Earlier today I posted a nine minute clip I stumbled across on YouTube - it was taken from a fantastic documentary that was released in '03 by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott & Joel Baken, titled 'The Corporation' [it's one of my favorite documentaries - I highly, highly recommend it... "ahem Brian ahem"].

Now, I'm assuming, for two reasons, that my Uncle Brian did not watch the clip I posted before leaving his comment because a) he is at home right now and therefor would never be able to watch a nine minute streaming movie on a dial-up connection. And b) his comment seems more generic than related to the court case...

So to clarify where I'm coming from: The clip touches on a whistle-blower stand-off in which Fox "news" eventually went to Court arguing that it, being a corporation and therefor a legal person, had the right, under the 1st amendment, to knowingly lie. And the judge ruled in Fox's favor!

Here is Brian's semi-related comment:

mike, i have seen you recently post "news" or semi-fictional information as all news SHOULD be called but my question is why do you believe the so called independent media or the media that is "supposedly" not ruled by money but you question every other news program. I think alot of people (possibly you) who have this "question authority" mentality seem to believe more of the "off the wall" news or information programs then they do their local news. Is it because its different and they are not mass media so it gives the illusion that they tell the truth? i think ALL NEWS MEDIA should be taken with a grain of salt. I used to be a die hard Fox news fan but i no longer follow any one source..i feel learning from all types of news is best and then i can draw my own conclusions but you posted a radio show of a guy that honestly i never heard of... and you seem to believe him... I'm curious to know why him vs. the horrible mass media...

I don't want to blow past any points Brian made - so I'll respond piece by piece. First I want to talk about who owns what and show the changes over a period of 20-some years. In the early '80s, U.S. media was controlled by 50 separate corporations, not even a decade later that number had dropped in half...



As of recently, 90% of U.S. media is owned by half-a-dozen corporations: Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, News Corp, Bertelsmann, and General Electric. This is a very, very unhealthy situation to be in - media, the more it consolidates, the more it becomes self-censoring and in doing so, serves more as a propaganda-tool than a government watch-dog. News was the intended fourth leg of our democracy - it is the only business mentioned in our Constitution. And I doubt this is what our founding fathers had in mind.

As for my "question-authority mentality" - my views on the media do not stem from a problem or bias towards any authority, my views stem from educating myself on cases like the one talked about in the clip I posted earlier, where "News" stations are willing to openly go to court to reassure themselves they are in no way burdened with the responsibility to inform the people - to legally justify the deluding the intelligence of the most important branch of our government: the people.

On one hand I agree that some information should be taken with a grain of salt - but I think that mentality becomes more problematic than it does cautionary. For example: your taking "all" news with a grain of salt might have been the very reason it took you six years to shift to your current unfavorable position towards Bush. It allows for easy dismissal of unwanted or hard-to-stomach information. As for "learning from all types of news" - I wouldn't encourage you to continue to wade through the muck of mass-media just to make your way to outside sources that don't have a long track record of lying... or to put it more casually: being dead wrong in retrospect.



As for the Alex Jones reference - I don't believe him as much as I hope he is wrong this time, the first and only other time he has made such an urgent public claim, he was, unfortunately, 100% right.

I almost forgot: I wouldn't go around telling too many people you used to be a die-hard Fox "News" fan - as a matter of fact, I wouldn't go around telling anyone that I watch or watched Fox "News" period. Unless, of course, it was for entertainment purposes only... you know, like Andy Kaufman anti-humor.