Big media’s corporate bias contributes to suffering

“I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I’m going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also.” Sarah Palin, saying she wouldn’t address the questions asked of her during the vice presidential debate, Oct. 12, 2008.

All righty then, have we had enough? Time to get out and flush this eight-year train wreck right down the toilet, where it’s taken all of us, liberals and conservatives alike, secular and religious also. It’s a real mess, you betcha. And Mrs. Palin has already let us know what we’re in for if Mr. McCain kicks the bucket. The Bush years, only worse.

I recently received an e-mail from a reader who was raised as a Southern Baptist, but is now “more or less agnostic,” who wanted to know if I had any thoughts as to why certain of his Christian friends are so mean-spirited, particularly toward the poor. Here’s a portion of his concluding remarks.

“The end result, obviously, whether persons like those two women would ever admit it or not, is that they view everything as a zero-sum game: a dollar taken to help someone else is a dollar that won’t be spent on me. How did ‘Christians,’ fundamentalist or not, devolve into such a crass state?”

Partial big answer, you betcha, and not only for fundamentalists, too.

The mainstream media (MSM) is, to a significant degree, just another propaganda arm of the neo-con Reich. Stalin and Hitler would envy our spin machine. The MSM is almost entirely corporate, which is to say, aligned with the current regime. One anecdote will sum up the dominant attitude also.

Sumner Redstone, former CEO of Viacom – CBS’s parent company – is a self-avowed “liberal Democrat.” However, that didn’t stop him from endorsing Bush in the fall of 2004, when he said, “I look at the election from what’s good for Viacom. I vote for what’s good for Viacom. I vote, today, Viacom.

“I don’t want to denigrate Kerry, but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on.”

Also, too, you betcha.

I have fun with liberal friends when I say that I rarely listen to National Public Radio anymore, and that I think “All Things Considered” should be renamed, “A Few Things Sort Of Mentioned and Glossed Over.” They immediately assume that I’ve gone over to the dark side, i.e., that I’ve become a Republican.

But then I clarify. I say that I call NPR either “National Propaganda Radio” or “National re-PUBLICAN Radio,” but grant that investigative journalist (one of the few remaining real ones) par excellence Greg Palast might be more accurate in saying, “National Petroleum Radio.”

And I commit the ultimate blasphemy as I see their shock spreading, when I say, “NPR’s too far to the right for me, thanks.”

I might mention, though, that a 2003 Corporation for Public Broadcasting commissioned survey found that just 1 in 5 Americans detected a liberal bias in NPR or PBS and only 1 in 10 thought that there was a conservative slant.

So I must be a real maverick, standing somewhere left of not only “Joe six-pack,” but most “liberal elitists” also. I’m apparently speaking a minority opinion that should be easy to dismiss as extremist, far-left hyperbole. But is it?

I really pile on when I mention that I didn’t think it was possible for “liberal” Glam-Girl senior news analyst Cokie Roberts to suck up to Bush any more during the run-up to the war, and that although Daniel Schorr’s sonorous voice is pleasing to hear, he was guilty also, too.

The response? Stunned silence. NPR is where liberals get their news. This is where we know we hear the Truth. Cokie Roberts, a shill for the administration? Or the venerable Daniel Schorr?

Well, yes. Let’s hear the final assessment, by NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin, on NPR’s coverage of the lead-up to the war:

“Although NPR aired many anti-war opinions, this appeared to contrast with the analyses from Daniel Schorr and Cokie Roberts, who tended toward a pro-administration perspective on the question of war with Iraq. This led some listeners to conclude (logically, in my opinion) that since they are introduced as ‘NPR’s Daniel Schorr/Cokie Roberts…’ that their opinions reflect an officially sanctioned NPR point of view.”

You betcha.