Progressive Democrat Issue 52: MEDIA ACTIVISM I

This is from one year ago:

If we don’t take back the media, we will continue to lose. Period. That is a fact of life.

What are we up against? Here is my assessment. FoxNews, which dominates the news media due to its popularity, is an intentionally ideological propaganda machine for the right wing. Don’t believe me? See Outfoxed. FoxNews covers a big chunk of the market and those who watch FoxNews as their main news source have been shown to be more ignorant of what is going on than people who get their news from other sources. Essentially, people who get their news primarily from Fox believe the Republican party line rather than the facts. This has been quantified in the PIPA report.

More ideological than Fox is Sinclair Broadcasting. Fox is willing to compromise their ideology from time to time if to do so will help their profits. Sinclair will sacrifice their profits for their ideology. Sinclair is not a network. They are a corporation that owns local stations that include channels from all networks. In some cases, Sinclair controls the programming of those local stations. In other cases the local station is largely independent but can still be pressured by Sinclair.

Together, taking into account overlap between Fox and Sinclair, these two ideological propaganda machines control about half of the media, maybe slightly less.
The rest of the media is controlled by companies that are not obviously ideological. But they are lazy and interested primarily in profits. Despite having no specific agenda, CNN, and MSNBC in particular, but even ABC and CBS feel they have to follow the lead of FoxNews because a.) they don’t want to be accused of a liberal bias, and b.) they want to follow the successful model of Fox. This means that at worst they simply repeat what FoxNews or Bush says without question. At best they present the Fox/Bush side equally with the other side even if one is a lie and the other isn’t (e.g. the Swift Boat Liar campaign). Someone, I forget who, said “If Bush said the earth is flat and the Democrats said it was round, the media would report ‘Democrats disagree with President on the shape of the earth.’” Truth doesn’t matter.

I have two things I want to include in this week’s Media actions. First, get informed. Go to www.outfoxed.org, look over the PIPA report, and start finding your alternative media for your own use. Here are some suggestions:

Salon.com (subscribe if you don’t want their ads)
Air America Radio (go to their website to find your local station)
Media Matters (keep up on FoxNews lies and find out how to counter them)
Tom Paine.com (alternative media with Action alerts included)

The second thing I want to urge you to do is a continuation of the election reform issue I covered above. In addition to writing to your elected officials, bombard the media as well. Again, from www.Congress.org you can find a link to writing to local and national media. You can compose a letter to the media based on the same letter you wrote to your elected officials. The media HAS to hear our side. They hear the right wing’s view from Bush. But we are their customers. If they get enough letters telling our side, they do notice. So bombard them with your viewpoint and get your like-minded friends doing the same.

One update is that there is another source for good information with a liberal slant: Al Gore’s Current TV.

Current TV is aimed at youth, which means its hosts are young, perky and kind of annoying, and their segments (called “pods”) are for people with short attention spans. But beyond that, many of their pods are excellent. They include pods on conditions in Afghanistan, on American soldiers who have deserted from the war in Iraq, police brutality against anti-globalization protesters, drug abuse and the war on drugs, etc. Overall I have been impressed with the quality of the information provided and the absence of right-wing slant is refreshing.