Please stay on topic. Please don't be asses.
As long as laws are made by elected lawmakers, they will find a way to exempt themselves. See also, "do not call registry" for example.
Although I don't have the professional experience that AnonLib has, and although this is only an aside in the larger point of your post, I have to disagree with the starting premise that companies do not mislead comsumers. Watch any commercial and you'll recognize the absurdity of this claim. Politicians and political strategists are only beginning to catch up to the brilliant minds in the corporate world in terms of misleading consumers in to purchasing worthless products that they don't need. While companies may make sure that their copy is literally true, they sell their products with a smorgasbord of ethically questionable techniques.
No one has done studies on this, but I'll bet you even money most "consumers" believe the nonsense that comes from politicians because they think "He wouldn't be allowed to say that if it wasn't true. There are laws about that sort of thing, after all."
Clooney's movie, "good Night and Good Luck" is worth a watch. Particularly the closing speech.
"In his press conferences, the white house press corps failed to properly follow up or make it clear that Bush was being clever when he made these connections and instead laughed and fawned as if they were at a movie star's press junket."
I think it's much more damning than that. I think these people truly feel that, after 9/11, Bush was permitted, perhaps even obligated, to make some grand gesture (presumably military) in response. Who were they to point out the contradictions, misstatements, and outright lies that were issued by the administration? He was, after all, the brave man on horseback leading the charge to keep us safe. And I don't think they were laughing and fawning, at least initially; I think they felt it was their patriotic duty to support this President's actions, and to ignore inconvenient facts that might lessen that support.
They felt that it was their duty to support this president, rather than trust the public to provide that support based on the facts that the press had in their possession. An utter misinterpretation and abdication of the role of a free press in a free society, in other words.
I read AL's post earlier today and had the same initial reaction Paul did. Corporations lie constantly. For example, "made with whole wheat" can mean that as little as 3% of the wheat was whole wheat, even if the words are written as big a Montana.
As to the larger point, the digitization of every utterance made (witnesses Powell's big lie) is beginning to haunt the politicians and the press. The truth is being promulgated on the blogs, which are flanking the press corps and nailing the politicians.
I dunno. Ive always thought that the solution to this was blindingly obvious. Ban. All. Political. Advertising.
All of it. We banned cigarette advertising, and for much the same reasons. 30 second soundbites offer exactly zero in the way of information content - the format of advertising is, in itself, designed to influence, not to inform. Ban all spending on TV and radio commercials for political advocacy, and instead force the networks to give us our damn airwaves back - mandatory airtime provided for REAL political forums - debates, townhall meetings with ACTUAL PEOPLE - real discussions in depth. Mandate a series of 10 or 12 or however many debates between candidates - broadcast in primetime slots simultaneously on all major networks - get questions submitted by online submission forms, let the public set the agenda.
The problem has been tackled arse about face for so long - we keep trying to stop the money coming in to campaigns - when we should be stopping it from GOING OUT. Political ads are less than worthless - they are what keep our system in the hands of the shysters and Luntzs of the world.
Interesting points by AL, it's something I've been thinking about for a while.
I'm on board with poputonian that digitization is our friend.
I think that a bunch of us on the Internet, aided by technology, will pull off an intervention of sorts.
Right now, we can look back on the digitized BushCo lies and call them out, and it just destroys those liars' credibility. And the press that cheerleaded them.
It won't be long until we can monitor political statements in almost-real-time for their veracity.
Not just on the blogosphere, but on television and other live video streams.
The corporate press will either start doing their jobs, or move more and more to the side, exposed as full-time cheerleaders and sycophants.
Technology has a way of sneaking in and once a TV network or video cable service offers the new "fact-filter" service, the others won't be able to resist.
Oh, wait, I forgot about Fox. I wonder what they'll do...
One big problem with cunningly constructed misleading language is that it doesn't translate very well into other languages. (This probably has the effect of making Americans appear especially gullible to the non-English-speaking world, though I have no evidence.)
I think there may also be a business/politics parallel here: When some Repubs say government should operate more like a business, they may be referring to an all-too-common business "ethic" that says: it doesn't matter if your product is any good as long as it sells, i.e. making a profit is the total definition of success. As I recall, the admin discussed how to sell the war and the best time to introduce this "new product". As for enriching it's "investors", the war has been quite a success.
I never heard the word "stroppy" before - cool!
I agree with Fightin Irish. The money involved in political advertising is corruption incarnate. Our politicians have to chase the dollar night and day. And it is gravy to the TV networks.
Honesty in politics can only be achieved if the politicians do not need to raise millions and millions of dollars to run for office.
We need to reform the election campaign process before we can reform election campaign financing.
The Fairness Doctrine used to help in letting people know actual information regarding different issues. Until we can force the media to go back to the Fairness Doctrine ideas, or somehow lower the importance of paid political advertising, the press will do what their corporate masters tell them to do.
Banning all political advertising is obviously not the solution because, as AL points out, the First Amendment protects political advertising, and even protects spending scads of money on political ads. Public financing is a good way to try to even the playing field, but will ultimately fail because the monied interests will always be able to outspend publicly financed campaigns. Given this situation, we are left with the opposite: more and better speach, presumably as others have already pointed out, via the intertubes. Which brings us back to the importants of net neutrality as one of the most important items on the Democrats agenda when they take control of Congress. The only way to fight corporate control of elections is via grassroots, volunteer information campaigns, and the only way to ensure these is via net neutrality.
Fightin Irish
I've long had the same opinion (we'd be better off banning political advertising on the grounds that it is at best worthless and at worst pernicious as political discourse), but I don't think there's any way to reconcile such a ban with the first amendment.
Relying on the press to counter advertising-driven political spin is a forlorn hope, like trying to stop a bulldozer with traffic cones. I do think we'd get some good by dismantling/neutralizing the right wing noise machine as much as possible. There are ways to do this with regulation assuming we ever get hold of the White House again.
Seems to me that problems could be largely fixed by amending our current holdings that libel laws do not apply, for the most part, to public figures.
Would wingers (and Hitchens) feel free to call Clinton a "serial rapist" or Hillary a murderer if they knew they could face expensive judgments? Would the Swift Boat Vets have backers if they could lose substantial chunks of their fortunes for saying Kerry's wounds were self-inflicted?
Such a change wouldn't conflict with the first amendment. You could still say anything you want to. But you can also be punished if a jury of your peers decides that you LIED. What's wrong with that?
The fairness doctrine and other like measures were only Constitutional in reference to broadcast media, the reasoning being that the public airwaves were a scarce resource owned by all of us and thus regulation of speach over the airwaves was constitutional. Given the makeup of the current Court, and the ages of some of these Justices, this view of the First Amendment is here to stay for the forseeable future. We are forced to look for alternative methods.
Watching the West Wing, the mythic Democratic presidential candidate Santos gets on TV live for a one minute spot and promises not to run any ads or have any thing said on his behalf unless it comes directly from him.
i'm hoping my campaign of spitting on the members of the nat'l press whenever encountered will catch on and have a positive effect...
"It was their job to sort that rhetoric out, right as it happened, no matter how unpleasant it might have been."
G-D right. Just when our society most needs maturity and wisdom, we instead get a glut of poor, half-baked reporting, and our political culture is degraded.
Marketing exists to hype consumption and media has budgeted it's message to the lowest common consumer and called it political consensus.
digby :
... it's important that we keep the pressure on the press to do the job that democracy requires it to do. They are getting very stroppy about it ...cdj :
I never heard the word "stroppy" before - cool!http://www.translatebritish.com :
cdj | Homepage | 12.26.06 - 5:04 pm
Stroppy = GrumpyThe "translatebritish.com" web site isn't quite right. Stroppy means not just grumpy but also defiant and petulant and truculent and obstreporous and bolshy.
"Stroppy" is commonly used in reference to teenagers, as in, "Why are my teenage kids so stroppy? I only asked them to clean up their room and do their homework."
AL's point was not that corps don't lie about products, but that there are so many legal methods to nail them for such behavior, whereas there are essentially none policing political speech. And he argued that there basically cannot be because of the first amendmenet, which makes an adversarial press that much more important.
The press behaves more like lobbyists than anything else -- what they choose to publicize and attack is measured by the corporate interests of their masters. There no longer is any meaningful separation between news and business in the big media corporations (and in fact, a drive to promote "synergy" between the two interests) -- the big media is all about oligopoly.
Thank god for the internet.
It is good to keep pointing up MSM
behavior. To me, however, the reason for that would be to cause such a massive loss of trust in the MSM as to
make the MSM shunned and avoided by most people, thereby depriving it of its propaganda-catapulting effectiveness.
A definition of insanity has been offered as: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Expecting to find accurate
fact-based journalism in the MSM is like expecting to find Hawaiian Punch
in a bottle of insecticide. If you
keep drinking from the insecticide bottle, whose fault is it if you keep getting sick? So I support the digital bloggersquad of truth in their efforts to publicise the structure of lies which it is the MSM's Prime Directive to disseminate,
but I support treating these truthsquad-efforts as a means. A means to the end of exterminating the MSM.
And the MSM's Ruling Class OwnerMasters understand the Internet's
role very well, which is why they keep
trying to figure out how to outlaw the
Internet. Their goal is a Red Chinese
type of Internet, with bricks and firewalls all over it and around it.
(Their Visionary Dream would be Ceausescu's Rumania, with computers,
memory sticks, ipods, and etc, made
illegal for private citizens to own
or have in their possession).
I wuz born stroppy!
Paul Waldman did a piece for Tom Paine shortly after the election where he listed a few suggestions for newly empowered Democrats. They are all great points
http://www.tompaine.com/print/
de...nt_wimp_out.php
I liked this one in particular and it is relevant to the topic here:
Boycott Fox
The Fox News Channel has been a reliable megaphone for White House talking points, a veritable RNC house organ proclaiming that Republicans are noble public servants and Democrats are whiny hippies who, if not engaged in an actual conspiracy with al-Qaida, are certainly serving the ends of America’s enemies. It has also functioned as a safe haven for Republicans to run to when things look bad. Shoot a guy in the face, and you can do your first interview with Brit Hume, secure in the knowledge that he won’t ask any tough questions.
So Democrats should say the following to Fox: You want to spread GOP propaganda all day? Be our guest. After all, it’s a free country. But don’t expect any Democratic newsmakers to legitimize you with their presence. We’ll go on every other network, be interviewed by every legitimate news organization. But we don’t consider ourselves under any obligation to pretend that buffoons like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson are news professionals who deserve a moment of our time. We’re not going to try to fight you; we’ll just act like you don’t exist.
This can be a lesson to the rest of the media—not a threat, but an indication that they need to change the way they think about Democrats. For years, journalists have looked on Republicans as tough, smart and skilled—in short, winners. Democrats, in turn, were viewed as wimpy, stupid and weak—losers. If Democrats want the media to treat them like winners, they should start acting accordingly. Stop worrying about getting reporters to like you, and start thinking about getting them to respect you. And if the David Broders of the world start complaining that you aren’t playing nice, that’ll be evidence that you’re doing something right.
copied from
http://www.tompaine.com/print/
de...nt_wimp_out.php
I wonder how much longer the MSM will be around. Today we found out that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the hometown paper and the biggest newspaper in Minnesota, was sold by McClatchy to a private equity firm, Avista.
Here's the kicker: McClatchy bought the paper for $1.2 billion in 1998 and sold it for $530 million--that's almost a 50 percent loss in nine years, although McClatchy will get some tax benefits in the sale that will make this an attractive loss.
But all I could think when I saw those numbers was.......shit, the newspaper business is really toast. I've been hearing and thinking this for years, but those numbers really brought it home.
Between the press failing to do its job and other market forces, I think the modern journalism machine, as we've known it for the last 50 years, is dying and dying fast.
People may find 'professional driver, closed course' et al. overly nannyish, but those durned tort lawyers are pretty good at their jobs.
Political broadcasts in the UK don't have to follow ASA regulations. But they're strictly limited and not paid advertising, meaning that viewers know when they'll be broadcast -- i.e. when to change channel.
I see political advertising as a bi-annual gift of millions of dollars to network television affiliates and cable companies. It distorts political economics, dominates the time of elected officials from the moment of victory, and saps at the lifeblood of democracy.
I see political advertising as a bi-annual gift of millions of dollars to network television affiliates and cable companies.
Indeed it is a gift - a gift of a piece of the public commons. This is why FCC licenses should be conditional on providing free or very low cost airtime to qualified candidates. That is a fair price for using public property. Broadcasters would scream bloody murder of course, but they would do it if forced, because they would still turn a healthy profit. With publicly financed elections and impartial districting, this would go a long way to eventually bring better government to the US.
That "70 %" poll actually had more detail about the respondant's source for news. Does anyone have a link?
As I recall, something like 90% of Fox viewers believed SH was linked to 911, followed by the major broadcast networks (60 to 75% or so?). The only source cited with a good rating (20%) was NPR. (This was before the rightwing made a concerted effort to put NPR in its place, so in a repeat poll today, NPR might not fare so well).
In any event, the fact that the heads of news organizations got a report card on how terribly they were all doing at actually informing the public. I tried to imagine a conference room in which a bunch of newsroom bigwigs were discussing the poll. They should have been aghast at their stunning failure, if indeed the education of the public was their main function.
But all I could imaging was a bunch of guys giving themselves the high five on how successful they were at manipulating public opinion. It must have made them feel very powerful and in control.
I saw a study that found that most of the reporters are comming from upper income house holds,thats why there all pushing right wing talking points,thats were they come from.thats why there so completly moraless.
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