Wednesday, October 04, 2006

 

Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom

"Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend." --Chairman Mao In the communist-like state created by Bushco, one marks turning points by what the press allows to enter the range of public discussion. It is therefore interesting that the NYT has permitted Noam Chomsky to publish a piece stating that Latin America has declared independence. The piece itself doesn't qualify as news: The US is overstretched and can no longer suppress dissent in Latin America. Latin America is groaning under wealth inequality. Elections are happening. Yawn. But for the NYT to publish Chomsky says that a certain amount of reality has penetrated the thought shields guarding the control tower of the American equivalent of the Kremlin. It's now permissible to discuss developments in Latin America outside the Marxist-LeniBushist lens that refuses to accept that the Cold War is over and that, by the way, we won. How long this thaw lasts is anyone's guess. (hat tip to Avedon, of course.
Comments:
FAIR has done studies of Lehrer's guests that show that conservative and governmental sources are vastly overrepresented.

When people tell me that we have a free press, I ask them, "Where is the union channel? Where is the feminist channel? On which religion channel can I regularly hear mainstream religious broadcasts, as opposed to John Hagee, Pat Robertson, and D. James Kennedy?" Where is the channel for university students? Why do I have to look for ACORN and other community groups on 'community cable,' rather than network news?"

What gets on TV is much more conservative, white, and affluent than America (not to mention a h--l of a lot stupider).

Television shows some country I don't know.
 
There are no popular feminist, communist, unionist, or Chomskyist media outlets because very few people would watch it.

While competition is restricted in the broadcast media market, your paranoid conspiracy theory that Chomsky and others have been shut out by media gatekeepers is so pre-internet.

Chomsky is not a trained historian, economist, or sociologist. He's a linguist, and his scholarship is a neat and obnoxious as a grade school grammarian's pedantry.

You guys can't even see contrarian evidence proof you literally have your hands on it.

--spectator
 
It's fascinating that Spectator feels the need to insert "communists" among the list of groups. They were never mentioned. But I suppose that's how the delusional right-wing mind works.

Thirteen percent of the working population are members of a union. If there are 100 channels, one would expect that two or three might deal with union issues. There are no channels.

The majority of the religious population are moderates. Yet what is represented on television is disproportionately crackpot, extremist, right-wing... but I repeat myself.

There are millions of university students, who share common issues: how to study, how to take tests, how to plan a career, how to fit marriage and college together, what kinds of jobs are available and pay well, not to mention music, movies, and so on. They have no channels.

And, yes, there are lots of feminists, especially if one gets beyond the half million dues paying members of NOW. Many, many more than there are members of CPAC or most conservative organizations.

But please, do stay in your delusional world.
 
I'm happy that I fascinate you Charles. :)

Your buddies at Air America have already gone a step further than you by acting on their conviction that there is a vast untapped media market in the US. You know how they did.

Then, of course, there is the wildly successful Pacifica Radio.

--spectator
 
The only thing that is fascinating is the moral pathology of dissembling and refusing to admit wrong, Spectator. That pathology is consuming what might be considered a person.

There's a book about it, called the Bible. You might want to read it.
 
Spectator, know how Limbaugh got to be so big? (Well, aside from overeating, that is.)

He had and has rich conservative sugar daddies who were willing to lose a few million (and to spend a few tens of millions lobbying to repeal the Fairness Doctrine) and wait a number of years for their plans to bear fruit.

In the early days of his "going national", his program was virtually given away to cash-strapped rural radio stations looking for cheap ways to fill air time. Once a few dozen of these were racked up, Limbaugh's backers then started to crack the bigger cities. Limbaugh didn't start turning a monetary profit for his backers until then, but that wasn't the point: Disinformation was the point.

FOX News has had a similar path: It spent the first few years of its existence propped up, as was the rest of the FOX network, by the hugely-profitable cartoon show The Simpsons. To this day, the FOX network's financials are so murky that there's some question as to whether the company has ever turned a genuine profit ( for one thing, they can't charge as much for ads as can other networks because their programming, Simpsons aside, is generally not the sort of stuff with which advertisers want to be associated). But again, turning a monetary profit isn't the point: Spreading disinformation is.

This is why tighty-righties keep obsessing over George Soros more than any liberal I know: It's because the right-wingers are so used to seeing sugar daddies propping up their otherwise-unprofitable institutions that they just assume that the rest of the world does that, too
 
"But again, turning a monetary profit isn't the point: Spreading disinformation is."

What a concise description of this blog.

--spectator
 
Unable to answer Phoenix Woman's facts with anything a "Rubber glue, bounce off me, stick to you" retort, Spectator illustrates the terminal lameness of the Republican Party.
 
Look Charles, Phoenix Lady deals in half-truths and conjecture. You can't demonstrate that one statement in her previous post is factual. In fact, all the objective ratings of cable news programs consistently rate Fox News programs at the top. They rate the far left shows at the bottom. So yeah, I'm gonna let Phoenix Lady pretend she can square the circle.

Remember, just because you believe it and it fits into your paranoid delusions, doesn't make it true.

Finally, there's no point in arguing with hardcore ideologues. Plus you have no audience to speak of, and I'm not gonna bother debunking the proliic stream of nonsense if there isn't one sane person watching. No, I'll content myself with lobbing the ocassional grenades and having some fun with you and your small circle of jwerps.

--spec
 
Spectator, you've brought no facts to the table. You've engaged in attack so juvenile. Why should PW bother to supply links when you simply ignore what she presents?

Let me make one more effort at talking to you as an adult. The Fox profitability, or lack thereof, is well-known. As of 2003, they were barely breaking even. At the peak of their success, they were making ca. $100M in 2003... after running losses of ca. $300M. With the catastrophic recent drop in viewership, it would be surprising if they are still breaking even.

That took me a grand total of five minutes to find.

Why are you so lazy and ignorant?

You think you are "dropping grenades." What you are actually doing is "being an ass."
 
Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

More blogs about politics.
Technorati Blog Finder