Category: Media

Media Reform Information Center

In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S.

…

in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world’s largest media corporation.

In 2004, Bagdikian’s revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations — Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) — now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric’s NBC is a close sixth.

http://www.corporations.org/me…

http://www.corporations.org/me…

A year ago, an “event” occurred while we were fighting amongst ourselves as to which was the better candidate – Hillary or Barak – a major news event went whistling over my head, or rather – a major news event was hopelessly under reported in the U.S.

I found myself searching for a credible back up to support my argument with an office wingnut that Al-Qaida had nothing at all to do with Saddam Hussein pre 9-11. This asshole is hopelessly mush-brained from years of a steady diet of Fox News, he thinks Hannity is “a good man” and that O’Reilly is “fair and balanced”.

I took it for granted, since I have been paying attention and have not subjected myself to the mind control of Fox News Propaganda, that when the media FINALLY forced the issue and made George Bush admit that Iraq, in his words, had “NOTHING”  to do with 9-11 that the issue was finally closed and everyone knew it. Until the office wingnut kept insisting that I didn’t know my history.

HA!! Guess What Folks!?? There are STILL wingnut idiots that didn’t get the memo. They still believe what they were told by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, et al that somehow someway sometime Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Al-Qaida and had his share of responsibility for 9-11.

There is a book by Vernor Vinge called a Fire Upon the Deep. It is a great space opera read, but that is not what this post is about. In the book there are many alien civilizations that use an intra-galactic network to communicate with each other. It is obviously modeled on the early internet. In this book it is often called “The Net of a Thousand Lies” as there is no way to verify every piece of information posted on it by ever poster. This too is similar to the internet. Which leads to the Dog’s question today; how do you decide what to trust and what to ignore?

“Originally posted at Squarestate.net“

No one’s talking about prosecuting Cheney, any more. Lots of distractions, these days. I hope the congress hasn’t forgotten about how important that is, too. All the happy talk in the world isn’t going to make everyone who lives outside our borders forget that we’re now officially a nation that tortures. Prosecuting the master mind under existing law would go a long way toward ending that (accurate) perception.

Last night on Hardball I watched a clip of Rush “anal cyst” Limbaugh contorting facts until they were unrecognizable, which is usually not surprising, but for the blatant hypocrisy of the direction he was going.

He was trying very hard to convince his audience of drooling idiots that the elderly Annapolis resident that spent his life on the extreme political fringes even further to the right of the Ku Klux Klan was actually, you guessed it, a lefty liberal pinko Berkenstock wearing Prius driving hippy.

He made this convoluted and dubious argument in part by stating that James von Brunn, the 88 year old white supremacist and vile racist that went to the Holocaust Museum exercising his Second Amendment Right by killing an innocent employee was a liberal because he opposed the nomination of John McCain.

That’s right, the same Rush Limbaugh that opposed the nomination of John McCain.

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post has a long history of shameless bias and insensitivity. This is, after all, the paper that published a cartoon portraying President Obama as a monkey being shot to death.

Now the Post has moved their repulsive imagery onto the front page and presented it as news.

What first drew my attention to this was the utterly disgusting reference to the death of David Carradine. What Post editors must have thought was a cutesy play off of “Kung Fu,” the TV series in which Carradine starred, was entirely inappropriate and shockingly lacking in sympathy for the deceased’s family and friends.

But upon further examination, I noticed that the image at the top was no less repulsive.