Actually it is the medias, as well as holly-woods job, to distract and entertain the general public.
The most successful predecessor of this was Rome's Coliseum, bundled with the Big Business of the day controlling all the town criers. All successful Fascist/Imperalist operating countries know the public must be distracted, information must actually be disinformation, they lie even when the truth would work best, and the public who then get a headache must be entertained so they stay the hell out of what the government is doing for those they actually represent IN ACTION, or the people would revolt and drag their non representatives butts into the street, for some one on one communications, even though all those who ensured we got terrible representatives, would never ever come to light and be able to go off and start this successful ruse all over again, usually starting with the 'news' that only they or one of their factions can save us, form the results of their last actions, though your not allowed to know your revolting against them. There are several really good example in history of this happening, as when the mega business persons of Greece could no longer get the Greeks to in-debt themselves to these men, they went and invested in Rome, who came and enslaved the Greeks. Each and ever bit of Main Stream Media that you get, that gets to you emotionally, whether with disgust or entertainment value, is designed to keep you off track of who is really doing what. The so called Free Press, is NOT A FREE PRESS, it is not funded or answerable to you and I, it is a CORPORATE PRESS, and CORPORATIONS are the ones that MAKE THEIR PAYROLL. Those Corporations answer to a very few number of men, most whose names never ever get into the press. Those who are the figure heads, are as expendable to them should the general population revolt, as your probably already aware of, how expendable you are to them. Most of us would never believe that till it slams us in the face, as after all, we've all shared equally in the indoctrination of Free Press, and a Nationalist attitude of a God Fearing, Just Nation of Laws... which operates any way except that, note that the elite don't get fines or jail time like you and I would. Take bankers and Wall street and mortgage brokers at national level for a small instance. Every word we utter that supports the notion we've got a free press as the CORPORATE Press, is more willful self imprisonment. The Corporate Press tells us the same things that those who control those in major office, will tell us. We've got a small number of multi national mega corporations run by probably less then 20 men, who are all vying for world control via military supremacy and economic control. Seriously, you don't need to aid them by thinking their press, is responsible to you, and calling it a free press unless you feel self imprisonment is what free people should do. Scott > Welcome to the Freakshow > Media Gets Targeted by Obama, Discovers No One Cares Except the Media > by BETHANIA PALMA MARKUS > I was watching the local network news one recent evening because > apparently I like to torture myself. And what were they reporting on? > Michael Jackson. My hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, also ran a > story that day, May 22, 2013, about Michael Jackson. > Donât get me wrong. Jackson is and deserves to be a cultural icon. > Thatâs fine. But he died four years ago, so why is it still in the news? > Can anyone explain to me why mainstream American news outlets are still > âbreakingâ news with obsessive zeal > about a 4-year-old story that has no bearing on anyoneâs life? > Maybe itâs journalistic laziness or whoring to the publicâs base > desire for sensationalism and depraved celebrity gossip. But the news > media has a role to play and itâs not entertainment. > This leads me to more salient matters. While my local press corps was > babbling about some ancient history-Michael Jackson-related minutia > bullshit, another media storm was brewing. Apparently the Associated > Press and Fox News recently found themselves on the business end of the > Obama Administrationâs hostility toward journalists. The AP learned the > Justice Department searched troves of their phone records. Meantime, Fox > Newsâ James Rosen had his personal email account scoured by the DOJ and > heâs being called an âaider and abettorâ and âco-conspiratorâ in > a > criminal case regarding classified document leaks. > So now, all of a magical sudden, the news media in this country seem > to be waking up. After years of either promoting or ignoring George W. > Bushâs, then Obamaâs constant infringements on the civil liberties of > average Americans, the media suddenly think itâs a scandal now that > theyâre the butt of it. But while the AP and Fox News arenât the > first, > theyâve never caused a stir about the U.S. governmentâs abuse of > journalists until it hit them in the face. > Yemeni investigative reporter Abdulelah Haider Shaye, who exposed a > deadly U.S. bombing that killed dozens of women and children in the > village of Majala, is sitting in prison after being convicted for > terror-related charges in sham proceedings condemned by human rights > groups worldwide. Thanks to public pressure, Shaye was about to be > pardoned in 2011. > But in February that year, Obama personally called Yemenâs president > and âexpressed concernâ over Shayeâs pending release, according to a > White House summary of the phone call. As a result, Shaye continues to > sit in prisons for doing his job as a reporter. He isnât the only one. > Under Bush, Al Jazeera journalist and cameraman Sami Al Hajj spent seven > years in Gitmo. Pulitzer Prize winner Bilal Hussein was detained for > two years by the U.S. military for doing his job â with cheerleading by > the same right-wing blogosphere now howling over the attack on Foxâs > Rosen. > I donât recall any major news outlets reporting these cases despite > the fact theyâre obviously outrageous. In fact the first I heard of > Hussein and Al-Hajj was in reading this eye-opening run-down in > Salon.com by Glenn Greenwald. > (http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/obamas_personal_role_in_a_journalists_imprisonment/) > I can personally recall recent instances where my local media corps > sold out the public and kowtowed to authorities in direct opposition to > their duties, causing members of the public to pay a painful price. When > Occupy L.A. was raided at City Hall in November 2011, the Los Angeles > Police Department told the media that they couldnât cover it unless they > were hand-selected by the LAPD. No one, not even the big dog in the > room, the LA Times, took them to task on this, even though it was > obviously unconstitutional. > Meantime the TV stations shut off their aerial camera feeds upon > order by the LAPD. The result of this was, people were beaten and abused > while in custody. Protesters had bones broken. But none of this made it > into public view. Instead, reporters swarmed the next-day presser, > eager to pepper the powerful with pandering, meaningless questions and > hear the police chief and mayor crow about how smoothly things went. I > guess it was smooth if you didnât have your arm fractured by a bean bag > gun, your ribs broken by a baton, or forced to piss on yourself while in > custody. > (http://egpnews.com/2011/12/reports-of-police-abuse-emerge-after-occupy-la-eviction/) > A similar thing happened during the Chris Dorner saga this February. > At the culmination of their pursuit, with former LAPD officer Dorner > pinned down in a Big Bear cabin, police told news outlets with aerial > feeds to stop filming, so they did. We all know what happened next, > because people listening to scanners had the presence of mind to record. > The cops commenced with an apparently pre-planned âburn.â They fired > incendiary devices into the cabin and Dorner burned inside. Would they > have given that order if the news choppers were still filming overhead? > Probably not. The mediaâs decisions to be obedient lapdogs to authority > enabled authority to assume too much power, abuse protesters and > extra-judicially execute someone. > Meantime, the reasons behind Dornerâs vendetta rang all-too-true to > L.A.âs maltreated communities of color. His accusations of police > brutality hit a nerve. But you donât see L.A.âs news media > aggressively > digging into officer involved shootings, killings or beatings even > though there is a history of police brutality in Los Angeles. If they > report it, they usually source only the police, and they donât follow > up. They donât put it in context. No one is held to task for the pattern > of abuse on civil liberties and human rights in L.A.âs poorest > neighborhoods. The police are given the benefit of the doubt, and people > of color are treated like criminals. In fact, in an apparent > collaboration with the LAPD, the media chose to redact the names of > officers Dorner accused of being abusive when they published his > âmanifesto,â even though the un-redacted version was all over the > Internet. > The American news media has made pandering to power standard practice when > their mission should be speaking truth to power and âafflicting > the comfortable, comforting the afflicted.â In fact, new Orange County > Register co-owner and publisher Aaron Kushner flat out told his newsroom > that the long-held journalistic credo of âafflicting the comfortableâ > no longer applies. This runs parallel with fantastic displays of > incompetence like the flagrant misreporting of facts surrounding the > Boston marathon bombing by the likes of CNN and New York Post. > The result? The public no longer believes much of what the media > reports and any trust in the Fourth Estate to expose truth and provide a > voice for the voiceless is shattered. So it seems the public no longer > gives a shit about the media, and itâs the mediaâs own damned fault. > But the public should care about recent developments, even though I > understand why it doesnât. The decision by Obamaâs Justice Department > to go after domestic journalists is grave. Why? The way this country is > set up is reporters are the check on government. When the government > gets out of line, the role of the journalist is to call it. But, if the > government grants itself the authority to criminalize journalists for > performing that role, it weakens the institution intended to keep the > government from abusing its power. And thatâs exactly whatâs happened. > Setting the precedent of criminalizing the press means the federal > government has given itself limitless and unchecked power. > The current administration has gone after more leakers than any > other, and without leakers, investigative reporting doesnât exist. > Investigative reporting in this country brought to light and forced > accountability for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Watergate > scandal that brought Nixon down. It revealed the human rights abuses at > Abu Ghraib. Leaks by currently-incarcerated Bradley Manning to Wikileaks > revealed the U.S. military fired on and killed a Reuters journalist and > his team in Baghdad, among other âwar on terrorâ atrocities. > People who leak government indiscretions and journalists who report > it are the key to holding government accountable and limit it from > overreaching its authority. They play a pivotal role in a functioning > democracy and open society and are the gatekeepers against > totalitarianism. The Rosen case is the first in U.S. history where the > federal government has treated a domestic reporter as a full-scale > criminal for doing his job as a reporter, while the AP phone record grab > is the widest infringement on the working press in U.S. history. This > is a chilling development. First Amendment, RIP. > Whether the general public cares or understands these implications > isnât clear. But from the comments Iâve seen surrounding these > stories, > doesnât look like it. If the public doesnât care, what defense do the > media have? A bunch of policy wonks, university professors and civil > liberties lawyers yammering on a high level about the role of the free > press in a democracy donât resonate with a cynical, over-worked, > under-informed public accustomed to seeing partisan hacks and > incompetent, hyperventilating sensationalists talking about Lindsay > Lohan, tailing car chases or acting like the danger theyâre personally > in after leaving their comfortable offices is the story. > Thanks to the proliferation of cable ânews,â the line between ethical > journalism and slanting or cherry-picking stories to fit an ideological > narrative has been badly blurred. As a result, self-described liberals > donât give a shit about James Rosen because he works at Fox News, > regardless of the ominous and universal implications of his case. And > thatâs because Fox News is a shitty, partisan hack organization that > would have celebrated if any New York Times reporter was criminally > investigated for doing critical, accurate reporting on the early stages > of the Iraq war. > I wish though. No one did, and the media marched along wide-eyed with the > war drum. Turns out, it was all a lie. While some corporations and > individuals made off like gangbusters with war profits, the general > American public is paying for the mediaâs green-lighting of the bungled > Iraq war and failed policies in Afghanistan with utter fiscal decimation > and violent blowback. Writing for Truthdig, journalist Chris Hedges > estimates it was around this time television news officially hit the > skids. > (http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/the_day_that_tv_news_died_20130324/) > While reporters in the Vietnam era fanned out at will to cover that > war uncensored, the post-9/11 media started out âembeddingâ themselves > with U.S. troops to provide a bunch of biased crap journalism before > getting bored and ignoring the wars completely. Now, no one knows what > the hell their own government is doing with drones in places like > Waziristan and Somalia, nor the futility and misery we inflicted in Iraq > and Afghanistan. > Because journalists no longer care to analyze current events, too few > Americans understand how war spending and a tax code favoring the rich > affects the countryâs deficit, nor do people recognize âblowback.â > Instead of informing people what their government is doing abroad, news > organizations are making up fiction about food stamps breaking the > budget, digging through Michael Jacksonâs grave and conjuring silly > bells and whistles like CNNâs holograms. A couple days ago I watched CBS > News dedicate most of its allotted airtime to breathlessly following > the last minutes of a police car chase. > Maybe thatâs why no one gives a shit when Associated Press phones are > spied on. And Rosenâs plight is at least in part a result of his own > employerâs cheerleading of their pal Bushâs PATRIOT Act. Oh, the > irony. > Maybe if both had done their jobs when Al-Hajj, Hussein and Shaye were > persecuted, this wouldnât have been able to happen in the first place. > It remains to be seen whether the media will start doing its job now > that itâs been subjected to a small taste of what the public has been > bludgeoned with for years via FISA, CISPA, the NDAA, the PATRIOT Act, et > cetera. All these laws basically allow unlimited spying on and > detention of Americans without any due process guaranteed by the > Constitution. There are signs of hope, I guess. For instance, I noticed > the LA Times reported about drones last week when Obama decided to talk > about it at a press conference. Still, the mediaâs silence on these > issues has been bizarre and disturbing, and itâs still bizarre and > disturbing that they only start covering something when âofficialsâ > officially talk about it. > But then again, they also wrote about Michael Jackson. Itâs such a > hot mess. But why do I care? Maybe I should just take George Carlinâs > advice and be happy to have a front-row seat to the freak show. > Bethania Palma Markus is a former staffer with > the Los Angeles Newspaper Group which covered East LA County from > Pasadena through the San Gabriel Valley down to Long Beach. She hold sa > Masterâs degree in Middle Eastern/Islamic history. She has written for > LANG, the LAist and the OC Weekly and Hunter Thompson-honoring, literary > journalism zine Bat Country Word. > > http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/29/media-gets-targeted-by-obama-administration-discovers-no-one-cares-except-the-media/ > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] > > ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:laamn-unsubscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:laamn-subscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:laamn-dig...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:laamn-ow...@egroups.com?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:la...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/laamn@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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