The News And The Truth Are Not The Same Thing

[Jcrowley]

"Who needs censorship when we have self-censorship. When news is being withheld, or neutralized, at best, how can we expect anything but cynicism from those who read our daily papers? Maybe the reason many aren't buying newspapers isn't that they can get information for free on the Internet, but because they don't believe what they read, and how can they?"

Jane Lyn Stahl

"The people will believe what the media tells them they believe."

George Orwell

"Politicians and the media have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public. At heart, politicians don't believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the news media, especially television news, basically agrees."

Tom Fenton, CBS foreign correspondent

"Americans are too broadly underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict what they know of the world ... Instead, news channels prefer to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information, all of which fits what they already know. That way they don't have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations or further investigations."

Tom Fenton, CBS foreign correspondent

"The problem the United States faces is that almost all of its invasions violate international law, and sometimes, as in the case of Iraq, in a blatant manner. So how do the political elite and the news media reconcile this contradiction? Simple: They ignore it. It is virtually unthinkable for a mainstream U.S. reporter to even pursue this issue."

John Nichols and Robert McChesney

" never saw a foreign intervention that the Times did not support, never saw a fare increase or a rent increase or a utility rate increase that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers. And don't let me get started on universal health care and Social Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?"

New York Times reporter John Hess

"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd."

Bertrand Russell

"You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements."

Norman Douglas

"The American press, with a very few exceptions:, is a kept press. Kept by the big corporations the way a whore is kept by a rich man."

Theodore Dreiser

"It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion."

Josph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister

"The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."

Thomas Jefferson

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary."

George Orwell

[applegrove]

1. Not telling it like it is has certainly back-fired on the MSM. I hope they

have all seen their circulation increase of late. Cause I have been consuming more MSM lately...than in 2 years.

[elperromagico]

2. Absolutely true.

The media has the power to kill a story by ignoring it or to bring a story to life by amplifying it. As one's perception of facts is dependent entirely on context, it is easy to create a false reality simply by altering or ignoring the context.

Remember the rash of shark attacks and child kidnappings a few years ago? Never happened; there was no sudden uptick in shark attacks or kidnappings. But the media, by shining the light of attention on both, made both seem horrifyingly enormous.

[Jcrowley]

5. Look at what a former New York Times Journalist John Swinton was saying about journalism

all the way back in 1880 in free America:

“I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.”

“The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?”

“We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”

[snot]

3. I half-believe that the Repubs who've bought all the newspapers have

deliberately hastened their decline by withholding the news people really want to know. C.f. http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_jpol_061031_keith_olbermann_can_.htm .

They're already trying to strangle the internet.

What is it going to take to get Dem leaders to FOCUS on media reform???

We need strengthening of restrictions on consolidation of media ownership, reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, and 'net neutrality NOW.

[sam sarrha]

4. the only news is on Air America.. the rest is Fascist Corporate Media Theater, every morning the

white house sends a new script for their flying monkey whores to read..

[Jcrowley]

6. Corporate propaganda

has played upon the high level of religious beliefs in the community, beliefs which leave its citizens predisposed to see the world in "Manichean terms''. This outlook leads towards a preference for action over reflection, a "pragmatic orientation'' that is perfectly suited to the corporate aim of identifying positive symbols with business, while assigning negative values to those that oppose them, such as labor unions and welfare provisions.

The organised dissemination of these symbols had its initial impetus in groups such as the National Americanization Committee, which succeeded in manipulating nationalist and patriotic symbols during World War I to associate corporate values with the "American way of life''. The psychological power of this association cannot be discounted: it has proved to be an enduring feature of the political climate in the US today.

Since then the corporate agenda has embraced all areas of society - media, schools, academia and the workplace - with focuses on different levels from "grassroots'' to "tree-tops''. It has succeeded via the mass media in identifying capitalism with democracy and in portraying any challenge to corporate elites as either "subversive'' or "extremist''.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

7. "There is no 'news' in the truth, and no truth in the 'news'"

That's what the Russians used to say about Pravda ("Truth") and Investiya ("News"), and since the demise of the Fairness Doctrine and small independent daily newspapers, it goes double for early 21st Century America.

[Canuckistanian]

8. Sounds like the title of Drudge's new book

And I'd like to add another relevant quote:

You'll never go broke underestimating the taste of the American public." - P.T. Barnum