… let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works: the president makes decisions. He’s the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know – fiction!
Because really, what incentive do these people have to answer your questions, after all? I mean, nothing satisfies you.
kredwyn is so totally doing that Novel in a month marathon thing and we should all be encouraging her and anyone else brave enough to attempt it, but that’s not what I’m here to talk to you about.
I want to talk about Media Complicity.
Tuesday’s performance by NBC/MSNBC/GE and by both Brian Williams and Timmeh was beyond pathetic.
But first of all Dan Abrams, BREAKING: CAMBODIAN FUCKING SEX TOURS INSTEAD OF A REPEAT!!!???
Have to blame corporate though for the shabby behavior of the Moderators.
From word one the sneering sarcasm and hostility of their every utterance was a burning stain on the filthy piss smelling hole that jack-off journalism has become. A cynical collection of Thug talking points and dismissive condescension.
How about them Dodd minutes?
They wanted a cock fight and did everything they could to get one. I’m not going to pick a winner. We all lost.
They are bad for America.
I want to educate them and baseball bats are nicely balanced tools (and I am a such a Mets fan), but a golf club swing is so much more gratifying than some.
The idiocy of it is that they need us, without our money and/or eyeballs they are nothing. I’m ashamed to be a news junkie but what can I do? I’m not Nielsened (that I know), and I do love me a good train wreck.
The Sunday Shows don’t even advertise things that you buy. They advertise stocks that investors buy and so Faux News seems so much less disappointing to me than the “real” thing because at least I know what to expect.
As John Kerry said-
But the main question is: what can we do about it? I’m going to make this case in any way I can. Television, newspapers, you name it. There’s no magic bullet to this; we simply need to apply as much pressure as possible in as many ways as possible. I’ll be back with some specific actions from time to time because concerted action by many people toward a single goal gets the best results. But do as much as you can all the time. Drop by your representatives’ office and let them know your feelings. Write, call, fax, email, get in contact any way you can. These actions aren’t glamorous, but they really do make a difference. And don’t lose faith. The other side in this debate is intent on outlasting us, convinced that we’ll give up. You and I have to make sure that they are wrong on that.
Well, that’s about what we can do but the most important part is this one-
And don’t lose faith. The other side in this debate is intent on outlasting us, convinced that we’ll give up. You and I have to make sure that they are wrong on that.
So there you are.
No one has promised you a “magic bullet”, you have to make this case any way you can. You have to “apply as much pressure as possible in as many ways as possible.” “Do as much as you can all the time.” “These actions aren’t glamorous, but they really do make a difference.” Temporary setbacks are just that unless you give up.
Do you want them to have that victory?
I say never. “Live Free or Die.”
The Media is going to be the slowest of institutions to change. They’re the very ground we’re fighting on, the embodiment of late 20th Century corporate power. Here on the tubz we fight free. As in cheap. As in 41 cents for a Benjamin Franklin letter, he of deserving neither security or liberty fame.
The limit of this tool is the limit of your imagination, just as for any artist. There is what is and then there is what you wish to see.
If the line does not look like a tree, change it until it does.
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The Japanese media is even worse. Here there is no such thing an independent media as the only way a reporter can write a story on almost any subject they must belong to a press club. Thus those providing the information control the media because they control the message.
… I read on my AOL “headlines” that a new poll says folks find Iran to be the most dangerous nation.
Boggles the mind.
Great post, ek.
I’m back on dry land.
For the last three weeks, since we got within satelite radio range, I’ve been living on the BBC World Service to support my news habit.
The story that stuck most in my mind was of the capsizing of an Indonesian ferry caused by the passengers crowding onto the topmost deck so they could use their cell phones as they approached port. Dozens were killed and more are still “missing”.
So we know that cell phones can kill you, but it is claimed that they don’t cause brain damage. Evidence seems to suggest otherwise.
When Obama was asked about his halloween costume.
What. The. Fuck. It was indeed a farce.
from even talking with the dissemblers we hire to represent us is that not a single one is coming clean about one issue.
Globalization.
This has been “sold” to us as a push for the world to share markets.
What they are not telling anyone straight, loud and clear is that the US, its assets, its corporations, its wars, its mortgage industry and ooops! its people – have all been sold to the rest of the world.
Ask me for links and explanations if this is catching anyone broadside. Seems I but rant and rant.
The US is being prepared, all the martial law stuff, all the executive orders, all the other cognitive misstepping, for economic collapse. When the Chinese buy the houses in lots, there will be places prepared for the homeless to go, lest they take to the streets en masse. I knew a Chinese realtor working in the US who laughed and laughed about how everything played into Chinese hands, said they would eventually be taking Yellowstone Park for condos.
OK here’s an example of a full-time sold-out koolaid drunk on the subject of globalization (talk about not seeing the forest for the trees) and a resultant smackdown.
Or here is my series of comments resolving with “Dubai or not Dubai, the ultimate question.”
The fact – not theory – is that the US lacks the fiscal solvency to pick the country up off its face anymore. It has been utterly economically gouged and gutted. Whatever ensues will be the job of perhaps the Chinese or the global community.
I have gotten dinged at the big orange junior high for my position, that it is “an Illuminati” thing. Well if you own the banks, the World Bank, the IMF and a few other entities, you don’t need a conspiracy – you are a conspiracy. Conspiracy is a word suggesting frightened ruffians fleeing law under cover of night in a leaky boat. The real decisions are made at a cocktail party, a fundraiser, over a glass of the finest bourbon with no hiccuping back the words with a tentative “but we’ll see what the public thinks.”
Government is dead.
But hey, we’re still paying them for it.
E. K. Hornbeck: Mr. Brady, it is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
has established a beachhead in the land of pseudo-Democracy, replacing it with a measure of real Democracy.
What’s needed next is not to start developing the beachhead, but to use it to launch the effect into the mainland, where anti-Democracy media rules supreme and still, except for potshots from the beachhead (Media Matters, et al) unchallenged.
We need an “Educate the People” strategy: a website with real facts, and TV ads to push awareness of said site into the mass awareness. The current process of reaching people via Internet depends on a self-selected person who is lucky in their google searches. Here’s a sample TV spot, maybe 15 seconds with the voice-over: