Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Chris Hedges: "... American Media Carnival Act ...."

*Chris*Hedges, author, columnist and former Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New York Times spoke with RT about how FCC deregulation during the Clinton administration allowed a handful of corporations to dominate USmedia.
 
>> Because we’ve lost control of our media >
 
 And that’s really at this point what it’s all about -- these television personalities, people like Chris Matthews, a cheerleader for the war on MSNBC, makes about five million dollars a year. They’re celebrities, they’re judged on their likeability - what in the business is called a Q Score - and not on their commitment to news, or to the truth.
 
>> When General Electric owns, as they do, MSNBC -- and I began the column writing about Phil Donahue, who was removed from MSNBC although he had the highest ratings of any show in the evening, because he dared to put on people who questioned the rush to the Iraq War... Look, General Electric’s made a fortune off these wars, as has Microsoft, and they’re hardly going to allow a dissident voice to impede their profits or their ratings.
 
Well, they stick to the lowest common denominator. They build these kind of soap opera scenarios night after night, week after week, around celebrities. It’s entertaining -- it’s really, at this point, the business they’re in is entertainment -- but I worked for many years, including fifteen at The New York Times, and news is not about entertainment. News is about information, news is about giving your readers or your viewers often uncomfortable and unpleasant truths -- climate change, let’s go back to climate change, would be a good one. That is the purpose of news, it is about fostering the common good. It is about informing the public, and when news becomes a business, when news becomes about entertainment, then issues that are not uplifting so to speak, issues that don’t have an immediate emotional draw -- whether it’s around sex, whether it’s around violence, whether it’s around anything else -- are shoved to the side. And you’re reduced to what essentially we have been reduced to, which is a kind of carnival act.
 

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