Not only did the Harvard Negotiation Project (HNP) pull the covers on the naked capitalistic agenda for promoting open warfare in the Middle East, they proved that when both sides want to negotiate for peace, they can do so based purely on mutual interests.
But if either side does not want peace, it doesn't matter what the other side wants, they are FORCED by the nature of our shared existence on this planet to, AT A MINIMUM, engage in pointless, meaningless tit for tat.
I've had just about a snootful of meaninglessness. This marginalization of Keith Olbermann and his budding media influence is complete horseshit.
Identify your targets people, and then neutralize at will. The more random and haphazard the implementation of the plan, the better.
Whether you choose violence or non-violence is up to you. But be advised that time has become a factor in rectifying the ills of the current world leadership, so include this calculation in your decision to choose your tactics and your tools.
Play to your strengths and attack THEIR'S vigorously.
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Richard Volaar (26 articles, 0 quicklinks, 132 diaries, 410 comments)
on Monday, September 8, 2008 at 9:00:51 PM
Our Last Bastion of Free Speech O'Hope Gone........
Comment from Ratings: Well we knew it would come sooner or later. Keith O got a lot of good lefthooks in though. Keith O was a K.O. Knockout. Always right on the money. Edward R. Murrow is rolling in his grave. So is George Orwell.
Good night and Good luck Keith O. Your voice will be sorely missed in the largest majority.
What else can you say?
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cheyanne (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 14 comments)
on Monday, September 8, 2008 at 6:51:27 PM
Very cool news there. O.K..... I see Rachel Maddow's on now at 9:00 Keith O is still on at 10. He's interviewing Obama.....Very cool.....
I still don't take back everything I said about 'em though as if he were not still on the air. I bet they canned him and Matthews because of their "get out your shovel" incidents. Each one telling the other their bullshine was getting deep and arguing back and forth.
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cheyanne (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 14 comments)
on Monday, September 8, 2008 at 9:36:10 PM
maybe we are looking at two different people... The Matthews I saw was talking about shivers whenever he heard Obama speak...
Having Olberman as a news anchor is as absurd as having Rush Limbaugh at the table.. Sorry, but you can't say that this is a shot against fairness.. that just does not ring true AT ALL...
Ciao, CZ
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steve scheetz (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 734 comments)
on Monday, September 8, 2008 at 8:32:03 PM
So, having one cable news network exspouse an exclusive pro-Republican point of view in their campaign coverage (Fox) is fair while balancing that with another cable news network that exspouses a prominent pro-Democratic point of view in their campaign coverage (MSNBC) is not fair?
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Robert Arend (5 articles, 17 quicklinks, 19 diaries, 183 comments)
on Monday, September 8, 2008 at 10:28:50 PM
...there is no more "fair." The Right Wing neo-conservatives took the grounds of fair play away.
There is only war that's left, I assure you. We can dilly-dally with 10 years of tit-for-tat, but we're wasting valuable time that we haven't got to spare.
If all we can do is have one network versus another, that is what we'll have to settle for. For now. It's all they're willing to give. The rest of us have been unwilling to stage an effective and well-organized boycott of corporate interests.
Before we can get back to "fair" we need a "fairness" doctrine. The one that Reagan, Bush, Clinton and finally, Bush, did away with allowing for complete corporate control.
We have what we have and, no, it isn't right, fair, just or objective. It's not even journalism any longer.
What we will get is what we are willing to fight to the death for.
Those jack-booted thugs in St. Paul and even Denver weren't playing around...they were an overwhelming force designed to suppress the most over-the-top civil disturbance imaginable -- on par with what the British faced in Northern Ireland.
When your partner fancies themselves an opponent, they FORCE you to adopt a counter-strategy.
We have to fight. We've been called out into the streets by a bully that tortures, lies, steals and corrupts everything it touches.
There is no longer a middle of the road solution.
We have to AT LEAST walk out there and bloody somebody's g-damn nose or we won't be able to walk on our own hometown streets. Those friggin' cameras at every intersection...they're there for conditioning...their final placement will allow for the Total Surveillance Society. We won't be able to do a damn thing without our local law enforcement knowing about it.
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Richard Volaar (26 articles, 0 quicklinks, 132 diaries, 410 comments)
on Monday, September 8, 2008 at 10:54:59 PM
Hold On To What We Got To Get Back What Was Stolen From Us
I understand and agree with all you have clarified here. However, I believe we must fight fire with fire with all that remains to counter the neo-propaganda machine, even to holding on to the little we have, such as Olbermann, in order to finally pull the rug out from under those traitors and take back methodically that which has been stolen from us__our country.
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Robert Arend (5 articles, 17 quicklinks, 19 diaries, 183 comments)
on Tuesday, September 9, 2008 at 12:06:01 AM
You think Matthews is ok because of the Fox effect. Go through my archive and by all means tell me where I am wrong. This is a guy that gave a full hour to Anne Coulter, so spare me.
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Anthony Wade (156 articles, 2 quicklinks, 44 diaries, 683 comments)
on Monday, September 8, 2008 at 10:44:52 PM
.... he treated her with complete disdain. He quite visibly hated her, and wanted the audience to know it. Matthews is an old-style Tip O'Neil liberal, and to say that he's somehow on the right because he had Coulter on in order to trash her makes no sense. You guys pick a few little episodes or circumstances and ignore what makes up the man in full context.
