The Unfree press- 100 yrs of Radical Media Criticism Robert W. McChesney, Ben Scott

Thought I would toss a few bones out of this book for this forum to gnaw on.
Since the press won't be critical- I guess the blogs will be supercritical to make up for it

Doh! Newspapers are not necessarily guardians of the public welfare or organs of POLITICAL enlightenment.

Publishers adhere to a different ethic than bankers, magnates or drug manufacturers.

Medical field has AMA. Legal has the bar associaation. Engineers and architechs have quality and IEEE etc. Publishers have preferences.

Advertisers in newspapers rely on optimism- continuous and self concscious
therefore- the US did not lose jobs under this administration- they do not have a label called underemployed in their vocabulary.

The message of the book is to make them accountable for their stories.

And keep asking for a steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news.

www.commondreams.org...
Elliot’s statement about the media and advertisers also cuts to the heart of one of the great myths of global commercial media (we need to stop pretending that this is an American disease): that members of the public are the primary "clients" for mainstream media output. As any introductory business class will tell you (and as any introductory media class should tell you), your "primary client" is the person or organization providing you with your greatest inflow of revenue. For commercial media outlets, the primary clients are advertisers. Every business sells something, and the business of commercial media is to sell the audience (attracted by the non-advertising content) to advertisers. The audience -- preferably the "right" audience, of course -- is the "product" of commercial media. Not comedies, not drama, and not news. If members of the public do not buy the products advertised in newspapers and on television, there will be no commercial newspapers or television.
The assertion (or was it a Freudian Slip?) that there is a "tension between the media's right to say what they please and marketers' right to advertise where they please" is rather confusing. I’m no constitutional scholar, but while I’m pretty sure that newspapers have certain freedom of speech rights under the First Amendment, I wasn’t aware that marketers actually have the "right" to put ads wherever they please. I can only assume that once something like taking billions of dollars from advertisers becomes so ingrained into corporate journalistic culture, it is easy to confuse a "business decision" with a "right.

Already my work site has discontinued many of the great news sites that I like to visit. Whatever firewall you may have could do the same thing. And in the future- police state and think police have already started their control of the world-wide web in europe and china. WE just get surveillence so I'm sticking my neck out, cuz I'm really not worried about the helicopters. And if they do come for me, they are wasting OUR tax dollars So, my update to this old april told ya so is to ask What is Next? Do the thought police and the new theocracy politicians outlaw Halloween? Do blogs suddenly become rewritten? Will YOUR petty opinions matter that much that , THEY will arrest you without habeus corpus? Stay tuned Rocky and Bullwinkle!
(the recent website discontinued at my work site was 1000 reasons.org)
P>S> tell me what non-porn websites you cannot go to, maybe we can exchange stories!