If "anything goes" into the hopper of 24-hour corporate "news", why is it the "charlatans" at CNN will promote militia spokesmen and "death-panel" fearmongers but not the testimony of "charlatans" like Barry Jennings?

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/barry-jennings-speaks/

Why not give air time to these "charlatans"?

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/make-it-happen-on-purpose/

The media isn't a filter. It's not even a sieve. It's an active promoter of the absurd. Why? They know we're addicted and it appears we're incurable.
www.MDWhistleblower.blogspot.com

that in the new media ecosystem, anything goes. Anything goes, and goes. In the world of the blogosphere, cable TV, and talk radio, nothing stops. This is Newton (Gingrich)'s new law: Charlatans eat charlatans to nourish themselves, as in the impressive new horror/sci-fi/parable movie "District 9."

Why blame the existence of blogs for the right wing nuttery at FOX news? Do you remember when The Mail published the "Zinoviev letter" hoax, which derailed the first Labour government in the UK? There were no blogs, no internet then.

Do you remember the Dearborn Independent, which Serialized the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? That was in the "old media" establishment. It isn't true that everything goes. It was never true. What goes is what the owners of the media believe advances their class interests. Always has, always will. We will have better media when we change that class ownership.

Thank god we got the mass weapons of destruction out of Iran.

Different tune, same whistle.

It's interesting this happens a few weeks after Walter Cronkite died.

When was the last time we had a media voice that the majority of Americans trusted?

Will we ever hear one again?

The media (including the blogosphere) is so fragmented, I doubt it.

What infuriates me the most is that the RW has so many of the sheep convinced that there is somekind of left-wing bias in the media. There isn't. The only bias in the media is a pro-corporate one.

1.) Is there anyone here who can clarify the source--the text of the proposed legislation--from which the Palinates derived their misinformation?

2.) Perhaps a clearer explanation, beginning here and now, of advanced directives, or end-of-life counseling sessions, or whatever it is in the proposed health care plan that's being misconstrued, could begin to pierce the darkness with a beam or two of illuminating facts.

The media is almost purely user (and, in turn, audience) driven.

And by "media" I mean television and radio. Those media still have the strongest influence, most cohesive audience, and, hence, it's where the money is. So it all goes around. (Doubt it? Check what our own TPM uses to portray the "Day in 100 Minutes" -- it's all television.)

The right wing knows how to push things (user).

And they have a never-tiring (gullible) audience to drive demand.

The left (True Left) is hopeless on packaging and audience participation. They aren't providing valuable eyeballs. Too many liberals (me) find the Left just about as irritating as the Right. And "left of center" has a much, much larger moderate/liberal component than the corresponding "right of center." The Right wing is much more Manichean than the highly graduated Left wing.

And, meanwhile, Liberals are their own worst enemies at packaging and pushing. Our very sense of shading and fairness keeps us from making strong, audience-grabbing messages. Similarly, we are terrible audiences. We don't stick to the same diatribe repeated over and over, and we're skeptical of most advertising. So we're unvaluable eyeballs.

Liberals always expect to be invited and be heard, always wondering why "the media isn't doing its job."

So the only thing I'm amazed at is that we somehow convinced 53% of the electorate and 365 electors to put someone as subtle and expansive as Barack Obama in the White House.

Just to toss something into the stew--maybe we need to rethink the idea of a "fair and balanced" press altogether. The idea of press neutrality is a relatively new one--maybe one hundred and 25 year old, give or take--the era of Joseph Pulitzer--the guy with name on all those prizes.

Go back 100 years before that and newspapers were proudly and blatantly political. The major parties were closely allied with publishers, and the resulting papers wore their affiliations proudly on their mastheads...Whig, Democrat, Republican, Federalist.

The public didn't expect balance. The public expected advocacy, and exercised its political muscle by reading broadly and deciding who was most convincing.

My best example is the Federalist Papers==first circulated anonymously in Papers around the country. The authors were Madison (kind of a "blue dog" in his day, Hamilton, and John Jan.

Far less well known (because they didn't win) were the AntiFederalists...circulating at the same time in their own coterie of newspapers. They were less organized (like today's Democrats) but the essays were no less well writtten and no less widely distributed.

Being an editor was a dangerous business--numbers of them were killed or wounded in duels. (I'm not suggesting bringing those back--except paintball might be fun to watch).

See the Federalist Papers here: http://www.foundingfathers.info/federalistpapers/

and the anti-Federalists here: http://www.iahushua.com/hist/AntiFED.html

It would be refreshing to pick up newspapers without a lot of he said/she said pap.