The Fake Issue / Taming the Watchdogs of Media Concentration

People who scare other people run a huge risk of blowback.

Rather says there is fear in every newsroom. I'd bet my next paycheck that it isn't al Qaeda that's giving them nightmares. Nope, my bet would be that it is the huge conglomeration heads for whom they work.

We must break up the news corporations.

They are, often by their own admission, doing a piss-poor job of actually informing the people of Democracies all over the world, which essentially means there are no healthy Democracies where these corporate monsters exist.

If there is one thing worse for democracy than an uninformed electorate, it is a misinformed electorate.

The only news organization that is not complicit in Bush's war, built on out-right lies, is Knight-Ridder (now McLatchy). All the rest became cheerleaders for the mother of all war crimes, a war of choice, a war of aggression, making them all complicit in International crimes of horrendous proportions

Adbusters : The Magazine - #72 The Fake Issue / Taming the Watchdogs of Media Concentration:

When Australia’s Rupert Murdoch threw his support behind the Iraq War, so did the 175 media outlets he owns as part of News Corp. When Canada’s CanWest Global Communications justified the Afghanistan invasion, so did its eleven daily newspapers and 16 television stations.

And when the major US media conglomerates signed off on the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, American journalists lined up right behind them. In a recent interview on PBS’s Bill Moyers Report, former CBS Evening News anchorman Dan Rather explained why journalists were so afraid to question the war.

“Fear is in every newsroom in the country . . . particularly in [the] networks,” said Rather. “They’ve become huge international conglomerates. They have big needs, legislative needs, regulatory needs in Washington. Nobody has to send you a memo to tell you that that’s the case – you know. And that puts a seed in your mind of well, ‘If you stick your neck out, if you take the risk of going against the grain with your reporting, is anybody going to back you up?’