How do you guys feel about the Media

macgyver06

controlling the people in our society that don't pay close attention to our elections and don't think twice before casting a vote about someone they really don't know.

I think its fair to say these voters make up a very good majority of the votes.



How do you feel about Television News Stations and Radio Corporations controlling what information gets out?

How do we stop these corporations from funding candidates? It should be Illegal. You can't pay high school students to get them to choose your college to play football in... so why can corporations pay amateurs running for the highest position in the world..

g under p

They're simply DECEPTIVE in their reporting. The corporations run them.

Peace

catefrances

much like wikipedia the media is a good starting point. dont believe everything you hear or read. if it sounds too biased one way or the other there's a good reason for it. people have got to read more than the TV guide or the sports section.

binauralonthecape

macgyver06 wrote:

controlling the people in our society that don't pay close attention to our elections and don't think twice before casting a vote about someone they really don't know.

I think its fair to say these voters make up a very good majority of the votes.



How do you feel about Television News Stations and Radio Corporations controlling what information gets out?

How do we stop these corporations from funding candidates? It should be Illegal. You can't pay high school students to get them to choose your college to play football in... so why can corporations pay amateurs running for the highest position in the world..

unfortunately there are a lot of dumb people out there and many people dont actually get educated on each and every candidates stances on the issues, most people let talking heads on television or radio let them make up their minds for them, its sad, i actually had this discussion with my mother the other day, she claims to be very liberal, shes a registered democrat, but i didnt think she really was liberal, i just thought thats what she thought she should be, so i gave her an online test to see who she was actually most compatible with, and truth be told, her most compatible candidate was guiliani, she was stunned, so i guess the lesson here is, get educated...

macgyver06

binauralonthecape wrote:

unfortunately there are a lot of dumb people out there and many people dont actually get educated on each and every candidates stances on the issues, most people let talking heads on television or radio let them make up their minds for them, its sad, i actually had this discussion with my mother the other day, she claims to be very liberal, shes a registered democrat, but i didnt think she really was liberal, i just thought thats what she thought she should be, so i gave her an online test to see who she was actually most compatible with, and truth be told, her most compatible candidate was guiliani, she was stunned, so i guess the lesson here is, get educated...

yup yup..its something Gravel brought up today... with online quizzez (respectable ones) if people were voting based on what they believed in and which candidate they matchup with...there would be a much different looking race going on.

Vedd Hedd

its the same as it ever was.

binauralonthecape

Vedd Hedd wrote:

its the same as it ever was.

i disagree with that, even though it was sort of a broad statement, i think the media in general is bias to liberalism, it wasnt always this way...

g under p

Vedd Hedd wrote:

its the same as it ever was.

As the band Talking Heads would say....Same as it ever was, nothing's changed only the deception and gotten sleak and slicker.

Peace

Vedd Hedd

g under p wrote:

As the band Talking Heads would say....Same as it ever was, nothing's changed only the deception and gotten sleak and slicker.

Peace

and you may find yourself....in another part of the world

and you may find yourself....behind the wheel of a large automobile....




Ill say this.... I dont think its gotten any sleek or slicker....I think the populus has, for the most part, has become indifferent.....so anything they say works...

Commy

'Any dictator would admire the conformity and obedience of the US media". That's a Noam Chomsky paraphrase and very accurate.

In the US they cant' control us with guns, obviously, so they have to control our opinions. Entire industries have been spawned to this end-see public relations and marketing.

The United States has the most effective propaganda system in the world. And that can be proven, if you have the time to do a little research.

Small example of how the propaganda machine works.

So the US bombed Cambodia into the dark ages, literally, it allowed Pol Pot to take control. He chose to get his weapons from the Soviets-so Cambodia becomes an "official enemy of the State". Then you have Indonesia, supplied militarily by the US and an offical ally.

Both countries commence whole scale slaughter on civilian populations. Mass starvation torture, brutality unimaginable. In Cambodia the numbers were higher, but relative to population size the Indonesia slaughter in East Timor was far worse.

People took the time to investigat the NY Times coverage of these events during a specific time period in the 70's. Not only is the NY times the most widely read newspaper (it was a few years ago anyway) in the world, it is also the historical record. A thousand years from now historians will go to the NY Times record to find out what was going on in the world. That's a big responsibility.

So, they laid all articles end to end on a basketball court, side by side. Newspaper articles about Pol Pot and his massacre vs Indonesia and the slaughter in East Timor. East Timor made it a few feet, whil Pol Pot made it across the entire floor of the court. It was literally, 2 or 3 stories from an entire year about this massacre in East Timor. And its not like the US didn't know what was going on. Indonesia was supplied by the US, their soldiers wore US army uniforms..Kissinger was in Indonesia 10 days before the invasion.

What is worse is that once enough people found out about this massacre in East Timor, commited by Indonesia, the slaughter ended with a word from Washington. That's all it took. Had the journalists actually done their jobs and the editors, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved. We couldn't stop Pol Pot, not directly, not like we could with Indonesia. So to focus on an official enemy of the US (in some cases fabricating stories of torture in Cambodia) and not on Indonesia (an official ally) wasn't just propaganda showing how evil Russia and its sattelites were, it literally cost people their lives.

That's propaganda in the US. It's not what they say its what they dont' say that is so damaging.

redsdisease

binauralonthecape wrote:

i disagree with that, even though it was sort of a broad statement, i think the media in general is bias to liberalism, it wasnt always this way...

Are people still on about that?

The media doesn't have a conservative or liberal bias, it has a bias towards status quo. None of the major candidates will cause a very great paradigm shift. They can talk all they want about changing the status quo, however none of their policies reflect that in any way. Candidates who actually do pose a threat to business as usual, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul for example, get completely ignored. The media is a business, nothing more, nothing less. They do what's good for the bottom line. The only difference, is that they have a greater ability to control whether or not their profits and subsidies remain stable than other types of companies. In the same way that most large corporations give money to candidates to ensure there continued success, media corporations make sure that any threatening candidates are unable to make it past the primaries to ensure their continued success.

MasterFramer

Only person I "trust" in "big media" is Keith Olbermann...

slightofjeff

MasterFramer wrote:

Only person I "trust" in "big media" is Keith Olbermann...

yikes. I liked him on SportsCenter, but ...

MasterFramer

slightofjeff wrote:

yikes. I liked him on SportsCenter, but ...

regardless of what you think of his politics no one really can report the news of the day better, of the major talking heads...

godpt3

The people who bitch about the media controlling everything have probably never had ink on their hands and so have absolutely no fucking clue what they're talking about.

Commy

MasterFramer wrote:

regardless of what you think of his politics no one really can report the news of the day better, of the major talking heads...

who decides what the news is?

macgyver06

godpt3 wrote:

The people who bitch about the media controlling everything have probably never had ink on their hands and so have absolutely no fucking clue what they're talking about.

what are you talking about?

macgyver06

Commy wrote:

who decides what the news is?

the people who fund ridiculous candidates

Pacomc79

I think the Telecom act of 1996 especially dealing with ownership rules and regulations was a really bad deal.

Far too few media companies own far too much media in far to many markets.


Everything is homogenous.


Some of my collegiate work was around these this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory

this is a huge part of public relations and political campaigns.

DriftingByTheStorm

macgyver06 wrote:

yup yup..its something Gravel brought up today... with online quizzez (respectable ones) if people were voting based on what they believed in and which candidate they matchup with...there would be a much different looking race going on.

I actualy disagree with this tremendously.
And i think online quizes (respectable or not) are HORRIBLY DESTRUCTIVE TO TRUE LIBERTY,
because they encourage people to click on something that appeals to them without understanding it, then they get a candidate.

Basicaly, they see, "more free services" and they go, "oh hell yeah" ... or whatever the free lunch du jour is ... and they get their candidate.

Online polls present people with questions that ask them about their idealized views on a reality that is much different than some silly quesiton.

It's all well and good for people to want this or that, or to agree or disagree with this or that ... but if they have no fundamental understanding of the reality that stands behind that issue, they are probably contributing to the cause.

Like subsidization ... "do you think the government should offer incentives to sustainable business models"?

Well, any well meaning folk would answer YES to that.
But the reality is who the hell defines "sustainable" and why should the government be in charge of giving those companies a competitive advantage over other companies? What if the government is wrong, and they end up funding a bad technology (ethanol, cough cough!) ...

DriftingByTheStorm

Pacomc79 wrote:

I think the Telecom act of 1996 especially dealing with ownership rules and regulations was a really bad deal.

Far too few media companies own far too much media in far to many markets.


Everything is homogenous.


Some of my collegiate work was around these this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory

this is a huge part of public relations and political campaigns.

agreed.