There's No News Like Fake News

I love it! It just keeps getting stupider and stupider and stupider! Just when you thought this nightmare of an administration couldn't slip any lower into the realms of unintentional, black comedy, they cheerfully do it again! Last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), in a pathetic attempt to put a good face on on a bad situation, decided to hold a news conference in order to answer questions about the wild fires raging on the west coast. Here's the kicker: instead of inviting the news media, they decided that the questions would be posed, not by professional reporters, but by the FEMA employees themselves - guaranteeing an unending barrage of tough, hardball questions:
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"How happy are you with FEMA's results?"
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Which would be followed by tough, hardball answers:
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"Oh, very happy indeed! Thank you so much for your question!"
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Is that a laugh riot, or what? I think that it is illustrative of this White House's unprecedented arrogance that they really believed they could get away with something this bold. Come to think of it, why should they not have thought as much? For the last seven years, the corporate news media have been letting these guys get away with bloody murder - literally!

Here's something to ponder: there is, no doubt, reason to pine for the likes of Edward R. Murrow and John Chancellor in this era of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. They were men who held up a mirror to America's conscience and reflected to the people - not what they wanted to know - but what they needed to know. The fact that the deregulation of the Reagan years ushered in an era where CBS (Murrow's old network) could be purchased by arms manufacturer, Westinghouse, and NBC (Chancellor's old network) could be obtained by arms manufacturer, General Electric - should give every thinking person pause.

All the reasons why the main stream news media, the fourth estate, has utterly failed in its responsibility to keep the public informed on matters of policy and affairs of state were laid out in depressing detail in Bill Moyers' recent PBS report, "Selling The War" (It's available on DVD. If you haven't seen it, you should). In the run-up to the obscenity we are now committing in Iraq, the very few news organizations that got the story right (read that to mean: Invading Iraq is a monumentally stupid idea) were those that operated outside the Washington beltway, cocktail party mentality - Knight Ridder, for instance. What happened in the months leading up to America's illegal occupation of that country was nothing more than the Washington Press Corps acting as stenographers on the one hand, and cheerleaders on the other.
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In the good old days, the news divisions of most radio and television networks, operated outside the dictates of corporate policy. Any owner of a broadcast entity was obliged, by FCC mandate, to keep the people up-to-date with news and information - regardless of whether or not the news department made the company a profit (and in most cases it did not). If an owner was going to have the luxury of making his or her fortune by selling consumer goods over the people's airwaves, making sure that those same people remained informed citizens was the price they had to pay - like it or not.

Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end.
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FOX and Friends: News for Idiots
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Every once in a while, I'll tape an entire, three hour segment of the morning "news" program, FOX and Friends. It is the modern equivalent of watching the old, 1965 movie, Hold On! starring the deservedly forgotten British pop group, Herman's Hermits: so mind-numbingly awful that it's actually fun to watch! The very fact that this lame assemblage of info-taining, trivial nonsense is the highest rated morning cable program is instructive when trying to get to the bottom of the question as to why the American people are the dumbest, least informed, unenlightened people in the entire western world and why we are - no doubt about it - the laughingstock of the planet.

Its three hosts are totally lacking in any real journalistic credentials. Indeed one of them, an amiable twit named Steve Doocy (whose last name will one day become a verb, I promise you), is a former TV weatherman. He now has the job of commenting daily on important matters of national and international concern - that is, when he's able to find the time to pry himself away from the latest Brittany or Paris scandal du jour. FOX and Friends is embarrassing any way you analyze it. It is nothing more than a propaganda arm of the Republican National Committee. It's message is as simplistic as it is unbalanced:
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Conservative: GOOD. Liberal: BAD. Think of it as Mallard Fillmore in real time.
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It was not like this in our parent's day. In that bygone, lost era, before the "Triumph of Mediocrity" (as Norman Corwin put it twenty years ago in the subtitle of his well-written book "Trivializing America" ), the greatest generation went to the polls with - at the very least - a remedial knowledge of the issues important to their country. Today we are so susceptible to political propaganda and corporate media influence, the main talking point of the last presidential campaign was John Kerry's innocent gaffe during the primary season: "I voted for the eighty-seven billion before I voted against it". A statement as innocuous as that one would not have made so much as a blip on the political radar screens of 1960 or 1972 or even 1984 for that matter.
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Mah! Mah! The ol' plantation sho' has changed!
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While the fact that the Washington Journalistic establishment has been showing a little pluck in recent months is somewhat encouraging, it does not take away from the fact that they are responsible for letting this dreadful situation metastasize. Forty years ago, George W. Bush would not have been taken seriously as a potential presidential candidate. He is only where he is today because a lazy and compliant press refused to ask him the tough questions and, instead, wasted their time (and ours) by debating whether or not Al Gore ever said that he had invented the Internet (NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: he never even implied it). And it might further be noted that they have already fouled the political waters by crowning Hillary Clinton as the Democrat's virtual heiress to next summer's nomination - consciously following the GOP's playbook to lull the Dems into nominating the one candidate who will - most certainly - lose in November of 2008. And the tragic fact of the matter is that very few people are able to see through what can only be described as a blatantly obvious political ploy.
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It appears, at least from the vantage point of November 2008, that the electorate will, once again, send another corporate whore to the White House one year from today - regardless of who is elected. That very fact alone does not bode well for the future of democracy. If you want to deny the undeniable reality that we are now living in a Corporately Controlled State, consider the fact that, eighteen years after Exxon was fined 2.5 billion dollars for the Valdez accident, they have yet to pay one red cent to the people of Alaska and still refuse to do so! They know that they are not required to obey the laws that you and I are obliged to live by. They know that whoever wins the White House next year - Democratic or Republican - it will continue to be business as usual.
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If that very fact does not enrage you, you're probably watching a lot of FOX and Friends - C'mon! Be honest!
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Tom Degan
Goshen, NY
tomdegan@frontiernet.net
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SUGGESTED VIEWING:
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"Selling The War"
from Bill Moyers' Journal
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"OUT-FOXXED: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism"
A Film by Robert Greenwald
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For more recent postings on this atrocious, french-fry-eating, latte-swirling, Ted-Kennedy-loving, Karl-Marx-reading site, please kindly proceed to the link below:

"THE RANT" by TOM DEGAN

Disgusting, commie propaganda. THERE OUGHTTA BA A LAW, I TELLS YA! THERE OUGHTTA BE A FREAKIN' LAW!!!

Shh! They're working on that.