By Kevin Stoda
I was happy to see Senator Al Franken taking Comcast and NBC to task for their straight-faced lies to him and his office's investigation of the largest merger in media in recent memory. He was merciless and noted how many different ways theses company's lawyers were misleading the government in the current merger discussions--i.e. These two companies are not interested in fairness and good local journalistic access.
The Huffington Post got the whole story here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-silver/senator-franken-rips-into_b_450736.html
However, the major problem in for all of us is the current collapse in America (and worldwide) of journalism as a wage-earning industry. This slide has been a decades-long crash in good journalistic media in the USA--a nation taken like a pig to slaughter in the recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The new internet media may have sped up this crashing around us of good media in most places where it counts in America-but it is the wholesale disregard of the USA government in under-financing a free press that has led to the demise in America.
As Franken stated, "It matters who runs our media."
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4010
Robert McChesney and John Nichols note that if we spent as much as is normal for good democratic countries to spend promoting a FREE PRESS, we would have in America a national budget of 23 billion dollars to underwrite all the good programming, journalistic access, and public access points in our communities. No wonder America is not in the top 10 democracies on Planet Earth according to many different evaluations made by social scientists and political economic institutions around the globe in recent years.
With the rise of independent blogging, the powers-that-be run the big media news networks like their own chiefdoms (thief-doms), are now really throwing journalism to the dogs--just as America falls and falls in world-wide rankings as a democracy.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/2/The-US-Government-Has-Lost-by-Dave-Lindorff-100205-553.html
Just today, I read David Lindorff's article that "The US Government Has [actually] Lost Its Reason for Being". That is sad and too often true. We need to start doing some things right, America.What we need for our FREEDOM of the PRESS to become reality is what...
freepress.net and fair.org have been demanding for years.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=5
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