To retain their subscribers, listeners and viewers, a media business must keep them interested.  This has led to the media business becoming an entertainment business.  This has also led to a least common denominator approach to media content.  Feed the audience whatever they seem to want.   

The media would like to convince you that it has some noble calling to report the facts, and present a fair and balanced stories.  A popular canard.  Social journalism, the practice of taking sides on issues, and presenting a strong favorable side to any story that has multiple sides is practiced exclusively these days.  It is taught  in every journalism school in America, and rewarded in every major news outlet.  And that is okay. If you don’t like it, form your own paper, just remember, you have to attract and keep readers too.  You may find the media is only doing what the common consumer desires. 

The media business has also always been used both by the owners to manipulate events covered by the media, but also by those who wish to manipulate such events. This has led to the planting of false stories, ignoring stories, and the heavy editing of facts out of a story. Lies by omission.  Where do you think Matt Drudge gets his leads from?  Not all journalists are out to save the planet, but virtually all their editors are, so reporters leak "spiked" stories anonymously that are not going to get out by any other method. 

The media is ostensibly protected from interference by all government due to the First Amendment prohibiting Congress from passing ANY laws prohibiting freedom to speak or publish.  But censorship comes in the form of the FCC, taxation, issuance of press credentials, etc.  The Constitution means nothing if rights are not insisted upon, and those claiming some infringing power are not mocked and ignored.   

The government limits the number of licenses for broadcast media to a few select outlets, and threatens to destroy any outlet by revoking its license from time to time.  As a result, the media has an interest in not crossing the government.  This was done by the Clinton administration, by revoking White House press passes … and thereby sending “Washington Bureau” reporters back home from whence they came.  And the Bush administration did it thuggishly with embedded reporters in the Iraq war, as well as threatening the FCC licenses of stations that broadcast military caskets coming home, dead Iraqi civilians, hospital views, etc.  Is this the USA or a banana republic? 

With newspapers invested in broadcasting media (and vice versa) the weight of this repression extends to the print media as well.  As a result, not only is news coverage rather homogenous and sparse in America, it is also rather vapid. 

I placed a painting of the Gutenberg press on this page for a reason.  When in 1445, the Gutenberg press was invented the world turned upside down.  Not right away.  But suddenly publication was not the providence of the local Abbey.  Now wealthy merchants could pay to rapidly have pamphlets, flyers, catalogs and books made ... printings that were faithful from one print to the next, at a price that was deemed reasonable. 

Some 30 years later, a shy and disillusioned monk named Martin Luther wrote his 101 Things that Suck about the Church and hammered it to the local church door.    Some unknown person, spied the list, took it down and had it copied and handed it out.  It spread like wild fire.  The original mimeograph machine.  A revolution had begun. 

Eventually the only superpower at the time, the power of the Pope, would wane due to an insignificant monk, listing all of the corruption he saw in the Church, and his list being published and distributed (rapidly all over Europe) for the common man to read.  The Church no longer had control of communication, and indeed, its communication had been supplanted by a more accurate, rapid and inexpensive form of communication than the local monks.   

The Internet has really only been around a couple of decades, and only caught on with the mass public in the last decade.  But my, oh my, has it caught on!  Designed to keep on ticking even after a full nuclear war, it now is hard for any government to kill it off.  It is full of mavericks, independents, and philanthropists of all descriptions, located all over the world.  It travels at near light speed.  It is amazing what information and services are out there, much for little to no cost.  And you can access it for nothing, or near nothing, with an inexpensive computer. 

Worse, you can become your own publisher for little cost, and no government censorship or permission.  The governments simply hate it, in the same way that the Cardinals and Bishops must have grown to fear the press … once the genie escapes, and the government fails to anticipate the power of the emerging genie ... once its threat finally becomes apparent, it is too late to get it back into the bottle.  That doesn’t mean they aren’t trying.   But government also wants the Internet, in the same way the church wanted the printing press.

More and more people are turning to the Internet for their news.  While the boot licking media censored the content in America, people went online and saw uncut footage of many staged events in Iraq.  From the faked pulling down of Saddam’s statue, to the sick photos of Iraqi POW's criminal mistreatment.  Often, Internet readers saw and shared items on foreign news outlets, that national media only covered weeks to months later, because the magnitude of Internet traffic ultimately forced them to.  And when they covered it they made it sound like it was a current story they just uncovered. 

Here is another dirty secret.  Digital communications makes it possible to put at least 500 channels of radio stations on the same wavelengths occupied by either AM or FM radio, without ANY crosstalk.  This has been true  for over a decade.  Now that would be choice!  Why don’t you have it ? . . . because the government does not want that many choices in every city.  Can you imagine how many people they would have to have to monitor and regulate all of that?  Satellite transmissions have the potential to simply by-pass this, and let TV, radio and newspapers die on the vine of the free market.  This withering is occurring right now!

One person I know of shot her TV set many years ago.  She just took it out to a wooded area and blew it away.  TV is the mind killer.  It literally induces a stuporous alpha and delta wave suggestive mellowness, like a drug, as any parent knows.  You should greatly reduce your TV time.  Read a book, or surf the net.  THINK.PLAN.DO