American foreign and domestic policy is adrift. Progressives, liberals, and
democrats have criticized the incoherent policies of the Bush
Administration. Even members of the once noble Republican Party are parting
ranks with a GOP that has been infiltrated and commandeered by a minority of
far right extremists whose only obligation is to the corporations that
birthed them and fund them. The vetoing of the Fairness Doctrine by
President Ronald Reagan and the Telecom Act of 1996 have all but eliminated
any rational discourse of opposing ideas on the airwaves. While claiming
victimization at the hands of a non-existent liberal media, a few powerful
men with an agenda to utilize this nation's decreasingly free press as a
propaganda tool, have cornered the market on talk radio and simultaneously
created their own propagandist cable "news" channel. This has been a
dangerous first step in creating a media where only one political voice is
heard and the populace is at risk of being manipulated rather than informed.
The effects of this can already be seen in a study by the Program on
International Policy Attitudes that showed that viewers of Fox news were far
more likely to be misinformed on the issues surrounding the Iraq war than
people who got their information elsewhere.
http://www.oldamericancentury.org/principles.htm
--
"The biggest political joke in America is that we have a liberal press. It's
a joke taken seriously by a surprisingly large number of people... The myth
of the liberal press has served as a political weapon for conservative and
right-wing forces eager to discourage critical coverage of government and
corporate power ... Americans now have the worst of both worlds: a press
that, at best, parrots the pronouncements of the powerful and, at worst,
encourages people to be stupid with pseudo-news that illuminates nothing but
the bottom line."
Mark Hertzgaard
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