If I have to have for-profit media shoveled down my throat for some goddamn news, I want it to be the goddamn corporate media that actually shows up during our Berlin Wall moment.
This is just a rant; I'm not trying to lay out some grand manifesto.
I know where I'm going to check my news headlines first from now on, and it's not MSNBC, or Huffington Post, or Yahoo.
No. It's not because of Chuck Todd concern trolling over Egypt's "peaceful movement without a leader," as my dear comrade Granny Doc pointed out, or Tom Brokaw oh-so-subtly bitching about the departed Keith Olbermann, nor Brokaw's silly assertion about the GE-NBC-Comcast supremacy in the corporate media.
Those are more like the last rubbings of salt in a wounded marriage.
Were I to forgive the media for their failings, they'd have to either apologize or at least not repeat their biased, anti-people campaigns. Neither is the case today. As progressive journalist Amy Goodman noted in her classic documentary, Independent Media in a Time of War, when we looked to the corporate networks during 2002 to 2003, including PBS, we found a directed, conscious blockade of any anti-war voices, any war skeptical voices. Including PBS. In the week before and the week after Colin Powell lied before the UN Security Council about the "smoking gun" of a Saddam Hussein WMD threat, opinion polling showed that most of the country was against war against Iraq. Then, the corporate media all played their vital role in distributing war propaganda. From a FAIR study:
Among the major findings in a two-week study (1/30/03=2/12/03) of on-camera network news sources quoted on Iraq:
* Seventy-six percent of all sources were current or former officials, leaving little room for independent and grassroots views. Similarly, 75 percent of U.S. sources (199/267) were current or former officials.
* At a time when 61 percent of U.S. respondents were telling pollsters that more time was needed for diplomacy and inspections (2/6/03), only 6 percent of U.S. sources on the four networks were skeptics regarding the need for war.
* Sources affiliated with anti-war activism were nearly non-existent. On the four networks combined, just three of 393 sources were identified as being affiliated with anti-war activism-- less than 1 percent. Just one of 267 U.S. sources was affiliated with anti-war activism-- less than half a percent.
ABC's Chris Cuomo--yes, of Cuomo family fame--was calling the people taking part in the then-largest protest movement in history, in freezing rain, "confused" about their intentions and purpose. Shepard Smith of FOX News told viewers who, unlike the Iraqis soon to be showered with depleted uranium, dismembered or burned to death, were totally safe on their couches in suburbia to "stay safe, stay brave, and stay with FOX." CNN and NBC/General Electric could barely refrain from drooling and cheering as the video game version of Iraq--Shock and Awe--was underway. We even got to see little targets on Iraqis from US military video recordings.
And yet, here we are today, and most people I talk to on a daily basis are completely unaware of what's happening in Egypt. That's right, as in, they don't even know there's a revolt. Why is that?
- The media doesn't do its job.
- People know the media doesn't do its job, so they tune out from a boring, uninformative and fatiguing propaganda bombardment.
As well they should. The media failed this country long, long ago.
I had to go to Russia Times just to find a video for my recommended diary on Pine Ridge Reservation's 80% unemployment and youth suicide crisis. Can anyone tell me which important fucking fuck we're learning about on CBS instead, while American children starve?
So why Al Jazeera? It's not that Al Jazeera is so holy--they're a corporation, too. But they throw the world a bone: they have dissenting, unorthodox opinions. If I could read German I would check Deutche Welle for my news headlines, too. Both actually staff overseas correspondents. Remember those days, America? When there were other countries, and peoples?
Independent media like Democracy Now! and the Real News are still favorites, but they don't have money, and that means they aren't all over the world at once. My two British newspapers, the Independent and The Guardian, both lack that sort of world focus. It's not enough when we've become an ignorant and psychologically-isolated people, with a low percentage of passport-holders and poor knowledge of the international community. That hurts us as a people.
And I care for my Arab brothers and sisters, who've been demonized on all of those corporate networks--the new "scary black men," or "homosexual agenda" after your schoolchildren, as it were.
Consequently, I know where I'm going to check my news headlines first from now on, and it's not MSNBC, or Huffington Post, or Yahoo. This is just a rant, I'm not trying to lay out a grand argument.