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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (11989)	4/12/2002 3:58:30 PM
From: MSI	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93284

It's a matter of taking a broader view of the material available. For example, I'm now sure the mass media is heavily influenced by government, at the highes levels. Therefore I have to look at sources possibly not so influenced, and especially stories out of the mainstream, even tho' many are silly and bogus, there are a few serious individuals. I learned that once attending a rally in Sacramento when Reagan was governor, and Nixon had bombed Cambodia. In the Press Room were four wire services (back then they were all teletypes). Out of each wire service machine were different representations of the event that I saw unfolding around me. In fact, even on the same UPI service, I saw three different slants on the same story: one was fairly liberal, one was fairly right-wing, and another was a bit in the middle. The obvious (to me, a journalism student in college at the time) reason was to please the spectrum of editors around the country, who could pick and choose whichever slant they wanted in the stories, to please their readership, their advertisers, or, more often, their owners. It is so incredibly simple to plant any sort of story you wish, if you are in a newswire, and the ownership of various media around the country can run your story if it pleases them, or if they are threatened by events. Following that, I became aware of Ben Bagdikian's work in more detail, showing the information content of, for example, an all-news channel in Chicago. Guess how much actual new news appeared each day on that 24hr radio station? 15 minutes per day. That's if you take a stopwatch, elminate ads, clutter, intros, "my name is", repetition, etc., and just took the actual content. From there, during Nixon's reign, it became clear the news is highly controlled in more ways, not just government information but how current events are reported. Once you become convinced how flimsy the credibility is of what you hear, you realize to get any part of the truth you need a wide spectrum of input. Like old JP Morgan said, people do things for two reasons: a good reason, and the real reason. We hear that about Catholic priests, whose primary role in life is teaching morality, but who have been running a decades-long pedophilia cover-up. It isn't just politics. But politics is what has its hand in my pocket, the para-military on the streets, the secrets in the back room, and the strident profiteers in the White House. Perhaps it sounds paranoid. I see it, at least at this point, as simple prudence.