Tink <kjgrish@comcast.net.spamno.ccom> wrote:

Yang, AthD (h.c), Kicking AWOL's Cocaine Snorting ***** wrote:

Paul Duca <p.duca@comcast.net>

Didn't Duke used to resent not getting any money from him?

I guess Abramoff didn't like duke's *****!

Sorry to tell you, but according to the Baltimore Sun, 1-6-06, Democrat
Senator Barbra Mikulski has to repay $6000 to Abramoff.

The only article I find that could be related says that Mikulski is
refunding money to Abromoff's CLIENTS. The indian tribes. Not
Abramoff. Maybe you could provide an actual article cite?

"Mimi Cohen" <mimiNOSPAMgal@cox.net> wrote in message news:7odvf.

The media is corporate and in the business of making money,

Yup...!

MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media
January 4, 2006

MEDIA ALERT: NEW MEDIA LENS BOOK AND AN INTERVIEW WITH THE EDITORS

Media Lens is happy to announce that our first book, Guardians Of Power -
The Myth Of The Liberal Media, is now available:
http://www.medialens.org/bookshop/guardians_of_power.php

John Pilger says:
"Guardians of Power ought to be required reading in every media college. It
is the most important book about journalism I can remember."

Noam Chomsky says:
"Regular critical analysis of the media, filling crucial gaps and correcting
the distortions of ideological prisms, has never been more important. Media
Lens has performed a major public service by carrying out this task with
energy, insight, and care."

Edward Herman says:
"Media Lens is doing an outstanding job of pressing the mainstream media to
at least follow their own stated principles and meet their public service
obligations."


Media Lens Interview With UKWatch

Alex Doherty of UKWatch recently asked us about the new book
(http://www.ukwatch.net/article/1282)

Alex Doherty: Your new book is called 'Guardians of Power' who are the
Guardians of Power? Who are they protecting
and why?

Media Lens: The guardians are the corporate mass media. They are protecting
the powerful state-corporate interests on which they depend and of which
they are a part. In this book we specifically focus on the 'liberal'
guardians of power - the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the BBC
and so on. They are essentially protecting their own interests. For example,
many people consider the BBC a bastion of honest reporting. On December 2,
the media reported that Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark and her husband Alan
Clements netted £1m each from the sale of IWC Media, the television
production company, to RDF Media, maker of Wife Swap, for £14m. The other
presenters of Newsnight - Jeremy Paxman, for example - are also
millionaires.

Irish billionaire Sir Anthony O'Reilly, who is chief executive of
Independent News & Media Plc, the multinational company that publishes the
Independent and Independent on Sunday in London, is estimated to be worth
£1.3 billion, making him the richest man in Ireland.

A Guardian Weekend supplement in March 2004 consisted of 128 pages. Of
these, 90 were taken up in advertising, some of it aimed at society's
wealthiest elites. The "chiffon halterneck dress with metal sequin overlay"
advertised on page 74, for example, cost £5,890. The country's leading
liberal newspaper described this as "absolute glamour".

The Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group (GMG), which has only one
bottom line - making money. The GMG website enlightens anyone who thinks the
Guardian is a dauntless liberal force for truth and compassion in a
money-grubbing world:

"Guardian Media Group has a wide portfolio of media interests. The flagship
titles - the Guardian, the Observer, the Manchester Evening News, and Auto
Trader - are strengthened and supplemented by a range of successful
businesses which together from one of the most vibrant media organisations
in the UK. Our investments in the Internet, electronic publishing and radio
give us a broad and successful commercial base. Guardian Media Group is
owned by the Scott Trust." (http://www.gmgplc.co.uk)

These are obviously just a few small examples; but this is an elite media
system that has been designed, and has evolved, over many decades to defend
the interests of the top 5% of the British population who own 45% of the
nation's wealth and who run the country. The idea that this system reports
neutrally between the interests of corporate titans like O'Reilly and
impoverished civilians in the Third World, for example in Iraq, is just
absurd.

AD: The focus of your book is the liberal media. Why have you chosen this
target rather than the right-wing media which many would consider far worse?

ML: As Joel Bakan notes in his book, The Corporation, the current status quo
is fundamentally psychopathic - it systematically subordinates people and
planet to profit. Much of the suffering in the Third World is the result of
deliberate military, economic and other interventions to subordinate the
interests of local people to Western corporate profits. Much of the
destruction of the environment - for example of the climate - is the result
of the same psychopathic set of priorities.

Even now the websites of major business front groups like the US National
Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce are full of
climate scepticism, Kyoto rejectionism and so on. Unfortunately, a
profit-oriented corporate media system owned by wealthy people and/or parent
companies, dependent on advertisers, linked with any number of business
enterprises, has every interest in maintaining this psychopathic status quo.
Phil Lesley, author of a handbook on public relations and communications,
advises corporations:

"People generally do not favour action on a non-alarming situation when
arguments seem to be balanced on both sides and there is a clear doubt. The
weight of impressions on the public must be balanced so people will have
doubts and lack motivation to take action. Accordingly, means are needed to
get balancing information into the stream from sources that the public will
find credible. There is no need for a clear-cut 'victory'. ... Nurturing
public doubts by demonstrating that this is not a clear-cut situation in
support of the opponents usually is all that is necessary."

This is the main function of 'professional' news reporting. The main
function of the 'liberal' arm of professional journalism is indicated by
Australian media analyst Alex Carey:

"There is evidence from a major wartime study that, for the best results,
one side only of an issue or argument should be presented to poorly educated
people. Two-sided presentations, however, are more effective in influencing
better educated people and those initially opposed to the desired view."

The liberal media tell both sides of the story - kind of. They emphasise the
state-corporate version of the truth, particularly in news reporting. This
is then 'balanced' by commentary that presents superficial or trivial
counter-arguments that do not seriously challenge the official view. So, for
example, on the issue of Iraqi WMD, the official view - that Iraq was a
threat that had to be disarmed, by force of necessary - was countered with a
superficial, trivial view - that this may well be true, but any action
should be endorsed by the UN. The real counter-argument - that Iraq was
clearly not a threat and that any attack on Iraq, with or without UN
approval, would be the supreme war crime - the launching of a war of
aggression - was almost nowhere to be seen.

The result is what Edward Herman describes as "normalising the unthinkable".
The liberal audience - the section of the population that might be expected
to be most compassionate, most fiercely opposed to government crimes - was
subject to endless liberal propaganda persuading them of the basic
reasonableness and respectability of the US-UK government position. This
consistently has the effect of pacifying and neutralising the most concerned
and motivated section of society - people drawn to progressive, liberal
ideas. By contrast, the right-wing press preaches to the converted, people
who are happy with the status quo and keen for it not to be challenged.

AD: The liberal media do allow some genuine dissenting voices. The Guardian
and the independent for instance publish articles by principled radicals
such as George Monbiot, Mark Curtis, Naomi Klein, Robert Fisk amongst
others. If the liberal media are truly "Guardians of Power" why let these
dissenting voices be heard at all?

ML: This is not actually true. The liberal media do +not+ allow genuine
dissent when it comes to analysing the structural corruption of the
corporate media system. Monbiot, Klein and Fisk have written essentially
nothing about this topic in the Guardian and Independent. Last time we
checked, Curtis had not mentioned the role of the media at all in his
Guardian articles. Fisk never criticises the Independent - in fact he
praises it, as he does the British media generally. He does not focus on the
appalling performance of the liberal media - he seems to believe that the
Independent really is independent; an astonishingly naïve view. Recall that
these are our most honest writers.

Serious media analysis is a completely taboo subject within the mainstream.
We published one article on the issue in the Guardian in December 2004 but
that was a one-off gesture in response to intense criticism of the Guardian
from Media Lens readers - it took us four months to place the article and we
haven't been invited back.

The only journalist who has been consistently honest about the media is John
Pilger. It's interesting to consider how he's treated. In our view he's the
country's most powerful dissident - his writing is superb, and the depth and
breadth of his insight is beyond most of the other writers you mention. But
it seems there's no place for him in any of the quality papers! People talk
about the Guardian comment editor Seumas Milne as a radical force - but he
won't publish Pilger. We've asked Milne why and he refuses to answer. So our
best living dissident - obviously one of the all-time greats - is required
to write a fortnightly column in the New Statesman which reaches a few
thousand people. So why is he treated differently to Klein and Monbiot?
Because he's honest about the media - he criticises the Guardian, he draws
attention to the vital role of the entire liberal media establishment in
crimes against humanity. So he is persona non grata. The same is true of
Chomsky.

American dissidents are traditionally much more honest about the media -
here it's just understood that you don't talk about it - and so they are not
welcome in our press. It couldn't be more obvious. By the way, the media in
other countries are sometimes far more honest. Papers in places like South
Korea and the United Arab Emirates publish material that is sometimes far
more critical of the media. It matters more here - we're closer to centres
of real power - so it's more tightly controlled.

Readers are not stupid. In the USSR it was obvious to much of the public
that the media was heavily controlled and censored. As a result most people
realised they were not free and so they sought out honest sources of
information (like Samizdat) and energetically pushed for greater political
freedom - the clear fact of media oppression motivated progressive change.
By contrast, in the West, occasional examples of honest commentary and
reporting create the powerful illusion that we have access to an open,
independent press. It is like a vaccine that inoculates people against the
truth of thought control.

AD: Why do you think the UK media does not behave more like the United
States media where dissenting voices are almost totally excluded? Which
system do you think is more effective in controlling the domestic
population?

ML: Bush and Blair are both currently in office rather than in jail, so we
conclude that both systems must be extremely effective. The US is an unusual
and extreme case. Historically, US corporate elites have waged a very
intense and conscious kind of class warfare - really huge, centrally
directed campaigns of propaganda manipulation and political control designed
to stifle opposition. The British public are largely unaware of this, but
the very large and popular socialist movements in the US in the first half
of the 20th century were deliberately targeted and destroyed by business
power. The propaganda campaigns were like something out of Stalinism or
Maoism (see Elizabeth Fones-Wolf's remarkable work, Selling Free Enterprise,
for details) - really vast attempts to brainwash society.

Things were initially not that different here. From the early days of the
nineteenth century, business and government were resolutely determined to
stamp out the free expression of ideas. The first resort were the seditious
libel and blasphemy laws, which essentially outlawed all challenges to the
status quo. When these failed to have the desired effect, elites turned to
newspaper stamp duty and taxes on paper and advertisements to price radical
journals out of the market. Between 1789 and 1815, stamp duty was increased
by 266 per cent, helping to ensure, as Lord Castlereagh put it, that
"persons exercising the power of the press" would be "men of some
respectability and property"; the point being that these more "respectable"
owners of the press "would conduct them in a more respectable manner than
was likely to be the result of pauper management", as Cresset Pelham
observed at the time.

The rise of a parliamentary socialist opposition - which was never
successful to the same extent in the US - naturally supported a left-leaning
press. This has been under remorseless attack ever since. With the
convergence of Labour and Tory parties in the style of the US political
system, the pressure on left elements within the media has increased
markedly. There are signs that the press, too, is converging - the Observer
is now essentially a right-wing propaganda organ. The Guardian also makes no
bones about rejecting radical causes in favour of "the centre ground". The
centre, now, in fact is the hard, corporate right. It is ruthless
realpolitik dressed as humanitarian intervention. It's noticeable that,
despite being proved right in almost everything they said, several
high-profile anti-war journalists and politicians have lost their jobs since
2003 - cruise missile columnists like Aaronovitch, Cohen and Hari have not
been touched. That's surely a sign of the times.

AD: Tell us a bit about Medialens. How did the project begin? What were your
hopes for it?

ML: We had both published books on radical politics/media analysis. We had
also managed to publish a few articles and book reviews in the mainstream
press. But it was agonising work - it was clear that tests of servility
were being set up, hoops were being held out, punishment for honesty was
being administered. Naturally, we were expected to play the same game as
everyone else - notably, don't even +dream+ of subjecting the corporate
media system to serious criticism. DC had set up a website for his book,
Private Planet (www.private-planet.com), and DE suggested a similar website
on media analysis. Our initial thought was to just send out useful analysis
and information to a small circle of interested friends - the idea of how to
reach more people than did not initially occur to us. We assumed we'd be
ignored and blanked, and remain pretty much unknown.

We thought it would be interesting to conduct an experiment - what happens
if you give no thought to the sensitivities of mainstream commissioning
editors and just tell the truth, as we see it, about the media? So we very
consciously decided to burn any media career bridges we might have, to
abandon any thought of making money from writing, and just write what seemed
most important. We consciously set out to reject all forms of compromise. We
are both strongly drawn to the idea that motivation is crucial - we believe
that it is vital that our work should be rooted in a compassionate
motivation rather than in a personal concern for career security, status,
and so on.

AD: An important part of what you do is getting people to regularly
challenge journalists and editors. Do you think these challenges have had an
impact on the way the news is reported?

ML: It's very difficult to judge, and maybe we're not the best people to
give an opinion. There have been clear examples where readers have changed
outcomes in the media - questions have been asked of senior politicians on
BBC radio and TV that otherwise would not have been asked.

AD: Medialens has understandably focussed on the crimes of the media and on
raising consciousness on this issue. To turn to another side of the problem
what kind of media would you like to see? In what ways should the media
change and how is change to be achieved?

ML: We are an example of the media we would like to see. Forget for a moment
issues of structure and so on - what is it we really need? We need
individuals motivated by compassion for suffering rather than greed - people
who are willing to write honestly about the causes of that suffering. We
need journalists who are not compromised by their aspiration for money,
status, respectability and power - people who find the idea of rubbing
shoulders with the rich and famous repulsive if it means they have to
subordinate the interests of the suffering and defenceless to their own
career progression. We need journalists who understand that personal
happiness and social welfare are ultimately rooted in concern for others -
in personal qualities of kindness, generosity, compassion, patience and
non-violence.

We are not trying to pretend we are exemplars of these qualities, but we
+do+ aspire to be motivated by them, and we do think they should be at the
heart of honest journalism. It's reasonable to say that one-half of our
focus is on challenging greed, hatred and ignorance with facts and
arguments. The other half is to maintain and increase a compassionate
motivation for what we're doing.

AD: What do you think of the state of alternative media in this country? Is
it capable of ever supplanting the mainstream?

ML: It already has for some people to some extent. Quite a few people who
want to understand the truth of Haiti, Colombia, Iraq and so on turn to
alternative media rather than seek confusing, misleading, compromised
accounts in the mainstream. We have written often of how we hope that
increased public awareness of the limits of political and media freedom will
generate truly democratic, alternative media with the power to impose a news
agenda on the mainstream, or to replace it as source of news. Ideally,
beyond even this, powerful alternative media should aspire to inform and
motivate large popular movements, and even new, libertarian political
parties, which might then be in a position to reform media structures to
limit the influence of corporate interests.

AD: What are your hopes for the book? What do you want people will take away
from it?

ML: People will never seek liberation from a situation of oppression if they
believe they are already free. The illusion of media freedom is incredibly
potent. It is backed up by high-tech power, endorsed by endless celebrities
and global heroes telling us, or implying, that the media system is
fundamentally benign, free, open and honest. It's very difficult to step
outside this propaganda and think for ourselves.

We have collected the most powerful and relevant examples we can find
showing how even the best media systematically impose a false, controlling,
pacifying, oppressive and lethal version of the world on the public. Of
course, we have read this stuff 100 times, so we assumed the impact on us
personally would be pretty minimal, even tedious. We were both pleasantly
surprised to find that, after reading the book in proof and final form, we
came away with an unusually clear sense of just how obviously compromised
and destructive the media system is. It opened our eyes! If the book has a
similar effect on other readers, that would be a positive result.

Readers may also be interested in the following interview we did with
Gabriele Zampirini:

http://www.thecatsdream.com/blog/2005/12/guardians-of-power.htm


Write to us at:

On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 10:16:41 -0800, Mimi Cohen <mimiNOSPAMgal@cox.net>
wrote:

Looks like the "liberal" NY Times made yet another
"mistake" that just happens to favor republicans.

Look, yet another idiot who thinks the media are
biased toward the GOP. It's hard to believe there
are folks that stupid.

Look, yet another moron who thinks that there's nothing
for Chris Matthews to MC a Jack Abramoff event!

These morons still believe Nixon's *LIE* about the "liberal
media".

The contemporary conservative notion of "liberal media"
began as an anti-Semitic smear. Nixon (and Agnew) came
from a generation that didn't bother to sanitize this fact in
private conversation (where it was the "liberal Jewish
media").