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Content is heavily censored by conglomerates controlling media empires for profit, "not to inform, educate, and agitate...." With no competition, they cut staff, use wire services over their own reporting, and lost "significance as sources of (real) news." Avoiding controversy and pleasing advertisers counts most, and on political issues they "suck up to power and don't ask (hard) questions...."
The relevant one for consumers is "why the hell should we pay for their misinformation?" In increasing numbers, they've stopped, preferring instead to get reliable information from independent print and online sources.
It shows that "while there might not be a future for soulless, zombie monopoly newspapers, there is a future for journalism." Niman sheds no tears for the corporate kind and hopes that many credible alternatives will replace them.
PC's Top 25 2008 - 2009 Stories
(1) US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street
Americans get the best democracy money can money, coming more than ever today from Wall Street. "Since 2001, eight of the most troubled firms have donated $64.2 million to congressional candidates, presidential candidates and the Republican and Democratic parties." Is it surprising that they own them? As senators, Barack Obama and John McCain got "a combined total of $3.1 million."
Influential House and Senate finance and banking committee members got $5.2 million from bailout recipients like Goldman Sachs, Citibank, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and others. In the last election cycle, Obama received at least $4.3 million from the same ones, investments that yielded big returns.
From 1998 - 2007, financial and banking companies "spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists." In 1999, Glass-Steagall was repealed, the landmark 1933 law that curbed speculation and separated commercial from investment banks and insurance companies. In January 2000, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act legitimized swap agreements and other hybrid instruments, at the core of today's problems by preventing regulatory oversight of derivatives and leveraging, thus letting Wall Street legally pillage and speculate, so they did.
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