Fear Greed and Infotainment vs. The Press

See this piece in the Arizona Daily Star, by a David Cuillier, a former newspaper reporter and editor, and current vice chairman of the national Society of Professional Journalists' Freedom of Information Committee.

Some details and comments about BushCo paying journalists to spread propaganda are mentioned. Also, some details about the Press' duty to speak out, and newspaper companies gradually sliding away from the press' function as a check on government and industry misdeeds.

I think what caught my eye about this op-ed piece is the tendency of some people to believe assertions that basically anyone who questions the current administration is somehow helping "the terrorists" or actually on the side of religious fundamentalists who wish to harm our country. Of course what shows such assertions to be utter bullshit is that there is no motivation for anyone questioning BushCo to side with destructive religious psychos from foreign nations. We have enough destructive religious psychos here, not quite as militant as the overseas version, calling themselves Christians, and doing a big insult to Christianity in the process, anyway. Anybody who's not a few bricks short of a load, for example those that are fed up with the lying and cheating of the Bush Administration, would never be on the same side as the morons of the ultraconservative religious right of any nationality.

But my point is that people can act like they believe whatever Cheney says, and whatever the so-called Conservatives have been saying since the Reagan days, when the Conservatives started wishing to get in control, and devote the government to serving large corporations and a handful of rich business leaders, rather than our own country, its own people, its environment and its infrastructure.

The writer of the article points to fear as motivation for folks to rally around something, anything, blindly. So no wonder the Vice President and other hired mouthpieces like O'Reilly, and, I guess, the President, keep having to dredge up new demons for people to fear. Outlining threat after threat, they keep picking more and more on people right here at home, usually their political opponents, often those of diverse social backgrounds who don't attend the correct church.

You can read the comments section of about any story in the Star, and see the few people whose duty is to hammer away at the actually very conservative paper, calling it again and again "The Red Star." Usually comments are tinted with xenophobia, racism, hatred, and form an amalgam of whatever kind of drivel you can hear well-paid conservative mouthpieces spout on just about any "news" show. You can't really call anything about that section of current events info "press." You can't really call it info because most of it is lies, the rest of it is twisted truth, and the overall function is to divide and conquer by covering up the truth, and to intimidate with the threat of playground-style name-calling into unquestioning silence.

Right wing slimeballs trying to influence election

So what else is new? Business as usual with the right wing religious nuts and power-mad robber barons trying to fuck over our country and every man woman and child in it.

Read about it here in the Huffiningtonpost blog.

Or watch it yourself. I wouldn't. I just think it's another example of why TV is bad. And I think this type of thing happens daily on the TV news.

A snip from the story:

"The Path to 9/11" is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11's director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision.

Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC contracted David Cunningham as the film's director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father's group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is "dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Televisionindustry." As part of TFI's long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission's in film industry jobs "so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out," according to a YWAM report.