I'MMA LET YOU FINISH
First? Really?
I posted this below, but I don't want to lose it on a "dead" thread:
Morning, my fellow free thinkers!
My next door neighbor and I were just talking about the "Conservative Rock Songs" list.
He agreed that it was so ridiculous.
"First of all, these are the people who want to tell the rest of us how we should live. They want to silence all of us who don't agree with them.
Rock was supposed to be about rebellion. What do these asshole have to rebel against? The fact that when they were in college, 'pater' drove the BMW to the country club on the day that they wanted to drive it to the pep rally?"
I said that "Every artist on that list should sue them for slander."
He said "The bottom line is they're trying to be cool. Too hard. And, no matter how hard they try to make it look otherwise, there is nothing cool or hip about fascism!"
Second? Fuck Bush.
It's weird that the media think that Chimpy's little boy ride in the cockpit is not weird
THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Earlier this week, I traveled to Baghdad to visit the capital of a free and democratic Iraq. It was an incredible feeling to stand in the cockpit of Air Force One and watch the pilot steer us in toward Baghdad.
I can't believe Patrick Murphy married out from under me. Sure, I'm already married and have kids and have a good ten years on him, but still...
wooogoooo
Damn,
Went to read someething else....coulda been a contendre!
.
The GOP:
The folks who brought the world the Islamic Republic of Iraq.
I'm with the first commenter:
I don't think it's about how many companies, I think it's about how many viewpoints. It is ENTIRELY the corporatist viewpoint now.
When is the last time you saw someone on TV discussing the benefits of joining a union? When is the last time you saw a discussion on the merits or downsides of nationalizing the oil companies?
These ideas simply are not allowed topics of discussion anymore. Not even to discuss the pros and cons. These topics are, in essence, banned. America no longer has an open and honest "marketplace of ideas."
Beware the power of conventional/common-sensical thinking.
It's weird that the media think that Chimpy's little boy ride in the cockpit is not weird
But if Bill Clinton had done that.
Bush is a wanna-be: a wanna-be warrior, a wanna-be businessman, a wanna-be sports team owner, a wanna-be badass, a wanna-be preznit.
A wanna-be human being.
Went to read someething else....coulda been a contendre!
Oh, sure. Blame it on your intellectual curiousity.
Azores summit hosts - 1, dudes with nucular weapons* - 0
Portugal captain Luis Figo selflessly lays off the ball to Deco, who sends a curling right-footed shot straight into the corner of the net from 20 yards out.
It was an incredible feeling to stand in the cockpit of Air Force One and watch the pilot steer us in toward Baghdad.
P O'Neill
Shame someone couldn't convince him that it'd be fun to go sky-diving.
Without a parachute.
From an interview with Chalmers Johnson from 2000:
:::What has been the role of the press in the United States in covering our foreign policy?
An interesting pattern has been revealed. Regional newspapers sometimes report on the doings of our empire. The Baltimore Sun, for example, revealed the details of our murderous operation in Honduras during the 1980s. Similarly, the San Jose Mercury News detailed the sale of crack cocaine in this country by the contra revolutionaries in Nicaragua in order to finance their efforts. What then happens is that the establishment press—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal—denounces the journalism of these regional newspapers. The regional publisher usually agrees, apologizes, and fires the journalist.
The CIA asks its inspector general to do a thorough investigation; he looks into the files and says, “There is no evidence for any of this.” However, simultaneously, a secret investigation is undertaken by the inspector general, and some years later it is revealed that, in so many words, the original story was largely true.
Last spring, the New York Times undertook its own investigation of the alleged “mistaken bombing” of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. It did this not because of regional newspapers in the United States but because of two prominent British newspapers that had put out strong details countering the official American view. But the Times dismissed this in a paragraph. The Times is looking suspiciously like our Pravda.
What do you mean?
It’s a defender of the faith. You don’t read the New York Times for news; you read it in order to figure out how you’re supposed to think about what is going on in the world. They explain it in such a way that you will not get disturbed about what our government is doing.:::
Oh, sure. Blame it on your intellectual curiousity.
Damn insatiable curiosity!!!!!! From Hells heart I stab at thee!
And actually it was a fucking Mathews transcript concerning his curiosity about whether Tuckedr thought Coulter teh Hot!
Which in a way puts the period on the comment you cited.
How you doing dear?
.
Wow, someone on the thread calls Yglesias a whippersnapper!
Yet another of young Matty's half-baked, fantasical expeditions into errant nonsense!
coincidentally, i had just posted the following down on the MEdia Maters thread:
Boehlert or no, there will be no change in the conduct of the press until media consolidation has been stopped and reversed...
i favor a Constitutional Amendment:
No person or organization or partnership or any other association of persons shall be permitted to own, or own a determinative number of shares in, more than two media outlets anywhere in the USofA...
any other expedient is doomed to fail.
folks like boehlert and media matters may rail against the storm, but it will have ZERO effect until and unless the power of the corporation is decoupled from the power of the press...
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WoodyGuthrie'sGuitar(aka... | Homepage | 06.17.06 - 10:28 am
Aside:
i was struck how he was living at home--presumably in elementary of secondary school--when the Nation spread came out?
which would make him, what, 25 today?
.
And actually it was a fucking Mathews transcript concerning his curiosity about whether Tuckedr thought Coulter teh Hot!
Anyone who would think Manny is "hot" must be a closet necrophile.
Shame someone couldn't convince him that it'd be fun to go sky-diving.
Without a parachute.
Wouldn't work, Terri C. Even the Chimp knows you don't jump without a chute.
The workable scenario is for the Chimp to be halfway down, pull the cord, and have him yell, "Damn it! There was supposed to be a chute in that bag, not Bartlett's poo-poo undies!"
The media business doesn't seem especially concentrated and it's becoming less rather than more concentrated.
All arrows are still pointed at the left-wing radicals -- whoever they are. It seems that asking for clean water, clean air, and an occasional raise in pay are now "radical left-wing proposals."
WGG,
He graduated college in 2003, so probably 24or 25, yes.
But that's no excuse for such a short memory. Moonbootica is what, 19? And she has an excellent asense of the scope of history.
Speaking of media, a REAL editor has died.
The consolidation of the media is markedly more noticable outside of major media markets, BTW.
What's the matter with Kansas, indeed.
Speaking of media, a REAL editor has died.
David Ehrenstein
Back when people did their jobs.
What are those "economic pressures"? You don't say, but the first thing that pops into my head is the high degree of economic security enjoyed by members of the fourth estate, who are now as much self-interested players as the members of the other three. The combination of fat paycheques and a general lack of qualifications (good hair and skin rather than intelligence and skill) have degraded the quality of mainstream journalism pretty precipitously.
Last week Matt Lauer had a special on "countdown to doomsday," which included the possibility of a killer meteor strike. Jon Stewart of course had a wonderful bit on it, and the point of it was that, with so many real doomsday scenarios to worry about, the corporate media seeks only to entertain us with scary stories more appropriate to adolescent and pot inspired late night bull sessions. Lauer is an idiot and all by himself embodies everything that is wrong with corporate media. But, oh my, he is certainly nice looking. And just think how much money he makes! He proves, as Auden says, that "we are children afraid of the dark, who have never been happy or good." And, in such instances, character really is fate.
Just heard on "Stardust Memories."
"To you I'm an atheist, to God I'm the loyal opposition."
Lauer is an idiot and all by himself embodies everything that is wrong with corporate media. But, oh my, he is certainly nice looking. And just think how much money he makes! He proves, as Auden says, that "we are children afraid of the dark, who have never been happy or good." And, in such instances, character really is fate.
michael
I don't think Matt Lauer is good looking.
I think he's a dork!
Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...
I would suggest that the laws enabling and facilitating the consolidation of the media have done precisely that. Granted, the Founders were concerned with restrictions placed by government rather than corporations when they wrote the first amendment. But I'm reasonably sure they would be appalled at this state of affairs.
I think Big Media Matt is way off on this one. The part he misses is, the media corporations don't necessarily work for their own specific interests, but for the interests of an entire class of corporations. They sort out the ownership issues later, because that situation tends toward fluidity.
Let me ask this question: Why is it that TV stations invariably accept questionable attack ads from the right, and just as inevitably turn them down from the left on some pretext or another?
This post also shows Matt's ignorance of the newspaper industry, where it's common for one chain to buy up all the dailies and weeklies ringing an urban center. Chain ownership is usually conservative, and real journalism gets choked as a result.
Matt reminds me of that old New Yorker cover that shows New York City as the center of the known universe. It's just not that way for the rest of us, Matt.
Good Gravy!
yglesias must be doubling up on the moron pills. Now 6 mega-corps own most media instead of just the previous 4.
Can anybody say clear channel? If you live in the "heartland" you get rat-wing talking points shoved up your ass continuously. Right now several major cities tv channels are owned by the same company and share the same news programs! "Local" news beamed in from headquarters located some where else. How about koppel reading the names of the dead? A major corp decided large areas of the US won't see that.
yglesias is so far in the weeds I'd have to wonder if just types crap like is sometimes to see if anybody will call him on it.
When McClatchy acquired Knight Ridder, the first thing it did was sell off several of the papers to lesser corporations.
The second thing was hand control of the fabulous KR Washington bureau, which has broken story after story about administration misdeeds, to its own bureau chief. McClatchy's Washington bureau has only a couple of national correspondents. The rest just cover their local papers' delegation, so if Congressman Yahoo from Butte issues a press release, the bureau covers it for the local paper.
McClatchy over all is a good organization but I have severe doubts about what impact it will have on national reporting. That's what's wrong with corporate ownership--these corporations have chipped, sliced and diced, and merged their own staffs so much,cut back on costly foreign coverage, gone so local in many cases that they've had to leave national coverage to an ever decreasing number of other newspapers, so if they choose to ignore something, there are no other voices to dissent.
You used to be able to count on the Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Miami Herald or Detroit Free Press, among others, to come up with zinger national or foreign stories. Those days are gone.
Matt's analysis here is shockingly shallow. Consolidation isnt the whole story but it sure is a big part. Yes there are other factors, esp the fallout from the Telecom Act of 96 which, BTW, brought unprecedented consolidation. The only issue that might arguably supersede consolidation is the repeal under Reagan of the Fairness Doctrine. Consolidation has had a pernicious effect even on those entities that have not been sucked into the corporate machine, because consolidation affects the market - it removes excellence and replaces it with "what sells", enabling the conservative noise machine to infect the discussion with all manner of distractions and (wittingly or not) psy-ops. After the standards are set, it doesnt matter who your parent company is - you will tow the line if you want to sell copy, and the consolidation is what made the new "standards" happen in the first place.
Here's the point: we cannot reduce our options to the false choice of either taking back the media or building our own. We Have To Do Both.
Atrios, are you insane? Local media serves local communities. As radio stations, for instance, get bought out by big conglomerates, their ability to serve the needs of the local population decreases. Consider the famous rail disaster in South Dakota--a chemical spill--about wich the people of Minot could not be warned since all broadcasting was geographically centralized.
Also, as content becomes standardized under centralized notions of "format", the access that local content producers have to the supposedly public airwaves becomes almost non-existant. as a consequence, music, film, etc. takes on a distinctive "top-down" generation, as only the large commercial production entities have access to the capital needed to promote and distribute new cultural content through conglomerated media.
Certainly the internet has challenged this model--its why the riaa is taking 14 year olds and peer-to-peer network clients to court, not simply because the music being distributed (without a license) 'belongs' to them but because they do not have as much influence and access to the medium and thus cannot dominate its market and trends.
But given their and the media companies' pressure on the federal government to eleiminate the threat new media poses to old, we can look forward to the inevitable decline of even the internet as a viable medium through which public concerns and independent cultural inventions can be realized.
We are already in the beginning stages of what many learned men call a fascist state.The sports report on the US soccer team :They(US) went to a US military base and watched US television.What is US TV these days ? Propaganda.reminds me of what our govt(Soviet) used to do to it's citizens.
Yeah, I also agree that it's foolish to downplay media consolidation. Diversity of ownership means more competition, which means more of a chance for a news outlet breaking lockstep coverage and taking a different slant, just to be different. It's that simple. On the other hand, Chomsky and Hermann wrote Manufacturing Consent back in 1988, and things haven't changed that much since then. That is, the corporate media have always tended to support big business and government points of view; things are just a bit worse now.
Really, I think the worst affect of media consolidation has been with entertainment stuff: corporations, having bought up small media businesses in droves since the early 80s, have applied a corporate business model to the development, creation, and marketing of what are essentially creative/artistic products. That's just fine for selling soap, which is pretty much all the same, but not for music or movies, which are, by definition, unique works of art. That's why everything on the radio sounds the same these days. TV and movies, too. It's making our culture ever more bland and sucky.
This doesn't even get into how entertainment media affect the way Americans think about themselves and the world, which is pretty scary unto itself.
The squeeze Wall Street places on journalism is emphatically real and pernicious. Wall Streeters discount experience and competence because it comes with a high price tag. Wall Street abhors redundancy, which is an absolutely essential and unavoidable ingredient in competent news gathering. Wall Street is intellectually lifeless, another prime asset in good journalism.
Try to name the last time any Wall Street-backed media owner EVER talked about the value of a free press. Take all the time you want.
if you're going to question media concentration, you should start with bagkidian's findings first, rather than make up your own straw man thesis and pretend it's the gold standard.
bagidikian's thesis is alive and well, thank you.
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