How many of you guys know that the modern Tea Party movement started out libertarian leaning and it first got very popular PROTESTING the original BUSH / PAULSON Mother of All Bankster BAILOUTS?

I was at the first few anti bailout rallies.

It got HIJACKED by the Neocons, so much so that the founders of the Tea Party movement have denounced it:
Campaign For Liberty — Tea Party Co-founder Laments Hijacking of Movement

The general disgruntlement of the masses at the Establishment is being harnessed and re-directed back towards the mainstream. Glenn Beck for example, is riding it and doing re-direction too.

Today's Neocon tea party handlers are playing the "blame the Democrats" game. This makes the tea partiers simply side with the Neocons, and then it's back to same old, same old.

You see, if the Tea Partiers weren't identified with the Neocons/Republicans, the "liberals" might actually listen to them and say, "Hey, they've got some valid points". Instead, by branding them as Republicans, the "liberals" will simply *dismiss* their points as being "the usual right-winger crap".

Have you ever seen any mass media piece point out that the modern Tea Party movement was anything but Republican? Have you ever seen a piece pointing out that it grew massively during the Bush / Paulson bailouts? This fact should open your eyes about the mass media.


This is the problem of any centralized anti Establishment movement that grows. It WILL get hijacked. So by necessity the Freedom Movement has to be composed of lots of small groups.

 

It's interesting...

I hear / read a lot of folks bashing "the media", saying that "it" has an agenda, accusing "it" of various political biases, rinse, repeat. I think that I'm uniquely qualified to speak on this subject, and not just relative to the confines of a small auto enthusiasts' forum.

For the first 7 years of my so-called career I worked for various radio and television stations, both commercial and public, in operations (news production, on-air ops, editing, etc) and in engineering. I've spent the past eleven years on the vendor side of the industry, and I have worked inside of pretty much every major radio network, news dept, headend, etc., that exists in this country.

I've built studios and newsrooms at WLW in Cincinnati, KFI in Los Angeles, WINS in New York, WTOP in Washington DC, WCNN in Atlanta, KTAR in Phoenix, WBBM in Chicago, WBZ in Boston, KRLD in Dallas, KFYI in Phoenix, WBEN in Buffalo, and those are just a few of the big ones. I can't even remember them all anymore. I've done the Fox Radio Network in NYC, ESPN Radio's HQ in Bristol, about half of the Premiere Network studios in the country, yadda yadda. I did the systems design for the entire CM Telecom radio network (which was spec'd to be deployed in a hot, sandy environment by an entity whose name I was never allowed to know just prior to the Iraq war), etc. I've worked with Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Springer, Rick Dees, Ryan Seacrest, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Howard, Imus, Laura, you name it.


I'm not bragging, just establishing perspective.


Now, being in engineering gives you a rather unique sort of perspective on things. Folks may hate your guts when you tell them "sorry, but the router is offline, and it's going to remain offline for the next half hour no matter how loudly you scream because that's how long this update takes," but so long as everything is hunky-dory, you're sort of invisible. You have an all-access pass that opens every door, and folks don't even notice when you're hanging around. And when you're a contractor (or a vendor rep), they're actually pretty likely to vent their soul to you, since you're the only guy in the building who is not affiliated with any of the usual factions- engineers are the broadcasters equivalent of Switzerland. Everybody from the GM to the News Director to the air staff to the grunts working the remote truck talk to you like you're their friend.


Well, the various corporations which collectively comprise the mainstream media do in fact have an agenda. Their agenda is to satisfy their shareholders and boards of directors, which they do principally by making money. As for the folks doing the actual work, regardless of which way they appear to look at "the issues", they all have one thing in common: they're in it for the paycheck. And if you're good, they money flows pretty freely.


I'm serious! And I'm not making a criticism here. It's important to understand that broadcast media, regardless of the wrapper, is first and foremost designed to hold your attention so that they can deliver your ears / eyeballs to the ad agency. It doesn't matter whether they're airing a Jimmy Buffett concert, Battlestar Galactica, the superbowl, ten songs in a row, informing you of the reason why you have been stopped in traffic on the freeway for the last 20 minutes, or bringing you the so-called news. The end goal isn't to inform you, or even to entertain you per-se, it's just to keep you tuned in.


News Radio and Television outlets adopt certain stylistic and political tones (conservative, liberal, "fair and balanced", etc) for the same reason that music stations focus on a particular format (country, urban, classic rock, and what have you.) It's not because the owners of the station particularly give a damn about R&B as opposed to jazz, it's because they need to carve out a niche and attract a unique audience.


When you're doing a music format, it's pretty easy to hold an audience. All you have to do is play the same **** over and over again, with various contests, giveaways, and concert remotes in between. The Kiss stations are the worst- I think I still have the whole AT40 playlist from early 2004 running in my head on a constant loop.


With news stations, it's a little harder. You can do the Headline format (CNN HLN, WINS, etc) but that's only good for commuters and background noise. And even Edward R. Murrow (who, in my world, occupies a level one step shy of The Deity) would never cut it in today's hundred-channel environment. Hell, the great man himself even observed that "If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable."

The real trick is to synthesize controversy, and it doesn't matter which side of the so-called issue you take, so long as you inflame emotions and stir up the pot. A person who is listening just so that she can compile a list of every stupid thing you say and then blog about why your station is biased, evil and wrong is every bit as valuable in the Arbitron / Nielson report as one who agrees with every word you say. There's no such thing as bad publicity in this business.

Say that the President steps out of his office one afternoon and says to an aide that it's looking like it'll be a nice, sunny afternoon, and he'd like to take a jog later on. Great! The President has just acknowledged the effects of global warming, so let's bring in some experts from both sides of the issue and let them duke it out for half an hour, then we'll run a produced piece about carbon emissions, air some stock interviews with auto industry reps, show a few shots of a Polar Bear walking around looking confused, then do the reaction clips, go back to the studio for another round of experts violently disagreeing with one other, and then cut to the press conference that the President had to call to deny all the **** that you invented in the first place (missing his afternoon jog in the process.)

Hell, you can fill a whole daypart with that ****, and it's a lot cheaper than producing an episode of CSI.


Now, there are exceptions to the rule. In the US, it's the non-coms, and in this I include both the subsidized public broadcasters (PBS / NPR) as well as the independent community stations. The folks who work at these places aren't there for the money, because there isn't much of it to be had. A few are there because they just graduated from Full Sail and are trying to build a demo reel (our equivalent of a portfolio), but most of 'em are there for the same reason folks join PETA or Greenpeace- they have an agenda, and this is a comfortable soapbox to stand on. It's safer than getting shot at by whalers in the Sea of Japan, but fulfills the same fundamental need for smug self-aggrandizement and intellectual superiority

Fortunately, they're considered pretty marginal by insiders. Nobody quotes WGBH.


Now, I'm not saying that it's all 100% corrupt. Actually, corrupt isn't even a fair word to use. So long as you look at it with the right perspective, it's not corrupt at all. It's just a bit misleading in much the same way as a Vegas magic show. Lots of misdirection, but you come away feeling fulfilled.


There are, however, a couple of genuinely reliable news sources, and by that I mean agencies that listen more they they talk. In the US, you've got Reuters and the AP. Unfortunately, neither of these are really direct-to-consumer agencies. Yeah, they have websites, but they're mostly set up to feed information into the more traditional broadcast outlets, which in turn function as fixed-gain, variable-distortion amplifiers. (Trust me- if you're an engineer, that's a really funny joke.)


There are a couple of newspapers that still do honest journalism. The New York Times is one, the Washington Post is the other. Everybody else just quotes them and takes wire stories, but those two actually do their homework. If you've never read or watched "All the President's Men", it's worth your time. Those folks actually give a damn about honest reporting.


Within the broadcast space, about the only agency I'd still count as doing real journalism is BBC News. They enjoy a sort of ivory-tower status, in that they have basically an infinite supply of money, and are not afflicted with the neo-hippie stigma that permeates American public media (NPR and PBS).



But the so-called "mainstream media"? Hell, just by acknowledging it as such you're deluding yourself. It's just not worth getting riled up about.

 

This is because nut-job pro-life psychos like Palin took over command and now its ruined once it became marketable.

 

Don't forget about secessionist Perry.



Also, Big Gov isn't such a bad thing. It would be more dangerous if it was small and easier to manipulate. It is large and bumbling. For better or worse our Gov has managed to be quite stable (while taken in historical context). Remember the last Real revolution?

Me neither.

Moderation is good and moderation equals stability.

This is all big picture and doesn't address the failings of either party or the extreme elements (of which the Tea Party belongs to, until the (R)'s finish gobbling it up).

Chris

 

Nah the hijacking goes back earlier than that, to the point when Dick Armey, Glenn Beck, and Michelle Malkin hyped it up.

Palin herself was chosen by the Neocon handlers as the answer to the Hilary threat. Did you ever wonder how she got picked and who gets to pick who gets trotted out in front of the media?

You guys should learn to not be distracted by PERSONALITIES (Palin, Obama), and look at IDEAS.

The weak mind is concerned with appearances.
The average mind is concerned with personalities.
The strong mind is concerned with ideas.

By ideas, I mean this:
The Neocons (Republicans) follow Leo Strauss' philosophy that to control the masses you scare them with threats of nebulous enemies, project an empire overseas, convince them that an empire is needed for protection at home, and this allows the power elite to take away the masses' liberties (e.g. war on terror, patriot act).

The Fabian Socialists (Democrats) follow the philosophy that to control the masses you spread the idea of Welfarism because it is hard to argue against "help the poor" platitudes, convince the masses the gov't needs to take care of them, and this allows the power elite to control the masses because they give up economic liberty.

Both philosophies are about a power elite gaining more power and control over the masses. And which 2-bit or big politician isn't in the game for the power?

BOTH parties are for more welfare and warfare. The Dems may claim to be against wars and loss of civil liberties, but vote for em anyway. The Reps may claim to be for small gov't, but expand it anyway.

The mass media subscribes to both philosophies.

 

100% agreed except for feeling fulfilled. When you know it's junk food, you wanna throw up.

Let's look at the ownership of the media. But first let me tell you a story.

In 1898 the Spanish was the largest, but a dying empire. Cuba was one of its colonies. Spain had no interest in going to war with a young strong country like the USA. In February the USS Maine blew up while docked in the Havana harbor.

William Randolph Hearst, who owned several newspapers, declared it was an attack by Spain. The foreign policy elite in the USA, who were also the business elite, had visions of empire. It was used as a pretext for the Spanish American War. Going to war with an empire would be a grand way of expanding your own.

So you see, the "agenda" of the newspapers' *owner* started a war.

Let's see today. FIVE corporations own most of the mass media. The boards of directors of these five sit on other boards of other large corporations. They are extensively intertwined, with cross ownership.

Here is some great info on this cross ownership dug up by some dude
Follow the Money, Follow the Media - Honda-Tech

Yikes. They may do "honest journalism" - e.g. send a reporter to Baghdad, but these two are the main "Establishment" mouthpieces. All the other regional and city newspapers quote them.

 

I don't know how anyone can actually watch the mainstream media. Seriously, its pretty hilarious to watch when you realize their agenda.

 

Not sure folks really read Joe's post there, but personally I totaly agree. One of the reasons I prefer "The Daily Show" to the news programs is that very fact. I am dead serious. Often they have as many actual facts in their reports as Fox or CNN. But one of the big reasons is an interveiw with Jon Stewart years ago on 60 Minutes (IIRC) where he pointed out that the conflict is the story, and the facts are basically just context. Get people riled up is profitable. This is why Fox News is far and away the most succesful network in terms of ratings. Where I like the comedy shows because they can make their cash simply by pointing out the biases of others. It provides some perspective.

The thing to remember is this: Would you rather have government controlled media? Because if you want the nightly news you basically have two options, profit-centric or gov controlled. Sure you have non-profits, but frankly they seldom have the resources to really put out the information on a level that will actually capture peoples attention for 2.7 hours a day. And rest assured someone will do what it takes to secure that eyeball time. So I prefer it to be Time-Warner rather than the DOJ.

On the other hand, I am sick of the two party system too. In the words of Lewis Black, you basically get two flavors of crap to choose from. To get much done in Washington you have to toe the line it seems like. Not much room for people like Joe Leiberman. Love him or hate him, the guy does rock the boat on principal and I respect that. And for all his pull and influence, he still gets outcast and marginalized all the time by whichever group.

Policy by talking-point is not going to work in the long run.

 

You don't see that the mainstream news is basically a gov't propaganda?

 

No. If it got ratings they would cover senators bowel movements and critique them. Their bias is whatever makes money. And public approval ratings indicate that whatever the media is doing, its not helping congress much.

 

You are only thinking of the shallow stuff such as Rep vs Dem and "god fearing antigay Republican caught hiring teenage male prostitute".

The media is always

"how big should the debt / deficit be",
not "why the **** is there a perpetual deficit anyway and who benefits?"

or "should we or should we not socialize medicine" instead of
"why is health care so expensive and where does all that money go?"

or "hold your breath the Federal Reserve will decide on interest rates today" instead of "Do we really need the FED anyway?",

or "Bernanke deserves credit for preventing a depression" instead of
"wait a minute, just months before the big crash he said 'everything's never been better'"

or "The Treasury will bail out the big banks" instead of
"what would actually happen if the bastards go belly up anyway?"

or "a man who resisted arrest got tasered" instead of
"let's look at the video, there have been cases where cops used tasers on people who were not violent"

 

Yep. And thats all because it get ratings. If you had a special on the functions of the Fed and if it was needed, you would have similar ratings to a 80s James Bond movie marathon.

I'm not saying the effect is really much different at this point, only that the cause is.

Although, I do disagree with a few of the points specifically (while totaly getting what you are saying overall. Abuse of police power for instance gets all kinds of media attention from what I have seen.

 

Jason, you need to do some deeper investigation and understand the context of Hearst's empire. Right now, you're doing about as good a job of covering the meat of the issue as Fox News.

Essentially, Hearst pretty much invented the concept of tabloid journalism. His early papers, the SF Examiner and the NY Journal, were the forerunners of today's supermarket rags like the National Enquirer and Weekly World News. He was all about Big Headlines that caught the eye, and sensationalist reporting that was often outright fabrication. Fake interviews, doctored photos, pretty much every technique that characterizes a modern tabloid was pioneered by Hearst.

In other words, Hearst didn't give a rat's *** about politics or even right and wrong. His only goal was to boost circulation, and then, as now, you do that by fanning the flames of controversy.


But a number of things separate Hearst's era from ours. For starters, the public are slightly more literate and worldly. Ok, so when CNN reported that Russia was invading Georgia, there were some folks who didn't realize that they weren't talking about the Georgia that has the big Coca-Cola factory in it. But at least a majority of Americans don't actually believe that Bigfoot abducted Elvis and took him before Xenu.

And today, we actually have standards (mostly industry-enforced) about what gets printed and what does not. Journalists seek out multiple sources before printing anything that they didn't actually see themselves. Reporters don't just make up eyewitness accounts anymore. Is there still a potential for bias and selective coverage? Of course. But chances are that nothing you see above the fold on the front page of the Times is actually going to be an outright forgery.

Long story short: it's very possible that Hearst's actions may have provoked a war, or at least hastened it. But you are vastly mistaken if you think that he was acting out of some kind of patriotic or political motivation. He simply didn't give a damn about the consequences of his actions, so long as they sold more papers.




Ok, now I know you didn't read anything I wrote earlier. 99% of my business comes from Viacomm, News Corp, Clear Channel, AOL/Time Warner, etc. You are, as they say, preaching to the choir.

You're also proving my point. The fact that the majority of news outlets are owned by mega-corporations pretty much prevents them from acting under any sort of political motivation. The shareholders simply wouldn't stand for it. To them, a transmitter (or a printing press) is nothing more than a money pump, and your number one priority is to make sure that pump is running as fast as it can.




Oh, yeah. Woodward & Bernstein were definitely mouthpieces of the establishment.

You gonna try and convince me that Ben Bradlee (executive editor of the Washington Post) was actually part of a secret conspiracy headed by FBI Director Patrick Gray and Deputy Director of the CIA Vernon Walters, designed to topple the Executive Office and install Speaker of the House Carl Albert (democrat) as de-facto chairman of the federal government? After all, Albert was a key figure in the passage of the Social Security Act of 1965, which resulted in the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, our country's first foray into nationalized healthcare.

I'm sorry, but this is just paranoid bullshit. There is one reason, and one reason alone why Fox and CNN regurgitate press releases and air video provided by the Defense Department: it's cheap and it's easy. (Ok, technically, those are two reasons.)



YES!

My grandmother, God rest her soul, used to keep Fox News turned on pretty much 24/7. It's not because she liked what was on it, in fact, she utterly despised every talking head that they paraded before the camera. She watched it because it got her riled up and gave her something to argue about with my gun-toting, NRA-card-carrying sister. But you know what? The Nielsen box can't tell the difference. To it, she was just a pair of eyes that happened to be watching the commercials that air on Fox, and that's how it goes down in the ratings.



And here we have the heart of the issue. The reality of the situation is that commercial media isn't perfect, in much the same way as representative democracy. Both are, in fact, the worst possible implementations of their respective groups, with the exception of all others that have ever been tried.


You know, it's funny. Since I've been without an MP3-capable radio in my car for the past month, I've been listening to a lot of NPR. It happened by accident, actually. I tuned in one Sunday to listen to Car Talk, and forgot to change the station the following morning.

And I have to retract a small bit of what I said in my first post in this thread.

To be honest, it's been so long since I worked at an NPR affiliate that I'd kind of forgotten that there is, in fact, a fairly sharp distinction in credibility between the locals and the network. My criticism of affiliate bureaus, for the most part, remains unaltered. 99% of the folks who work at the actual stations are hippie liberals, and 99% of the content they produce is either fluff or propaganda.

But the network itself (the actual NPR) actually has a pretty good news department, on par with BBC News I'd say, in terms of the depth of their reporting. To dovetail off of something Jason wrote earlier, any idiot can send a talking head to Baghdad to stand around yammering into a microphone in front of some tanks. It's another thing entirely to do actual journalism. And they haven't forgotten the recipe.

Indiana Jones once told a group of students that "Ninety percent of all archaeology is done in the library." Well, You don't have to scatter a dozen reporters with remote uplinks and production crews all over a hot, sandy place to cover the story. In fact, doing that pretty much guarantees that all you're going to get is the headlines. All they can do is show you pretty pictures of bombs falling and charred corpses. Doing actual journalism is something entirely different.



Nope. I see that it's a business.

They may do a shitty job of reporting, but trust me, there's no secret cabal. The modern-day Hearst Corporation has the same goals and aspirations as Pepsi and Reebok. If they do from time to time parrot gov't propaganda, it's not because they give a damn about it, it's because plugging a cable into the pool feed at a WH press conference is cheaper than spending a whole month researching a story.

 

You know Joe. Now I realize that you are just another stooge covering up the abuses of BF. How can you look at yourself in the mirror?!

On a serious note, NPR is pretty good. I used to listen to it on the way to work in the morning. I know what you mean regarding the locals. In COS we have this guy who has never (and I have been paying attention on this) in my time lsitening gotten through the lcoal annuncements without stuttering are frigging up somehow. Not once. He does not have a speech impediment or anything, he just sucks.

BUT. They also have to beg for money about twice a year. And they dont have decent pseudo-intelectual mud-wrestling with Steve Inskeep (SP?) doing so muc of the reporting/moderating. Their influence is thus severely limited. McNeil/Lherer is basically in the same boat.

 

Joe, I *did* read your post. Absolutely, the primary motivation of the media is money. However, the networks and newspapers have a general editorial policy which is shaped by the movers and shakers of this country. You're probably right about Hearst, but there were many politicians at the time with visions of empire. It is a constant among megalomanics.

It's been like that since the beginning of civilization - that those in power want to shape the spread of information, be it with legal pressures (such as with the case of Fox and Monsanto
https://www.miataturbo.net/current-events-news-politics-77/lies-damn-lies-mass-media-45424/ )
or whatnot. I'm not saying that every reporter and every article is reviewed by some secret panel, that is just silly. I'm saying that this "editorial policy" is similar to the "KoolAid effect" that happens in many companies - wherein some belief spreads within a company e.g. "our products are the best rah rah rah" delusion spreads within a company while the competitors slowly eat their lunch. What happens is that reporters are hired which have the same beliefs as the "editorial policy". So the staff are simply a bunch of folks that believe in all the same things (e.g. "progressives" in the NYT, and "conservatives" in Fox).

There have been cases of direct intervention in the news, one such example was regarding the Lusitania that preceded WW1:
http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com...howtopic=77847

Have you heard of "Operation Mockingbird"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

 

No question here, though I fail to see a distinction between the corporate directorship of a media outlet vs. that of a company that makes sneakers or carbonated beverages. Folks like my neighbor Carl the handyman tend not to be found on the board of directors of any of 'em. All of 'em are focused on improving the bottom line, and and all are dealing with highly fungible commodities where image is king.

Large conglomerates, in my experience, are all pretty much the same. Heck, the company that I work with (Harris Corp.) is a combination defense contractor / think tank / telecom supplier / IT service provider / broadcast equipment manufacturer. The DoD and gov't contracts arm is far and away the most massive division of the company, and believe me, they profit from war every bit as much as Lockheed or Grumman. Ever since hostilities in Afghanistan began, they've been selling Falcon-series tactical radios and all sorts of other military comms hardware like it's going out of style. I'm pretty sure, however, that they didn't have anything to do with 9/11. (Or if they did, I never got the memo. They certainly didn't warn us about it in advance, and I'd been up on the roof of 1 WTC installing an antenna two days prior.)



And it is still so today. But while you can always find at least one or two outliers in every statistical sample, these folks tend to be interested in their own empire, not somebody else's. Carlos Slim Helu, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Lakshmi Mittal, you can run down the line of all the world's richest folk, and none of them seem to give a damn about conquest of a nationalistic nature- they're all about dominating their chosen field in the business empire. Even Mukesh Ambani, who has as much chance as anybody at shaping national politics, seems to do so only for the purpose of furthering his own petrochemicals business. (And since Pakistan has relatively little in the way of proven oil reserves, I don't think Ambani can be blamed for any of the unpleasantness there.)


Really, it was no different in the days of Rockefeller and Carnegie. There were just fewer regulatory controls in place then.



Ok, I'll run with that, and I'll use some examples that any US Citizen with at least a high school education out to be familiar with.

Earlier, you said that the Washington Post was a key gov't mouthpiece.

In 1971, the Post hired Bob Woodward, who at the time was fresh out of college and the Navy, having just completed a year-long stint at a small regional newspaper in the area. Definitely a young go-getter looking to make a name for himself. One year after that, he was a lead on what most people today know as the Watergate Scandal, a series of investigative reporting which exposed a scandal within the government involving the executive office, the CIA, the FBI, and the DOJ, and which ultimately resulted in the resignation of the President.

Maybe Woodward hadn't been around long enough? Carl Bernstein, who was his partner in the investigation, certainly had. Bernstein had been with the Post since 1966, and I think 8 years is certainly long enough to get a feel for what the boss does and doesn't like. If this sort of thing ran against the Post's "editorial Kool-Aid", then why the heck would he have risked his career by pressing the paper's editorial staff for the story?

Oh, I see- Nixon was a Republican, so it was OK to topple him.

But wait, what about Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Post (Woodward & Bernstein's boss's boss) at the time of the Watergate investigation? Well, there's the little matter of the Pentagon Papers. Actually, the Times broke that story in 1971 (knock them off the mouthpiece list, too), but Bradlee was a key figure in the battle against the government for the right to publish them. And what, pre tel, was in these documents? Only several thousand pages of extraordinarily damning evidence against the executive branch with regard to misleading the public about American military policy in southeast Asia, with particular emphasis on Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, all democrats.

Ok, so it isn't a liberal conspiracy against the GOP, and it isn't a conservative conspiracy against the democratic party. It couldn't have been empire-building (like most newspapers, neither the Post nor the Times posses the military strength necessary to seize control of the US government) so what the hell could it have been?

Objective journalism, maybe?





Unquestionably. This is kind of how the HR process works in general. I would imagine that the director of NPD at Toyota tends only to hire people who he feels are in-line with Toyota's core beliefs and design philosophy. Is this wrong of them? Should they hire designers who hold beliefs which run fundamentally against the grain of Toyota's?

I don't disagree with what you're saying here, I just totally fail to see how it's a bad thing, or even particularly relevant.




Sure, it was an alleged CIA directorate to influence the press. Nothing new about that, really. (It's part of the CIA's charter.)

Didn't work out too well, either.

Point is, you're talking about the government actively seeking to influence reporters, and on an individual level, there's no question that this has always occurred, continues to occur, and will probably always occur.

But there's a massive difference between men in dark sunglasses bullying individual reporters and entire organizations acting, at a corporate level, in collusion with any agency for any purpose other than making money.




This is what I love about you, man. There's a conspiracy under every bagel.

 

Agreed.

Agreed.

I didn't say that corporate execs all want to have a national empire - what I meant was that many of those who rise up in national politics are megalomaniacs with dreams of empire. Some of the megalomaniac types in government have risen up in the public sector and moved to government through the so called "revolving doors" between government and Big Biz.

Agreed, except you have to realize that "regulations" are most heavily influenced by those with the most money, and the effect is almost always favorable to larger players and punitive for smaller players, by increasing costs disproportionately for the latter.

No I wasn't clear about my point. You assume that the individuals who are elected are the ones with power. They are figureheads to an extent. The power elite are composed of factions many of which compete with one another, but they don't compete a few common issues. You also assume that the "Rep vs Dem" show is significant - it's not - like you say, the media plays up the conflict, but in reality both parties pick our pockets, wage war, protect big business, and expand government.

Here is my thesis.

6,600 people rule the world:
http://www.amazon.com/Superclass-Glo.../dp/0374272107

The author has a 5 part video. I like the first 3 parts:
http://www.academicearth.org/courses...the-superclass
The last 2 parts are the bullshit about "we need more gov't" - bs because gov't will forever be corrupted by money at the highest levels.

Here's another point ... author Perkins calls the virtual emperor that runs the USA a "Corporatocracy":
http://www.youtube.com/v/fDf-rwrCnkI

There's also this:
http://www.strike-the-root.com/91/groves/groves1.html

The problem is not that there's a worldwide secret elite that controls everything (that's a silly idea), but that the philosophy that big government is needed to rule us because we're too stupid to rule ourselves. This means that we believe we need to elect someone to rule us, a person that is better than the those he is ruling. In reality the most immoral members of society are the ones who want to rise to power.

There is no problem with big business if they succeed because they produce a product that is better than the competition that customers want to buy, the problem is when they lobby gov't to pass laws that skew the free market in their favor.

I guess my point wasn't clear. The point was that the German gov't paid for an ad in all major cities' newspapers to warn US Citizens that the Lusitania was sailing into a war zone, and JP Morgan's men pulled the ad. The Lusitania was supposedly a passenger ship, but a couple of years ago divers found it and it had tons of munitions in it. I suppose it's not a good example of "yellow journalism" because it was an ad that was pulled, not a news article. However, the news carried anti German propaganda after the Lusitania sunk.

 

First off, while I read everything that you wrote, I honestly am not going to sit through a bunch of videos that you link to, or buy and read a 400 page book that seems only tangentially relevant, just so that we can maintain discourse. From my point of view, it's somewhat rude to simply throw up a bunch of links and expect others to sift through them, rather than taking the time to clearly and concisely state your position in your own words.



I would consider this an axiom. I don't see how it's the media's fault.

From a certain perspective, this mentality is actually embedded in the foundations of our country. The men who formed America's first governments (both under colonial rule and after secession) were all the fat cats of their day. General Washington was a wealthy and successful plantation owner, Jefferson was an aristocrat born into money who inherited 5,000 acres and owned hundreds of slaves at his estate, Franklin was a self made hundred-thousandaire who parlayed his success as an author into a small publishing empire which he used to bankroll his later eccentricities, and on and on.

The fact is that the same traits and qualities which cause a person to be attracted to politics also tend to lend themselves towards savvy in the world of enterprise-scale business.

Should we eschew the concept of elected leadership and instead reform our nation as an anarcho-syndicalist commune, where every citizen takes it in turn to act as a sort of executive officer for the week, whose decisions are ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, and by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major policies?

We'd be overthrown by The Republic of Ghana by the end of the month.




Well, on the one hand, I agree that policy is influenced more heavily by corporations and the so-called "elite" than my my neighbor Carl & I. Again, this is so obvious that I consider it axiomatic.

I'm not sure how costs are borne disproportionately by the "smaller players" though. People who earn more income pay more money (both in absolute dollars and as a percentage of income) in taxes, despite the fact that they receive the same benefits as those who pay less in taxes, insofar as things like driving on public roads and receiving medicare benefits are concerned, and of course, the so-called rich receive no benefits at all (relative to those who pay no taxes at all) when it comes to things like welfare, food stamps, and so on, as those programs are aimed entirely at benefiting those who are not making any contribution at all to paying for them.

Now, certain laws may benefit those in the extremely high income brackets, by placing caps on the total amount they can be liable for in tax (which is pretty fair, if you ask me) and by offering similar incentives to corporations, but it's a long stretch to say that any of this is "punitive" to the little guy. All you have to do to get these same "benefits" is start a major corporation and pay the salaries of all the other little guys.


And I'm pretty sure that none of this policy is being set by news directors.





I'm not sure I understand here. The laws are enacted by congress and the executive, and these positions are all elected. Policies and regulations are enacted by agencies (such as the FCC) whose members are appointed by the aforementioned elected officials.

I don't see where the Illuminati fits in here, outside of their ability to influence these two groups with political contributions and by choosing to build their factories and corporate HQs in one area vs. another.


Not at all. I assume that a majority of Americans believe GOP vs. Dem to be significant, but in reality, it's just formatting. Doesn't matter if you're listening to Jazz or AOR, the Toyota commercial is the same.




(links to books and videos ignored.)




I agree. As a whole, the members of a society are too stupid to rule themselves. I don't mean "drooling on the carpet" stupid, but rather "unable to reach consensus" stupid, and "unwilling or unable to take the time to become fully literate on every single aspect of economic and military policy" stupid. IOW, governing a country is a full-time job, which is why we elect people to do it for us. If I had to spend all my time researching every detail of every decision that gets made every day, I wouldn't have time to build radio stations, and my neighbor Carl wouldn't have time to remodel kitchens. Thus, we appoint groups of people (the executive, the legislature, the military, etc) to do those jobs for us, and we pay them a nominal fee to take care of that stuff so we can focus on other things.


That, and I really don't want the folks I run into at Wal-Mart making policy decisions about nuclear security and fiscal policy.



Immoral? I think that's a bit harsh. Narcissistic maybe? Nah, still not the quality I'm looking to express... Maybe egotistical. But more than that, charismatic and dogmatic as well.

These qualities attract a person to leadership. Doesn't matter whether that's leadership in business or leadership in government. And that's the real reason why the leaders of government tend to come from the ranks of the leaders of business- the qualities that attract you to one make you seek the other.


I don't see a conspiracy here. Just evolutionary psychology.



[citation needed]

Here is an image of the ad in question, as it appeared in the NY Times:



It is worth noting that JP Morgan died in March 1913, roughly two years prior to the sinking.

The only connection that Morgan had with the Times was that in 1896, twenty years prior to the sinking, he provided a loan to Adolph Ochs, then-owner of the Chattanooga Times, to buy it. (Prior to this, the Times was a financially struggling also-ran in the market.)

Whatever influence Morgan might have been able to exert from his grave, it didn't stop the Times from printing the ad. I have no idea what paper you think "his men" pulled it from.


Still not seeing a point to any of this...