Wyane Madsen hit the nail ont he head a long time ago...
"Who Tells You What to Think?
Columbia Journalism Review and Media Channel track the owners and minions of U.S. media interests at
http://www.cjr.org/owners/ and www.mediachannel.org, and a visit there is most enlightening. NBC, General Electric's marionette, owns an array of properties from financial institutions in France to long distance telephone services in Hungary. General Electric is a partner with Starbucks Coffee in Talk City. Under the Walt Disney Group entity resides ABC, which recently featured an investigative piece on World News Tonight on whether time travel is possible. This was not a news story but a movie advertisement: Disney was preparing to release its remake of the movie, "The Time Machine." It must have been tough for the quintessential Peter Jennings to turn into an Entertainment Tonight host for a Hollywood gossip and gabfest show masquerading as a nightly news broadcast. Disney also owns interests in petroleum and natural gas production facilities.
The New York Times owns the Boston Globe and has a partial interest in a sports franchise, the Boston Red Sox. Viacom is the holder of CBS and runs everything from Star Trek properties to Spelling Television. The Washington Post co-owns the International Herald Tribune with the New York Times and, along with the LA Times, runs a news service. Gannett, publisher of USA Today, owns "insider" publications U.S. Army, Air Force and Navy-Marine Corps Times, as well as Defense News and Military Market. They also partner with defense contractor General Electric on web ventures.
And then there's The Unification Church's Washington Times Newspaper listed as a "project" on Rev. Sun Myung Moon's website. The Washington Times, along with the Dow Jones' Wall Street Journal (Jones also owns 20 newspapers around the U.S.), cater to a powerful constituency: God, Money, Corporations and Republicans, although not always in that order. Rev. Moon claims that Jesus Christ visited him in 1935 and, according to The Unification Church website, "Jesus asked him to complete the task of establishing God's kingdom on earth and bringing His peace to humankind." Apparently Bush the First and Bush the Second agree with Moon. The elder was on the Moon payroll as a speechmaker and the younger claimed in a presidential debate that Jesus Christ was the greatest philosopher of all time. Finally, no mention of media would be complete without Fox News Corporation. As reported by MediaChannel, Rupert Murdoch's empire is so vast that he claims, "Our reach is unmatched around the world. We are reaching people from the moment they wake up until they fall asleep."
Pay No Attention to What the Media is Doing Behind That Curtain
With incest in the U.S. media as flagrant as it is-combined with its subservience to the current U.S administration and military--is it any surprise that events are scripted to suit the outcome of the U.S. economic and national policies? The recent <U.S.-backed> Venezuelan coup exposed the U.S. media interests as complicit partners in deceiving the American public. FAIR at documented the print media's bovine coverage:
"When elements of the Venezuelan military forced president Hugo Chavez from office last week, the editorial boards of several major U.S. newspapers followed the U.S. government's lead and greeted the news with enthusiasm. In an April 13 editorial, the New York Times triumphantly declared that Chavez's "resignation" meant that "Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator." Conspicuously avoiding the word "coup," the Times explained that Chavez "stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader.... Three days later, Chavez had returned to power and the Times ran a second editorial (4/16/02) half-apologizing for having gotten carried away."
When the corporate megaliths took over the news networks, the first casualties were the foreign bureaus. No longer would network journalists be able to build up a base of sources and contacts within various capital cities and financial centers. The result is that the networks increasingly rely on government spokespeople for "news" that is really nothing more than propaganda. Take Afghanistan, for example. Network and newspaper reporters are confined to Kabul because U.S. military planners have convinced them the countryside is unsafe. Not knowing any better and lacking any in-country contacts, they remain in Kabul and dutifully file as news copy every statement regurgitated by a suspicious military public affairs officer. As Robert Young Pelton indicated in an interview with Salon,
"Well, the military hates the media. The conundrum is that we live and die for the Constitution and one of the elements of the Constitution is freedom of the press -- the right of the democratic public to make decisions based on a free flow of information, without censorship, without people rewriting history. And basically since the Vietnam War, the military realizes that the press is the enemy, because the press is actually faster and more intelligent than the military is. They can assess a military situation long before the military figures it out".
This story has been replayed in cities and countries around the world. Last June, the world media bought the story issued by the government of Nepal that a love sick, drunk, and deranged Crown Prince executed his entire family, including his mother and father -- the King and Queen. Not reported was that incoming King and new Crown Prince were brutal thugs bent on turning the country into a virtual province of neighboring India. The Hollywood-inspired news media liked the O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake angle of the story instead and, without even a cursory independent investigation, decided the official government explanation would suffice. It's the same story-line in Washington, DC.
Rewriting the Record
The recent pro-Palestinian and anti-globalization march in Washington was ignominiously ignored by the U.S. media interests. Only C-SPAN covered it live. However, when the ranks of the protestors swelled to over 75,000, C-SPAN cut away its coverage to air a taped three-day old speech by the head of the International Monetary Fund. Undoubtedly, C-SPAN, like many other networks that have offered unbiased coverage of Middle East news, felt the wrath of a powerful lobby group called CAMERA - the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America - a virtual propaganda arm of the Israeli government known for berating any reporter who criticizes Israel. It effectively uses is financial clout to get wayward media elements to fall in line with Israel's party line.
Another dangerous trend is cable news addiction to Bush. The Three Stooges of cable news broadcasting - CNN, FoxCable, and MSNBC -- all break away for live coverage whether Bush is hamming it up in the mountains of New York State or disembarking from his helicopter. Gone underreported is the doctoring of White House transcripts by staffers who excise Bush's intellectual blunders at press conferences and speeches who, in effect, are rewriting the record. And U.S. military movements in support of the failed coup in Venezuela received scant attention. History is replete with examples of authoritarian leaders surrounding themselves with cameras and one-sided news coverage. Consider Leni Riefenstahl's constant filming of Hitler and how the coverage extended to every German movie house. Or Soviet TV's ad minutiae coverage of Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. Every time they visited a tractor factory in Minsk or a poultry plant in Kiev, the story was prominently featured on the nightly "Vremya" news.
As U.S. military planners, politicians and corporations continue their global pacification campaign against a now trumped up Al Qeida, they have already planned for the invasion of Iraq and, perhaps, other members of the Axis of Evil. To garner public support for boundless U.S. military operations--from which new exploitable markets magically appear--the war machine has received the enthusiastic support of U.S. media interests whose task, it seems, is to keep the public busy and acquiescent. In reality, most American's are extraordinarily adverse to war, yet the U.S. media interests upon which they rely for "thought" are the integral operatives for U.S. war propaganda and concomitant public indoctrination. Nazi celebrity Hermann Goering would be right at home in the U.S. in 2002, working with U.S. media interests to suppress dissent and bring home a glorious victory for the Homeland.
"Why of course the people don't want war! Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
http://www.counterpunch.org/madsen0425.htmlViacom Inc. had large trading and shook hands with Unification Church and all its subsidiaries. Mitofsky left Viacom strangely after Moon's visit in which he held the "prophecy"
Mitofsky's family on the other hand, goes back years, and now he's been the governmental puppet to de-construct other governments by force.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
